Between noon and three

I preached this sermon on Sunday, June 29, 2025, the third Sunday after Pentecost, at St. Mark’s, Berkeley.

Collect: Almighty God, you have built your Church upon the foundation of the apostles and prophets, Jesus Christ himself being the chief cornerstone: Grant us so to be joined together in unity of spirit by their teaching, that we may be made a holy temple acceptable to you; through Jesus Christ our Lord, who lives and reigns with you and the Holy Spirit, one God, for ever and ever. Amen.

Readings: 1 Kings 19:15-16,19-21, Galatians 5:1,13-25, Luke 9:51-62

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

“For freedom, therefore, Christ has set us free.” This, from the beginning of today’s Epistle, is one of those glorious verses that comes as very good news indeed — because if you’re like most people, you’re deeply aware of those things that keep you unfree.

What are those things? You might reply with things like, fear of the future, or perhaps an abiding worry about your loved ones, or the institutions you care about. Maybe you’d reply with something about your health, like creaky joints or a heart condition or a cancer diagnosis. Some of you might reply by naming your particular addiction, maybe a substance or maybe a codependency. Maybe for you it’s none of these things but rather a need to be liked, to be needed, to be respected, or to please your parents, your spouse, your boss. 

Would you like to be free of these things? “For freedom Christ has set us free.” What would it even mean to be free? Many of us cozy up to our various captivities because we think they reflect well of us: “Of course I am captive to my kids, they’re my responsibility after all, and I love them. Of course I’m captive to my boss, I care about my career and I feel that my work is a real vocation. Of course I’m captive to the news, I care about the world, and even if it makes me depressed I’d still rather know than not know. Why should I want to be free of any of these things? It sounds like you’re suggesting free myself of the people and things I care about, but I can’t let them go, they’re too important to me.”

But for freedom Christ has set us free. Paul’s invitation is not to cut all ties with our loved ones, but to be free of all that holds us captive. The challenge, the opportunity, is to learn how to love them without being captive to them. Because true love actually doesn’t take prisoners, and if you find yourself captive to something you love, it’s usually a good sign that there’s something more at play than love.

Of course the two big things that Christ comes to free us from are sin and death. The church has always interpreted sin to be, first and foremost, a matter of love: either not enough love, or too much love, or else love misdirected, but love in any case. 

Too much love is easy: I love ice cream, I love spending time with my son, I love a good vacation, but too much of any of those things and suddenly I find I’ve neglected my health, my other household duties, my job. 

Not enough love is easy too: the driver of that minivan at nursery school drop off, who almost ran me over, is still someone for whom Christ died, and deserves my compassion and forgiveness, not my ire or wrath.

Love misdirected is harder, but still common enough: I love my country, and the values I understand are at the core of our our national identity. This love leads me to vote in certain ways, and to take a certain satisfaction when the other party faces difficulty. But love, real love, cannot take any satisfaction in anyone’s difficulty and still remain love. If I find myself caught in this trap, it means my supposed love for my country has been misdirected into something less – mere tribalism – and it doesn’t make it better if I’m in the right (because of course I always am!).

Love excessive, love deficient, love misdirected is how we turn the strongest, most life giving and creative force in the universe, the very Name of God, into a servant and vector of death. But for freedom Christ has set us free.

I say all this by way of set up to suggest a means of understanding why Paul follows his glorious statement about freedom with a laundry list of vices and an extended reflection on the war between the flesh and the spirit. The point of Gospel freedom is not to be free of the loves that make us who we are, but to be free in order to love them properly, fully, unalloyed by any misdirection, insufficiency, or excess; free to love, in other words, as God loves, who does not require anything from us except that we should exist, and give him glory by our being ourselves, free of captivating and controlling interests, free of sin and death.

Paul did not believe that the flesh was evil. Like most good ancient thinkers from Plato and Aristotle to Augustine and Gregory Nyssa, he simply thought that it should defer to the higher faculties, and not usurp their powers for its own ends. At the top was the spirit, the soul, which was the human person’s window and connection to God himself. Next came the mind, the rational powers, which operated according to reason, order, and laws. Then came the flesh, which operated according to desire, appetite, and need. 

For all these thinkers, the human person was a unity of body, mind, and soul, not one to the exclusion of the others, and the challenge was for all to operate harmoniously, with the lower in service to the higher, and not the other way around. This is because the higher had greater perspective, greater power, and greater potential for good. 

Back to ice cream again: when I allow my appetite to rule, I eat too much ice cream and not only does my mind enter a sugar-induced fog, but I’m also bloated for days. Maybe that’s too much information, but you get the point: when the appetite is allowed to rule, the mind is impeded, and even the flesh suffers. But when the spirit is given its rightful place, my mind is able to listen, even to people I think are dead wrong, and my passions are exercised in empathy rather than exasperation.

But this is MUCH more difficult than it sounds. So Paul, ever the pragmatist, gives us a series of exercises to practice. These are the fruits of the Spirit: love, joy, peace, patience, kindness, generosity, faithfulness, gentleness, and self-control. These are not personality traits we can either have or not have; these are all of them acts of the will, by which we exercise our freedom from captivity, freedom especially from captivity to ourselves.

Thank God we have help, because otherwise it would be too hard for us. In Baptism we have put on Christ himself, and we enter into his own freedom, by which he freely entered death and hell to break all its captives free. In the confession we’re about to make and the absolution which follows, we lay aside the many shackles we put on ourselves, and receive grace to walk upright again. In the Eucharist we’re about to celebrate, we are nourished with the very bread of heaven, and our own flesh and blood receive the Spirit of the living God. With help like this there is hope for all of us, no matter how deeply into captivity we might have fallen. 

For freedom Christ has set us free, and the doors of hell are wrenched open now forever. Please, walk out with me, and step into the light of God’s eternal life.

Amen.

This sermon was preached on Sunday, June 22, 2025, at St. Mark’s Berkeley. We kept the day as the feast of Corpus Christi.

Collect: God our Father, whose Son our Lord Jesus Christ in a wonderful Sacrament has left us a memorial of his passion: Grant us so to venerate the sacred mysteries of his Body and Blood, that we may ever perceive within ourselves the fruit of his redemption; who lives and reigns with you and the Holy Spirit, one God, for ever and ever. Amen.

Readings: Genesis 14:18-20, 1 Cor 11:23-26, Luke 9:11b-17

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

This Sunday we keep the feast of Corpus Christi. Some of you know this feast as a particularly exotic relic of medieval religion, something not seen north of the Alps since 1539. And you might wonder, what on earth is it doing in Berkeley, California, in 2025? Others might note, it’s only two months since Easter, didn’t we just commemorate this on Maundy Thursday? Still others might be wondering, what on earth is it anyway, and, whatever it is, why are we keeping a feast not in our prayer book? 

I’m happy to say, in response to this last point, it is in our prayer book, or a version of it at least, under the heading “Various occasions” and described as “Of the Holy Eucharist.” There are plenty of churches in our tradition in this country and around the world who still keep it. So what is it? In Latin, the name simply means, “Body of Christ,” and the feast was meant to be an occasion at the very tail end of Eastertide to give thanks for the gift of Christ’s ongoing presence with his church in the Sacrament of his Body and Blood. 

Anglicans have affirmed the Real Presence of Christ in the Eucharist for so long now, it’s easy to forget how stupendous this really is. What we’re saying is, that the Lord of all heaven and earth is present in these consecrated wafers, in this consecrated wine; that this is not just an amazing ongoing miracle, but that this is the fulfillment of his promise to be with his disciples, to be with us, till the end of the age.

There’s a lot to say about the Eucharist, about what happens when we offer it, and what happens when we make our communions. Perhaps this is why we have a separate feast for it. On Maundy Thursday, when we celebrated its institution, we were also at the outset of the Triduum, the Great Three Days celebrating the Lord’s Passion, Death, and Resurrection, and that rightly tends to take all our focus. A separate feast of Corpus Christi gives us a chance to pause, to dwell, on the mystery of the Eucharist.

All that notwithstanding, it’s worth noting that at present we live in an age where, when we look out at the world around us and encounter mystery, we take it as an opportunity to figure it out; to learn new things about how the world works, to grow in knowledge and in skill and in mastery. We’re convinced that in order to grow in wisdom and maturity as human beings in our relationship to the world, we must understand the systems according to which the world operates, find our place within them, and then wield them successfully to our purposes.

This is a good thing, mostly. It’s how we get everything from quantum physics to airplane travel and vaccines. But it is also fundamentally impersonal. Mystery, in a world like this, is anything I simply do not know yet — the implication being, that once I know it, the mystery is gone, that the proper end of all inquiry is the elimination of all mystery.

But as anyone who has loved another person knows, no amount of knowledge can finally plumb the depths of a human person. A person is always just beyond the reach of our powers of perception, analysis, prediction. We can get to know them very well, but even couples married sixty years can still surprise one another regularly. There is always a further, deeper layer of mystery to a human person, which we cannot ever fully understand, which compels us to stop trying to figure them out and merely to step back and love them. And it’s in this sense that the church talks about the Eucharist as “The Sacred Mysteries.” 

The Mystery of the Eucharist is one we have learned a lot about over the last twenty centuries. The church has prayed about it, sung about it, written, debated about it, been torn apart over it, been brought back together for it — and all this has left an enormous body of writing, devotion, and hymnody for us to read and celebrate today. But there is finally no plumbing these depths, no mastery over what it commends to us, no point at which we become an expert in this field. Because The Sacred Mysteries are for each of us an encounter with the living God, day by day, week by week, and year by year: an encounter we have in community, but which still comes to each of us individually, too. The Host is placed into your hands, after all, and you consume it yourself. Our first and proper response is always to love. Not to stop thinking, but to love first and last.

All this suggests another way of interacting with the world, an older way than the one that invites us merely to mastery over impersonal systems. And that older way encounters mystery not as a problem to be solved but as a presence to be loved; not as a problem to be solved but as a presence to be loved.  

There’s much to be gained in problem-solving, I’m not suggesting we set aside 500 years of Enlightenment and modern living to turn back the clocks. But I do think there is some real wisdom in this approach, and in any case it does seem to be what the feast of Corpus Christi suggests is the primary posture of the Church.

As Christians we are people who go through the world, first and foremost, learning to recognize and respond with love to the presence of God, in the Sacraments, in Scripture, in Christian community, in the beauties of creation, and especially in the sick, the suffering, the dying, the condemned, and those who wish us harm. There are plenty of things to learn here, plenty of processes and systems and doctrines to grow accustomed with. But the work is to love first, and only second to do anything else; to love first, and only second to do anything else.

Because: presence is everything. Christ came to earth not to make us masters of the universe, or enlightened beings who can command all truth, but so that heaven might touch the earth, and that earth might be dragged up to heaven, while both enjoy the full presence of God forever; so that even death itself might play host to the Son of God and his deathless love. It’s a family affair, a household drama, with the intention that all the members of the family leave their wanderings, put down their weapons,  and come home again.

Presence is everything: this is the whole thrust of the Gospel, for all the creatures of God, and creation itself, to be restored to one another, in one family, one household, where sins and injuries are forgiven, death is done away, and there are no further impediments to our communion with one another and with God.

Then what? Then we live, we grow up, we enter the lives we were made for, full of freedom, and vigor, and joy.

This is the Gospel of Jesus Christ. It’s a beautiful vision, and full of grace. But it’s not easy. It’s hard enough to be present to the people in our lives we love, let alone to those whom we really don’t. How wonderful, then, that we are strengthened at this altar with the presence, the Body, of Christ himself. How wonderful that when we leave here, we carry him within ourselves — so if we find it hard to be present in whatever situation may come, we can trust that the Incarnate Lord is present in us, for us.

The challenge is to get ourselves out of the way so he can do in us what he comes to do: to lift up our poor distracted lives, our imperfect loves and our cloudy judgements, our incomplete knowledge and our many sins, to lift them all up and to offer them to his Father, in us, so that we might be as present to God as in this Sacrament God is to us; so we in turn might respond with love to the presence all around us. So may our communion grow, till God be all in all.

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

This sermon was preached on Sunday, June 1, 2025, the Seventh Sunday of Easter, at St. Mark’s, Berkeley.

Collect: O God, the King of glory, you have exalted your only Son Jesus Christ with great triumph to your kingdom in heaven: Do not leave us comfortless, but send us your Holy Spirit to strengthen us, and exalt us to that place where our Savior Christ has gone before; who lives and reigns with you and the Holy Spirit, one God, in glory everlasting. Amen.

Readings: Acts 16:16-34, Rev 22:12-14, 16-27, 20-21; John 17:20-26

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

Our readings for the last few weeks of Eastertide move with such breathless anticipation towards Pentecost that it’s easy to lose sight of the major feast we just celebrated on Thursday: the Ascension. Properly speaking, the Ascension itself is the end of Eastertide, and for the nine days between then and Pentecost, the church lingers in a kind of suspended animation, full of anticipation, full of eagerness to get started on our mission in the world, but still waiting for the promised Holy Ghost. Maybe you know, the classic devotion of the Novena, nine days of prayer, takes its origin from these nine days when the disciples waited and prayed between the Lord’s ascension and the promised coming of the Holy Spirit.

But since we’re waiting anyway, it’s worth pausing for a moment to reflect on the magnitude of what’s just happened in the Ascension. This is the sort of feast that makes skeptics like to jeer. “Oh yes,” they say, “Jesus rose from the dead, never more to die again. Then why don’t I see him today, why isn’t he on the news, what have you done with him Oh, he ascended into heaven you say? Well, isn’t that convenient.” It won’t surprise you to hear me counter, that the Ascension is much more than a convenient way to dispose of Jesus’s body. It’s essential to complete the work he began when he took on human flesh in the first place. 

And what work was that? This is really important, I can’t say this enough, Jesus did not come just to tell us important things, though he did do that. He did not come just to be a good example, though he is that too. He did not come just to comfort and to heal, though thank God that was a big part of his mission. He didn’t even come just to forgive sins, though of course he is the only one who can, and he does, gladly, as many times as it takes. No, more than all these things on their own, he came to change something fundamental about human nature and about creation itself.

One of the old Christmas antiphons puts it succinctly: speaking of God, the antiphon says, “What he was, he remained; what he was not, he assumed.” In other words, though God had made human beings in his image, he was not himself one of them. In the Incarnation, however, the second person of the Trinity assumed, put on, fully inhabited for himself, human nature. His name, Emmanuel, famously “God with us,” means that now, no matter where we human beings may find ourselves, there God has gone ahead of us, as one of us. Wonderful – alleluia! – this is the Christmas Gospel, and it’s the reason the whole heavenly host split the heavens singing, “Glory to God in the highest.”

But that’s not all. At the other end of the journey is the Ascension. The first pope Leo, the one we call The Great, wrote in a sermon in the 5th century, that Christ, “in descending to earth, had never been absent from his father; and, in ascending up to heaven, had never withdrawn himself from his disciples.” What he’s saying is, if heaven came to earth at the Incarnation, then at the Ascension, Earth is raised up into heaven. At Christmas, God became a human person. At the Ascension, that human person sits down at the right hand of God; and with him, there in heaven, there is all of human nature, indeed all of creation itself. Heaven has come to earth, and earth has come to heaven. What before was separated is now joined forever.

Wait just a minute, you will say, are you saying I am now already in heaven with Jesus? How is that possible? I don’t feel very much in heaven most of the time. My life still feels very earthly. My mother still has dementia, the world is still a mess, people are still dying of overdoses, bombs are still falling, there are still families who can’t afford a place to live, hurricanes and wildfires still ruin whole regions. I still screw up all the time, I still put my own needs ahead of others. There is too much hurt and crying and pain and wrongdoing for this to be anything like heaven. How can you possibly say I am now in heaven with Jesus?

I’m afraid in this case the good news and the bad news are both the same piece of news. While we are in this life, we only have one foot in heaven with the Lord, while the other foot is firmly planted on earth. But think: this is exactly why the sin, death, and suffering bother us so much, because we do have one foot in heaven, and we know deep in the fiber of our being, that we are meant for more than all this. If we were wholly of earth, none of it would bother us very much, it would be just the way things are. Our very feeling of discomfort, of being off balance here, points us to see that we do indeed have one foot in heaven. The first and last prayer of every Christian is the first petition that Christ himself taught us, that on earth it may be as it is in heaven. And we have confidence in so praying, because the whole work and ministry of Christ is to stitch heaven and earth together. What before was severed, he has now joined, ad by his grace, his power, it grows together more and more.

This has lots of implications for our lives and how we understand the experience of being in the world. For one thing, it suggests that the deeper we go in prayer, in self-examination, in contemplation; the further we penetrate the mysteries of the cosmos in mathematics, physics, string theory, and whatever comes after that; whatever our chosen pursuit, whatever our charism, the higher we climb, the more we find we are not alone, that somewhere along the way we have passed through a door, that there is Another who has arrived there ahead of us. There is an Encounter deep within the heart of our being. If we shrink from it, then something vital in ourselves shrivels and dies, but if we embrace it, then that Encounter grows to encompass us and the whole world we occupy, filling us with love and beauty and grace.

Second, it suggests that a big part of our work as Christians is to make plain for all the world to see the marriage of heaven and earth: to treat every person with the same dignity as the Son of God, to love creation as the reflection of his glory, to grow in faith, hope, and love. It means much of our worship and mission consists in an Ascension-style lifting up, holding up before the presence of God everything in our lives, everything in creation, that does not yet reflect the truth, beauty, or goodness that we know it was made for, starting with our own hearts and extending to everything we encounter.

We do this in a special way at the altar, when we offer bread and wine to become for us the Body and Blood of Christ. But we do much the same whenever we pray, whenever we give thanks, whenever we exult, whenever we work to feed, clothe, visit — both those who love us and those who are otherwise unlovable. This is the Ascension at work, and it accomplishes, in our own small ways, the work God has been about from the beginning: to stitch heaven and earth ever more closely together, till God be all in all.

Third, it is strong medicine against despair. One of the things the presence of heaven does is to heal our memories: it reveals the good God has made of all the ruin we have wrought. It would have been better, of course, had the ruin never happened. But God is in the business of making good what we have spoiled, and when we begin to have eyes to see, even the worst and lowest and darkest moments of human existence, of our own lives, will start to shine with a higher light, as the door which Christ’s Ascension opens in our hearts floods even the grave  with God’s own life and love, and we find restored to us more than we thought we had lost.

Heaven has come to earth, and earth has been raised to heaven. This Ascensiontide, as we wait afresh for Pentecost and the coming of the Holy Spirit, let us take courage, and with joy enter the work that knits heaven and earth ever more tightly together. So our senses and our wits, our bodies and our souls will be healed, and with all creation we will come to know and breathe the many splendors of God’s love.

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