Tell Me About Yourself

Sermon preached at Christ Church
Greenwich, Connecticut
July 22, 2018 / Ninth Sunday after Pentecost (Year B)

Ephesians 2:11-22
Mark 6:30-34, 53-56

If I were to say to you, “Tell me about yourself,” how would you answer?

In our society of merit, where individual character and achievement are supposed to determine a person’s value, answering this question – and answering it well – tends to be a matter of consequence. In our society, we are engaged constantly in the work of distinguishing ourselves.

Perhaps we would start with our family background, or where we grew up, or where we went to school, or what we do professionally, or what our hobbies are.^[1] We might politely highlight our best qualities, draw the listener’s attention to the better points on our résumé, and leave the less savory parts of our past unsaid. We all want to matter, we all want to stand out, and we are told that, in a competitive marketplace, we have to distinguish ourselves.

It can be exhausting, and as the Apostle Paul says in our first lesson today, when all is said and done, all such distinctions are null and void.

[Christ] has broken down the dividing wall… between us, Paul writes.

Even two thousand years ago, making distinctions between people was nothing new. In Paul’s time and among his colleagues, the relevant distinction lay not between success and failure, nor between rich and poor, but between Jew and Gentile, circumcised and uncircumcised: between those people with whom God had made his covenant, and the non-Jews – the pagans and heathens who were being brought into this new family of Christians.

The distinction was a matter of intense controversy. I will never forget sitting as an undergraduate in a class on the New Testament. After a discussion of some part of St Paul’s theology, a hand went up timidly in the back of the classroom.

“Professor; will the Jews be saved?”

The professor looked up from his notes, frowned, and slapped the podium.

“Of course the Jews will be saved!” he thundered. “That’s not the question. The question is: will the rest of us be saved!”^[2]

Our first lesson today immediately follows Paul’s reminder to his Gentile readers of where they stood, which was nowhere. “You were dead,” he writes, “through the trespasses and sins in which you once lived, following the course of this world.”^[3] These Gentiles were not God’s chosen; they were not the moral people, neither the religiously accomplished nor the socially distinguished. They were following “the course of this world;” in other words, they were following the vain superstition that by their own effort, and by their own merit, that they could outrun aging, loss, pain, and death. They were, in Paul’s words, “children of wrath, like everyone else.”^[4]

That is the sum of human distinctions, and in Paul’s view, they don’t amount to much.

“But God,” he writes, “who is rich in mercy, out of the great love with which he loved us even when we were dead through our trespasses, made us alive together with Christ.”^[5] Do you hear who the actor is, and how the action works? This is God’s doing, it is God’s activity, and human agency has no part in it. This is the more complete version of “God so loved the world,” although it is less suitable for greeting cards: God loved us even when we were dead through our trespasses, and in raising from the dead his incarnate Son, he has opened new life to us as well.

In this morning’s first lesson, Paul reminds his readers that they were once “without Christ, being aliens from the commonwealth of Israel, and strangers to the covenants of promise;” they had “no hope and [were] without God in the world.”^[6] But those distinctions – between Gentile and Jew, between stranger and friend – have been collapsed in the person of Jesus Christ, into whose blessed passion, death, and resurrection all Christians have been united through our Baptism by water and the Holy Spirit. We are, as Paul writes, “no longer strangers and aliens, but… are citizens with the saints and also members of the household of God.”^[7]

The God who made each of us, the God by whom Jesus says that even “the very hairs of your head are all numbered,” has deemed us worthy to be counted citizens and members of his household.^[8] We are not asked by God to perform our worth; instead we are freed by grace to lead lives of generosity and warmth and good humor. We are freed by the secure knowledge that in the resurrection of Jesus Christ our distinctiveness has been declared forever. That’s what it is to be built spiritually into a dwelling place for God and holy temple for the Lord: it is to be a person in whose life the love of God cannot but help be made obvious through humility, kind-spiritedness, and strength of character. And what a relief it is.

Our first hymn this morning was written by the great hymn-writer Charles Wesley, on the first anniversary of his conversation to Christianity. You may have noticed particularly the third verse:

Jesus! the name that charms our fears,
that bids our sorrows cease,
’tis music in the sinner’s ears,
’tis life and health and peace.^[9]

The Name of Jesus itself is life and health and peace.

We see this on vivid display in today’s second lesson. Even though Jesus and the disciples had crossed the Sea of Galilee to get a bit of rest, the public finds him on the other side.

“People at once recognized him, and rushed about that whole region and began to bring the sick on mats to wherever they heard he was.” They came in droves from the whole country, and the fact that so many came to Jesus for healing tells us not that no one else would heal them, but that no one else could… and that they could not heal themselves.

It doesn’t matter what you and I have done, what we have achieved, or what we can bring to God. What distinguishes us is that God has come to us – and as one of us – humbling himself to be born in a stable and die on a hill, for our sake, for no other purpose than His own pleasure and love for us who were made in His image.

“Tell me about yourself.”

You are citizens with the saints and also members of the household of God, built upon the foundation of the apostles and prophets, with Christ Jesus himself as the cornerstone. In him the whole structure is joined together and grows into a holy temple in the Lord; in whom you also are built together spiritually into a dwelling place for God.

AMEN.

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^{[1] This is, ironically but not incidentally, exactly the progression of the preacher’s short biography, which he wrote for himself, on the Christ Church website.
[2] See Romans 7-8 for Paul’s discussion of the eternal validity of God’s covenant with Israel.
[3] Ephesians 2:1-2
[4] Ephesians 2:3
[5] Ephesians 2:4-5
[6] Ephesians 2:12
[7] Ephesians 2:19
[8] Luke 12:7
[9] “O for a thousand tongues to sing,” Charles Wesley, 1739; Hymnal 1982, 493.}

Moods of Greenwich

 

Do not let anyone disqualify you…

Homily preached at Morning Prayer in St Luke’s Chapel
Berkeley Divinity School, New Haven, Connecticut
April 20, 2018 / Friday after Easter III

Do not let anyone disqualify you, insisting on self-abasement and worship of angels, dwelling on visions, puffed up without cause by a human way of thinking.

Liber Chronicarum, Nuremberg, 1493

We live in a moment characterized to a very great degree by metaphysical despair, by what Raymond Williams described as “the felt loss of a future.”^[1] Intractable racism, sexism, and violence; the uncertainties of the global climate; and alienation and social discord –– all of these engender a sense of existential peril.

Political conservatives tend to deny the existence of problems which, if real, would be depressingly overwhelming. Liberals, on the other hand, tend to absent themselves from the problem, to say “it’s you, not me.”

A friend of my sister’s once dated a guy in his 20s, who had gotten a vasectomy when he was 18, because he felt that he could not in conscience contribute to global overpopulation. He was incredibly smug about it all, as you might imagine, and he usually failed to note that the great reducers of birth rates are not vasectomies, but better education and better medical care.

This guy was not a Christian, but Christians are not exempt from such temptation to self-righteousness. We tend to read Jesus’ command to “be ye therefore perfect, even as your father in heaven is perfect,” in a characteristically American, city-on-a-hill way, leading us to retreat into our perfect bunkers with our perfect ethically-sourced canned goods (in perfect recycled cans, of course).

As Paul says, These have indeed an appearance of wisdom in promoting self-imposed piety, humility, and severe treatment of the body, but they are of no value in checking self-indulgence.

It is very tempting (and indeed I have given in to the temptation) to be smug and self-indulgent about Mr Vasectomy. But it does not take a great leap of imagination or empathy to understand the impulse to self-abasement. In the face of challenges of a global scale, our own lives and bodies tend to become the vehicles for our political expression; they are our keeps, our last refuges, the last things over which we have some autonomy, and even still, the enemy is circling. There is something very apt – even poignant – in my sister’s friend’s boyfriend’s having responded to a sense of practical impotence with effective sterility. His posturing was self-righteous, but the underlying action bespeaks desperation and hopelessness.

During Eastertide, it is worth remembering that the Resurrection is not a standalone event; it is the culmination of Jesus’ earthly life and ministry, a life which began with his incarnation into a world which was every bit as ragged, contentious, and despair-inducing as the world in which we live today.

We hear Jesus in that same world at the beginning of his ministry; even as his cousin John the Baptist has been arrested, Jesus proclaims the arrival of the kingdom of heaven, advocating a single activity on the part of all who could hear. Do you remember what he said? “Repent, for the kingdom of heaven has come near.”^[2] Repent.

Repentance is not another form of self-abasement or mortification of the flesh, and it is not limited to Lenten observance. Repentance is the reorientation of our attention away from self-indulgence and toward Jesus Christ. Repentance is the opposite of the “pride which leads us to trust in ourselves and not in God.” The fruits of this turn are the exact opposite of smugness and despair: they are mercy, charity, and hope.

To hope in Christ is a humbling activity, but also a liberating one, as the acknowledgement of the limits of our own power is coupled to a fidelity to the “God of peace, who brought again from the dead our Lord Jesus Christ,” in whom alone are all things possible.

We live in a time of genuine trial, with much before us about which we might feel anxious and uncertain. To be hopeful in the face of this is neither to deny the reality of grave peril, nor to absent ourselves from the struggle, but to face the world, secure in the knowledge that in the raising of Jesus from the dead, God has acted decisively against defeat and desolation.

Tomorrow at Morning Prayer, Paul will encourage the Colossians, “clothe yourselves with compassion, kindness, humility, meekness, and patience… And whatever you do, in word or deed, do everything in the name of the Lord Jesus, giving thanks to God the Father through him.”^[3] That is the shape of Christian witness in a despairing world. Redundant and predictable posturing are just a restatement of a human way of thinking, and they have nothing new to offer. But hope in Christ is as solid as the ground beneath your feet, and it is the antidote both to political complacency and metaphysical despair.

Repent, for the kingdom of heaven has come near.

AMEN.

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^{[1] Raymond Williams, The Politics of Modernism: Against the New Conformists (London: Verso, 1989), 103.
[2] Matt 4:17
[3] Colossians 3:12, 17}

Not in Secret

Sermon preached at Christ Church
Greenwich, Connecticut
March 30, 2018 / Good Friday

One of the eerie parts of Good Friday is how normal it seems, banal even. If Jesus’ miracles seem far-fetched, and his teaching esoteric, there is nothing unusual whatsoever about his betrayal, trial, crucifixion, and death. If you read the newspaper, you have seen this story. Jesus’ trial is highly political, and Pilate gives up Jesus to the mob as the cost of keeping the peace. As he falls from grace, Jesus is abandoned by his closest followers, whose triumphant entry into the capital – which we heard on Sunday – has yielded ashes, failure, and death.

Of course they scatter. Of course Peter denies Jesus. I think that we can understand this. It would have been dangerous to do otherwise, perhaps even fatal.

“After these things,” St John writes, “Joseph of Arimathea, who was a disciple of Jesus, though a secret one because of his fear of the Jews, asked Pilate to let him take away the body of Jesus… Nicodemus… also came.”

This is Joseph’s first appearance, since he has been following Jesus “in secret,” but we have met Nicodemus before. Earlier in John’s gospel, Nicodemus was named as a Pharisee, a strict observer of the traditional and written Jewish law, and commonly held to have pretensions to superior sanctity. When he first encountered Jesus, we know that Nicodemus came to Jesus “by night” (John 3:2), the way Deep Throat came to Woodward and Bernstein. Being seen with Jesus could compromise his position.

“One wonders immediately how much St John wishes to say to his contemporaries about men of learning and influence who do not have the courage to profess their faith openly.”^[1]

One wonders what St John would have to say about us. Have we denied Jesus? Maybe. Have we come to him in secret? Without a doubt.

Most of the people whom I know regard Christianity with a kind of benign indifference. Others find the life of the church quaint; some consider that anyone who gets tied up with religion must be softheaded. I know that I have a very low tolerance for awkwardness, for social friction, and so I have many times in my life been at pains to NOT mention that I spend my Sunday mornings in church, or that I take the Gospel seriously. It’s easier that way. It means I don’t have to risk looking suspect, or silly.

I have been, in other words, just as cowardly as Peter, and just as concerned with my own standing as Joseph and Nicodemus.

The first step to a relationship with the God who is in Jesus Christ – the first step toward the peace of God which passes all understanding – is to become conscious. Conscious that we are instinctively looking out for number one, conscious that we spend most of our days wrapped up in ourselves. What it looks like to shake off the shackles of sin and self-absorption is to make a 180 degree turn, away from our own self-interest, and toward God.

Good Friday is what the first part of that equation looks like, carried to its logical conclusion. Good Friday is triumph of self-interest, the triumph of sin, the triumph of the utter banality of violence, fear, and sorrow, which we see in the news every day.

But even in this darkest hour, there is hope. For it is the most unlikely disciples who come to Pilate to take away the body of Jesus. Imagine what that must have cost them. Imagine what it must have taken for them to say, “To hell with it,” and to have borne Jesus’ corpse away from Calvary. They must have done so in view of many people, carrying the body to the garden that was nearby, where they conducted a loving and reverent burial, and in Joseph’s own tomb. Their secret discipleship could have been a secret no longer, and they would have had to do worse than travel to the ends of the earth. They’d have had to talk to their friends about it.

When we return to this church in three days’ time, will we be ready follow Joseph and Nicodemus out of hiding? Will we be willing to make that 180-degree turn? And will we be ready to carry the good news of Jesus Christ outside of these walls and into the places where it is not usually heard?

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^{[1] Gerard Sloyan, John (Louisville: Westminster John Knox Press, 2009), 43.}

Keep awake therefore

Homily preached at Morning Prayer in St Luke’s Chapel
Berkeley Divinity School, New Haven, Connecticut
December 19, 2017 / Tuesday after Advent III

Keep awake therefore, for you do not know on what day your Lord is coming.

If much of the Christian life consists in our being asked to do things that we would really rather not do, then Advent is the Christian life distilled and compressed. This is the season of waiting, of patience, of quiet expectation. At first, expectation can be exciting and invigorating. But after a little while, it becomes a bore, and then an agony.

Second Coming of Christ (Gospel Book, Walters Manuscript W.540, fol. 14v)

Perhaps not incidentally, therefore, Advent is also a season of self-purification. In the second letter of Peter, the author writes that “the day of the Lord will come like a thief,” and then he asks, “what sort of persons ought you to be in leading lives of holiness and godliness, waiting for and hastening the coming of the day of God?”^[1] Karl Barth loved to quote this line in describing the character of Advent: “waiting for and hastening.”^[2] We are actually always doing this as Christians, “waiting for and hastening,” and in Advent this is the particular focus of our attention.

But it is easy to be distracted.

Last Wednesday, Kaleb Horton, who is a writer for Vice, tweeted something that caught my eye. He said: “The rise of the ‘tailored for you’ internet combined with how news is disseminated on social media has led to nothing but algorithmically-enforced tribalism and a million tiny little information bubbles.” Then he said that all of this has “turned online into a drug that gets you anxious… instead of high.”^[3]

And then this past Saturday, a friend of mine who is a writer published a piece about the books that she’s read this past year. She began by saying, “I was pregnant with my second child for most of the year and I was also working from home, which meant I was very sedentary and slothful, and able to spend a lot of time reading articles that made me miserable.”^[4]

I wonder whether any of that sounds familiar. It sounds familiar to me, and these two quotations have been stuck in my mind ever since I first read them. “A drug that gets you anxious instead of high.” “Reading articles that made me miserable.” The experience of these two writers describes the experience of a lot of people whom I know, and in fact my own experience as well. We are, many of us, trying to keep awake, to be aware, to be on top of things, to be informed. We are trying to do what seems like our moral duty to fight evil via the force of our own attention.

The allure of the drug that all of this information provides is not the anxiety, of course, but the feeling of power. The news at our fingertips – all the time – holds out the promise that by knowing things we are changing things. And yet the more we read, the less it seems that we can do, and that sense of powerlessness is disquieting in the extreme, and the resulting anxiety can lead to a kind of moral torpor. The problems facing our world – injustice, violence, discord among nations, heresy – are too much, they’re too great, and the sheer weight of it all can be overwhelming and defeating.

I can’t do everything, so I can’t do anything.

We are not asked, however, to do everything. We are not asked to fight evil in every far-flung part of the world, all the time. That’s not the question at all. As the second letter of Peter puts it: the question is this, what sort of persons ought we to be, in leading lives of holiness and godliness?

Every weekday morning in this chapel, for the whole of Advent, we have prayed that for Jesus Christ’s sake, God the Father will grant “that we may hereafter live a godly, righteous, and sober life, To the glory of [his] holy Name.” That is not a small thing. The decisions we make in our everyday lives, with God’s help — the choice for mercy instead of cruelty, for humility instead of pride, for generosity instead of meanness — these choices are part and parcel of Christian witness. They are the tasks commended to us in both the Old Testament and the New, and they are the substance of lives that are awake for the day on which the Lord is coming.

Liturgically speaking, we get lucky this year. The fourth week in Advent is exactly 24 hours long. When the sun goes down on December 24^th, the time of Advent expectation and patience will be at a close. But the day of God will remain outstanding, and we will continue as Christians to wait for a day and an hour which – as Jesus says – only the Father knows.

That day of God, the day on which our Lord shall finally come again, Barth says it will be “the day of salvation from our confusions, and the day of the end of our restless disquiet.”^[5] On that day, Jesus Christ, who is the Key of David, will open every door, and lead forth every captive who sits in darkness and in the shadow of death, and the end of our anxiety and powerlessness will be at hand. As we wait for and hasten that day, let us tend our plots faithfully, even as our Advent prayer issues forth to the throne of Heaven, and we say, “O come quickly.”^[6]

AMEN.

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^{[1] 2 Peter 3:10a, 11b-12
[2] Karl Barth, The Early Preaching of Karl Barth: Fourteen Sermons with Commentary by William H. Willimon (Louisville: Westminster John Knox Press, 2009), 25ff.
[3] @kalebhorton, December 13, 2017, https://twitter.com/kalebhorton/status/941010460060524544.
[4] Lydia Kiesling, “A Year in Reading: Lydia Kiesling,” The Millions, December 16, 2017, https://themillions.com/2017/12/year-reading-lydia-kiesling-2.html.
[5] Barth, Early Preaching of Karl Barth, 31.
[6] Thomas Campion, “Never weather-beaten sail,” in The New Oxford Book of English Verse, 1250-1918, ed. Arthur Quiller-Couch (New York: Oxford University Press, 1939), 214-15.}

Beyond schadenfreude

Homily preached at Morning Prayer in St Luke’s Chapel
Berkeley Divinity School, New Haven, Connecticut
November 10, 2017 / Friday after Pentecost XXII

Let them be wiped out of the book of the living, and not be written among the righteous.

Unknown, ‘Initial S: A Monk Praying in the Water’, c.1420, tempera colors, gold leaf, and ink on parchment, The J. Paul Getty Museum, Ms. 24, leaf 2

If, whether out of curiosity or pure devotion, you were studying the lectionary in your spare time this morning, you will have noticed that this verse and its neighbors were put in parentheses by the compilers of the Prayer Book. These imprecatory verses – that is, verses containing a spoken curse – and those that come up elsewhere in the Psalter are usually made optional, and I think we can understand why. They are unpleasant, they seem ungodly and of questionable appropriateness for reading in church, and the minds behind the lectionary evidently felt it might be better just to leave them out. They are not alone: centuries of reformers of various stripes also have tried to do away with them.

Well, my friends, I think we in this room have sufficient theological and constitutional fortitude to hear these verses out, to sing them together and face down the issue of what to make of such spiritual ugliness.

Lay to their charge guilt upon guilt, and let them not receive your vindication. 

Part of the virtue of reading these verses is that they are anthropologically correct, even if they feel theologically troubling. The human desire for the settling of accounts, moral and otherwise, has deep roots. Consider the number of terms we have for it: is it not usually satisfying when someone gets his comeuppance; or his just deserts; or what’s coming to him? If that weren’t enough, the Germans have given us the word schadenfreude, which describes the instinctive pleasure we feel when someone does get what’s coming to him. When we are down and out, like the Psalmist is this morning, what could be better than a reversal for the person who put us there? Serves him right, we might say.

Pour out your indignation upon them, and let the fierceness of your anger overtake them.

James Cone writes, however, that “Our intention is not to make the oppressors the slaves, but to transform humanity.”^[1] This is a good thought, but it is far from intuitive; no wonder Cone spends 225 pages – plus footnotes – trying to convince his readers of it. How many of us would have the good grace to say, in extremis, “Forgive them, Father, for they know not what they do”? I’m not sure I would. How many of us, reading the news in yesterday’s Washington Post that Roy Moore, the Republican nominee for U.S. Senator from Alabama, is a serial sexual abuser of women and girls as young as 14^[2]… how many of us read that and said, “Father, forgive”? I’m sure I said something more like, “I hope he gets what’s coming to him.” And we know that he may not.

I have grown weary with my crying; my throat is inflamed; my eyes have failed from looking for my God.

Sometimes our only recourse seems to be to shake our fists in the air and curse our enemies. It is a very human response to human fallenness, and not only that, but also to the sense that God is absent, that the wicked are running amok with impunity, that Sin and Death are having their day at the expense of the good and the innocent. And so we get Psalm 69, its litany of woes, curses and all, and we are right to read it in its fullness. It might even feel good to do so. At the same time, we are forced to recognize the ultimate inadequacy of its imprecations. Wishing destruction on our enemies, as C.S. Lewis has written, is almost “naïve,” as if “such a simple remedy for human ills had not occurred to the Almighty.”^[3]

In fact we know that God has thought of something better, which is the “the redemption of the world by our Lord Jesus Christ, … the means of grace, and … the hope of glory.” The rectification of human pain, human injustice, and human suffering is accomplished not through the piling up of curses, but through the righteousness of God. We struggle mightily against every form of oppression, and yet we know that the sign of all things being made new is not schadenfreude; the sign is an empty tomb, and a question that makes a such a mockery of curses as the lectionary’s parentheses could scarcely dream: “Why do you seek the living among the dead?” The Psalmist knows this. Even in the midst of his troubles, the curses do not get the final say; they make way at the last for a hymn to the power of God to set right every wrong, rooted in the sure confidence that in the final day, God’s justice will prevail over every sadness.

The afflicted shall see and be glad; you who seek God, your heart shall live. For the LORD listens to the needy, and his prisoners he does not despise.

AMEN.

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^{[1] James H. Cone, God of the Oppressed (Maryknoll, N.Y.: Orbis Books, 1997), 199.
[2] https://www.washingtonpost.com/investigations/woman-says-roy-moore-initiated-sexual-encounter-when-she-was-14-he-was-32/2017/11/09/1f495878-c293-11e7-afe9-4f60b5a6c4a0_story.html
[3] C.S. Lewis, Reflections on the Psalms (San Francisco: Harper Collins, 2017), 24.}

Are You Religious?

Sermon preached at St Peter’s Church by-the-Sea
Narragansett, Rhode Island
August 6, 2017 / The Transfiguration (Year A)

I would like to begin with a question, which is this: Are you religious?

Have you ever been asked this question?

Several years ago, I was standing in the kitchen of the house belonging to the parents of my girlfriend at the time. This was probably only my second or third visit to their house, and she and I had not been dating all that long, and so as you might imagine I was eager to make a good impression. In the course of making conversation, her mother asked me the question: “Are you religious?”

I was well aware, even at that early stage, that these were not churchgoing people. Both parents were – for their own reasons – skeptical of organized religion. I knew that they viewed churchgoing with amused curiosity at best, and mild hostility at worst. “Are you religious?” was not a neutral question. Her mother was almost certainly aware that I spent most of my Sundays in church, playing the organ, and she probably wanted to take stock of whether her daughter was involved with some sort of religious zealot. And so the question was asked: “Are you religious?”

I remember all the thoughts that went through my head. Oh no! They’re going to run me out of the house! But I also remember thinking that, Well, I mean, I don’t feel religious. I’m a churchgoer, and a believer, yes, but I’m not sure that I’m “religious.” I don’t always do the most charitable thing; I can be self-centered; I curse; and as an organist, sitting out of sight on Sunday mornings, I have been known to check my email or even to read a book during the sermon.

Am I religious? I’m no Mother Theresa.

In some ways, I think that my then-girlfriend’s mother unwittingly asked me a trick question. The answer to it goes to the very heart of what it means to be a Christian.

The great Swiss Protestant theologian Karl Barth described “religion” this way: he said, “Religion is a human work…” and, “A religion adequate to revelation and congruent to the righteousness of God…is unattainable by human beings.”^[1] In Barth’s mind, “religion” is all about human striving, about the human effort to project human wishes onto a god who ends up looking a great deal like the humans who are doing the striving. Barth describes this sort of “religion” as “the last human possibility,” which is always confronted by the “impossible possibility of God.”^[2]

In our Gospel lesson this morning, this confrontation is on vivid display. Peter, James, and John go up the mountain with Jesus to pray. As we heard, Jesus was transfigured before their eyes, “the appearance of his face changed, and his clothes became dazzling white.” At the same time, Moses and Elijah appear with Jesus in glory, speaking to Jesus about his impending departure from this world.

And what is Peter’s response to this? He suggests to Jesus the building of three dwellings, or three tabernacles, such as those in which God had dwelt with the ancient Israelites in the desert. This is, on the one hand, a good idea, with ancient pedigree. But it also demonstrates the religious impulse, alive and well in old St Peter. Here Jesus is transfigured before his eyes, and what is his response? To domesticate it. To build a very human dwelling, bringing the dazzling power of God into the human realm.

The irony is, this is exactly what God has done in the Incarnation of the second person of the Trinity, in the birth of Jesus at Bethlehem. Back on the mountain, Peter almost immediately learns his lesson, as “a cloud came and overshadowed them; and they were terrified as they entered the cloud. Then from the cloud came a voice that said, ‘This is my Son, my Chosen; listen to him!’” Jesus himself is the dwelling of God with humanity, and it is the work of God, not any human effort, that builds the true tabernacle. As we are reminded time and again, the leading actor in the universal drama is God, not humanity. As the Psalmist puts it, “It is he that hath made us, and not we ourselves.”^[3]

Way back on June 18^th, we heard this shocking announcement from St Paul: “For while we were still weak, at the right time Christ died for the ungodly. Indeed, rarely will anyone die for a righteous person– though perhaps for a good person someone might actually dare to die. But God proves his love for us in that while we still were sinners Christ died for us.”^[4]

This is a most irreligious assertion. As Jesus himself put it, “The Son of Man came to seek and save the lost.”^[5] The Christian gospel does not depend for its efficacy, or for its power, on the righteousness of any one of us. It does not require our moral perfection as a demonstration of its truth. As Christians, we are asked to obey Jesus’ commandments that we love the Lord our God with all our heart and with all our soul and with all our mind, and that we love our neighbor as ourselves. And yet it is well known to God that we will often fail. We will usually fail. It is in human nature to be imperfect, and human history is the graveyard not only of aristocracies, but also of utopias of every kind, especially “religious” ones. One of the most insidious myths around is the one that tells you that humans can be perfected if only we buy this new thing, or follow these six easy steps. What a con.

Recognizing our human fallibility is the first step in understanding what it is that we are offered in Jesus Christ.

This is at the very heart of the good news of the Christian faith. Think about that statement of Paul’s: Christ died for the ungodly. What an astounding declaration that is. And what a relief! The love of God which is in Christ is not only available to the “good people,” the morally upright, the best, and the brightest. It is not only given out to those who say the right things or always behave the right way. Christ died for the ungodly, which is to say that he died for you, and he died for me.

Peter writes in today’s epistle that, “First of all you must understand this, that no prophecy of scripture is a matter of one’s own interpretation, because no prophecy ever came by human will, but men and women moved by the Holy Spirit spoke from God.” Do you hear that? No prophecy ever came by human will. The power of God and the truth of the Christian gospel are not the work of human religious striving, or the effort to make a god in our own image. In the person of Jesus, God has done the work, God has chosen to make his dwelling place with humanity, and in the final analysis the only righteousness that matters is the righteousness of God, in which we are made partakers through faith in Jesus Christ.

Am I religious? No. I’m a Christian.

AMEN.

 

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^{[1] Karl Barth, The Epistle to the Romans, trans. Edwyn C. Hoskyns (London: Oxford University Press, 1953), 366.
[2] Ibid., 332.
[3] Psalm 100:3
[4] Rom 5:6-8
[5] Luke 19:10}

The Power of Sin

Sermon preached at St Peter’s Church by-the-Sea
Narragansett, Rhode Island
July 2, 2017 / Fourth Sunday after Pentecost (Year A)

All this summer, and well into September, we will be working our way through St Paul’s letter to the Romans. We will hear a little chunk of it every Sunday. This letter is by common consent Paul’s masterpiece. In the words of one scholar, Romans “overwhelms the reader by the density and sublimity of the topic with which it deals, [which is] the gospel of the justification and salvation of Jew and [Gentile] alike by the grace of God through faith in Jesus Christ, revealing the uprightness and love of God the Father.”^[1]

In today’s passage, Paul deals with a topic that has – for a variety of reasons – gone out of favor in the church. It’s a topic we hear about a lot, but which we don’t talk about a lot. Today, Paul names it. That topic is SIN. As Paul writes, “Do not let sin exercise dominion in your mortal bodies, to make you obey their passions.” Who can say what he means by that?

Perhaps a story by way of illustration will be helpful.

When I was younger, let’s say eight years old, my best friend – Tim – and I would often gather at one or the other of our houses to play. My parents believed that video games were for other people’s children, and so at our house, our chief engagements were with our Ninja Turtles action figures or, as often, with LEGOs. My little sister, who is four years younger, would frequently join us.

I remember one particular day when Tim came over, and we went right up to my room and got out the LEGOs. Shortly thereafter, my sister appeared in the doorway and asked if she could come in and join us. “No.” I replied. “But I just want to play.” “No,” I said. “Get out.” This continued through several more exchanges, until finally I pushed my four-year-old sister to the doorway and closed the door in her face.

Some minutes later, I went to go down to the kitchen, and when I opened my bedroom door, there was my sister, sitting on the floor, playing quietly, all by herself, with her own LEGOs. In my mother’s words, “She was so devoted to you and wanted to be a part of your life so much that she was willing to sit on the floor outside your room just to be close to you.” And what did I do? I closed the door in her face.

This episode is one of the very few things in my life that I feel really and truly bad about. I had to call up my sister yesterday while I was writing this sermon to apologize – again. My parents were so affected by this at the time that my mother took my sister out for ice cream, to honor her.

Our tendency at this point, I think, is to let eight-year-old Andrew off the hook. “You were just a little boy!” we might say, and that’s fair. But the truth is that when my mother and my father sat me down and said to me, “How would you like it if somebody did that to you?” my reply was, “I wouldn’t like it very much.” I knew. I knew that I could have said to my sister, “Not right now, but could we come and find you a little later?” But in the moment, I didn’t think about that. In the moment, I didn’t think about my sister at all. I just wanted her out. Have you ever done anything like that?

This is what it means to be under the dominion of Sin. It is to be mindlessly, thoughtlessly, and instinctively self-absorbed.

When we read Scripture, and when we read our Prayer Books, and whenever we encounter the word SIN, we must understand that Sin is not an ethical concept. For Paul, Sin is not just your individual deeds and misdeeds. It is not just those things done and left undone. Paul recognizes Sin for what it is: it is a force, a power that is always acting on us, working in us to have its way. This is Sin, with an uppercase S, and it is the absolute antithesis of the power of the Holy Spirit, by which God works us. In the face of Sin, we are basically powerless. Next week, St Paul will put it this way, “I do not understand my own actions. For I do not do what I want, but I do the very thing I hate.”^[2] I knew better, even at eight years old, than to shove my sister out of my room, but I couldn’t help myself.

If the power of Sin sounds like bad news, Paul has some good news: “But thanks be to God,” he writes, “that you, having once been slaves of sin, have become obedient from the heart to the form of teaching to which you were entrusted, and that you, having been set free from sin, have become slaves of righteousness.” For Paul, each and every person has a choice. We can choose between the power of Sin, which leads to death, or the power of God that comes through faith in Jesus Christ, which leads to life.

It is always tempting to hedge on our faith. We’re all for Jesus on Sunday, but when the going gets rough, when we encounter evil, we tend to fall back on our own devices. It is seductive to believe that there is some combination of good deeds by which we can save the world. If everyone were just welcoming enough, or nice enough, or peaceful enough, everything would be okay. But this is us playing God, and it is Sin at its most lethal. The surest sign of Sin’s power is widespread consensus that it is nowhere to be found. To quote the movie The Usual Suspects, “The greatest trick the Devil ever pulled was convincing the world he didn’t exist.”^[3] The road to hell is indeed paved with good intentions.

Where this leaves us is, as always, at the feet of Jesus, echoing the father of the boy whom Jesus cured: “Lord, I believe; help thou mine unbelief.”^[4] We are asked, each time we attend a baptism, “Will you persevere in resisting evil, and, whenever you fall into sin, repent and return to the Lord?”^[5] We all know the reply to the question: “I will, with God’s help.” With God’s help. We are continuously in need of the grace of God to turn us from the power of Sin, and toward the love of God that is in Jesus Christ. When we repent, when we return to the Lord, it is only accomplished by our surrender to the power of the Holy Spirit working in us.

We are not promised that with Christ life will be easy, or that we will never know hurt, or harm. What we are promised is that those who come to God through faith in Jesus DO NOT GO IT ALONE. Christ has taken on Sin and defeated it, once and for all upon the Cross. God has done in Jesus what we could not do ourselves. “He himself bore our sins in his body on the tree, that we might die to sin and live to righteousness.”^[6] This is why those who live in Christ share our Lord’s own traits: they are marked by humility, and kindness, and mercy.

So whom do you want to obey? Paul puts this question to the Romans, and he speaks to us as well. “Do you not know,” he writes, “that if you present yourselves to anyone as obedient slaves, you are slaves of the one whom you obey, either of sin, which leads to death, or of obedience, which leads to righteousness? For the wages of sin is death, but the free gift of God is eternal life in Christ Jesus our Lord.”

AMEN.

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^{[1] J.A. Fitzmyer, Romans. Anchor Bible Commentary (New York: Doubleday, 1992), xiii.
[2] Romans 7:15
[3] This is actually a paraphrase by the movie of Charles Baudelaire, but it works (“La plus belle des ruses du diable est de vous persuader qu’il n’existe pas.” Le spleen de Paris (1862), XXIX. This is Baudelaire’s quotation of a Parisian preacher.)
[4] Mark 9:24
[5] Book of Common Prayer (1979), 304.
[6] 1 Peter 2:24}

Lenten meditation IV

We declare to you what was from the beginning, what we have heard, what we have seen with our eyes, what we have looked at and touched with our hands, concerning the word of life— this life was revealed, and we have seen it and testify to it, and declare to you the eternal life that was with the Father and was revealed to us— we declare to you what we have seen and heard so that you also may have fellowship with us; and truly our fellowship is with the Father and with his Son Jesus Christ. We are writing these things so that our joy may be complete. This is the message we have heard from him and proclaim to you, that God is light and in him there is no darkness at all. (1 John 1:1-5)

As we approach Easter, part of our Lenten task is to prepare ourselves to hear and receive a message that is frankly outrageous. Saying “Christ is risen” is as bizarre in our day as it was in the disciples’ day. It seems weird to say that a dead man was the Son of God and was physically raised from the dead.

Fra Angelico, ‘Noli Me Tangere’, 1440-41, fresco, Convento di San Marco, Florence

But the gospels do not hedge about the risen Christ. Jesus’ post-resurrection appearances are not presented as visions or dreams. In his first epistle, John the Evangelist writes of “what we have seen with our eyes, what we have looked at and touched with our hands.” Neither he nor the other gospel writers describe encounters with the risen Christ as visions or dreams. Post-resurrection Jesus might have been ghostly, might have passed through walls, might have vanished, but he also sat and ate with the disciples, who laid their hands on him and his fleshly wounds.

It is easy for us to accept as history Jesus’ sayings and his travels around Galilee. We trust the gospel writers on that, but the resurrection seems, well, in a different league. And yet the resurrection is reported by those same gospel writers with the same matter-of-factness as anything Jesus ever said.

John declares to us what he has heard and seen so that we may have fellowship with the saints, whose company truly is communion with the Father and his Son, Jesus Christ our Lord. Let us prepare to receive this message this Easter, so that when we hear, “Christ is risen,” we may without reservation reply that “the Lord is risen indeed!”

Lenten meditation III

He entered Jericho and was passing through it. A man was there named Zacchaeus; he was a chief tax collector and was rich. He was trying to see who Jesus was, but on account of the crowd he could not, because he was short in stature. So he ran ahead and climbed a sycamore tree to see him, because he was going to pass that way. When Jesus came to the place, he looked up and said to him, ‘Zacchaeus, hurry and come down; for I must stay at your house today.’ So he hurried down and was happy to welcome him. All who saw it began to grumble and said, ‘He has gone to be the guest of one who is a sinner.’ Zacchaeus stood there and said to the Lord, ‘Look, half of my possessions, Lord, I will give to the poor; and if I have defrauded anyone of anything, I will pay back four times as much.’ Then Jesus said to him, ‘Today salvation has come to this house, because he too is a son of Abraham. For the Son of Man came to seek out and to save the lost.’ (Luke 19:1-10)

Who is “the lost”?

If years of church-going have taught us anything, it’s that Jesus ate with “tax collectors and sinners” (Matt 9:1; Luke 15:1; Mark 2:2:15-17). These were the marginalized people of their time, the untouchables, the outcasts.

Now, as a tax collector, Zacchaeus may have been an outcast, but he may also have deserved to be an outcast! His Jewish neighbors and friends would have viewed his enriching himself by a little “honest graft” to have been dishonest theft. He had violated both the Law and had trespassed the trust of his neighbors. Vis-à-vis Jewish custom, he had mislaid his moral compass.

But what about Zacchaeus’ spiritual compass?

We may rightly imagine that he had abandoned himself to his work, to defrauding his neighbors and friends, to his focus on self-enrichment. Zacchaeus probably just wanted a fair shake, to get what was coming to him. This can happen to any of us, surely. Where are we when our lives become beholden to ambition, to achievement, to our own glorification? As our Lord’s brother put it: “one is tempted by one’s own desire, being lured and enticed by it” (James 1:14). Such poverty and distance from the loving purposes of the Lord make any one of us “the lost.”

What we know from the Gospel is that Jesus is calling each of us to repentance, just as he called Zacchaeus to come down from his tree. We may not see Jesus walking in the square, but he speaks to us as directly as he did to the old tax collector. We hear Jesus in our reading this passage today, in the niggling sense that maybe our lives have become impoverished, in the examples and inescapable witness of the saints, from Peter and Paul to Mother Teresa.

Are you ready to let Jesus find you? Because the Son of Man came to seek out and to save the lost.