Author Archives: djgrieser

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About djgrieser

I have been Rector of Grace Episcopal Church in Madison, WI since 2009. I'm passionate about Jesus Christ and about connecting our faith and tradition with 21st century culture. I'm also very active in advocating for our homeless neighbors.

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In the Year the King Uzziah died

Grace Church

Epiphany 5, 2010

February 7, 2010

The liturgical calendar moves on. We are nearing the end of Epiphany and already the staff is looking ahead to Lent—we are busily putting the final preparations to the Shrove Tuesday pancake supper, working on bulletins for Ash Wednesday and nailing down the final pieces of our Lenten programming. Tomorrow, I will be heading off for a two-day clergy retreat. I don’t know what they are like in this diocese, but in Upper South Carolina, our January or February retreat was clearly a pre-lenten retreat; it was designed for us to prepare spiritually for the season, so that in turn we might nurture the spiritual lives of those in our care.

I’m looking ahead to Lent, but we’ve still got two Sundays in Epiphany to get through and both of them have as their scriptural focus peak spiritual experiences. You have already heard me criticize the editors of the lectionary for various decisions they make, and no doubt I will make similar comments from time to time. They were more than occasionally ham-handed in the way they dealt with scriptural texts and injudicious in their editing. Still, on this fifth Sunday after Epiphany in Year C, they got it exactly right.

The season of Epiphany offers us the opportunity to reflect on God’s presence among us; God’s presence in the incarnation of Jesus Christ, but also the ways in which God manifests Godself in the world and in our lives. The Psalms are full of reminders of God’s glory—“The heavens declare the glory of God” our hymns of praise repeatedly have us singing about the glory of God. We read about that glory in the story of the wedding at Cana and in the coming of the magi.

In today’s lesson from Isaiah, we hear one of the most familiar, and most transcendent experiences of God’s glory in all of the biblical tradition. The prophet Isaiah has a vision, “In the year that King Uzziah died, I saw the Lord, high and lofty.” It is so important to the biblical tradition that the song the seraphim sing has become our song in the Eucharistic liturgy. For many scholars of religion, the vision described by Isaiah and his response to that vision, have become something of a paradigm for understanding religious experience in general, not just Jewish or Christian.

Isaiah describes a vision in such vivid detail that it may seem to us as if we are with him in the temple. He claims to see God, but the vision itself is of God’s throne and a being so vast that the hem of God’s robe filled the temple. Seraphim were in attendance, flying and singing. As Isaiah looked on, he felt the temple shake as if it were in an earthquake and the temple itself filled with smoke.

Isaiah’s response to that awesome vision was to recognize the vast gulf that divided him from God. He described himself as lost, a man of unclean lips, unable to perform the tasks to which God might be calling him. It is an experience similar to the one we heard the prophet Jeremiah describe in last week’s reading from Hebrew Scripture: “Before I formed you in the womb I knew you, and before you were born I consecrated you; I appointed you a prophet to the nations.” Jeremiah’s response to God’s words is to protest, “Truly I do not know how to speak, for I am only a boy.” But God insists and reassures Jeremiah, just as God reassured Isaiah, that God would put words in the prophets’ mouths.

Paul described a very different sort of experience in I Corinthians 15, the experience of the risen Christ. It is one of the key passages in all of Paul’s writings, a key passage for understanding Paul and a key passage for understanding New Testament Christianity. Paul cites for his readers a long list of all those who witnessed the resurrection of Jesus Christ. He seems to be saying, if you can’t take my word for it, here’s a list of everyone to whom the risen Lord appeared, go talk to them. The accounts of the encounters with the Risen Christ in the gospels as here in Paul seem unable to explain the radical transformation that took place; changing a rag-tag bunch of disciples into a group of men and women who took the gospel to the ends of the earth. That’s the important point.

As with Isaiah and Jeremiah, what matters is not so much the experience itself, it is the response. Isaiah and Jeremiah became spokesmen for God, prophets of Yahweh, and Paul’s experience of the Risen Christ was also a call, as he says in Galatians. In fact, the language of Jeremiah echoes in Paul’s understanding of his own call: “But when God, who had set me apart before I was born and called me through his grace, was pleased 16to reveal his Son to me.” For Paul the appearance of the Risen Christ to him was less significant for affecting his conversion than it was in establishing his authority as one of the apostles.

Speaking of which, the gospel story of Jesus calling the disciples is easily the least dramatic of all of the call narratives we have before us today. Jesus is by the shores of the Sea of Galilee. The crowds pressing in upon him, he seeks refuge from them in Simon Peter’s boat and teaches from that place. When he concludes, he tells Peter to put his nets back in the water, and there is a miraculous catch of fish. Jesus uses this to invite Peter, and the others, to follow him, and thus they become Jesus’ disciples and, to use the words of our gospel, “fishers of people.”

So Peter, Paul, and Isaiah each had pretty spectacular things happen to them, and their response in the end was to set about on the tasks that God had given them, to respond to God’s call.

I mentioned in my sermon last Sunday that one of the challenges facing Grace today, indeed one of the challenges facing Christianity as a whole, is the lessening importance of religion as a factor in people’s lives. A series of surveys has shown the growing number of people who identify themselves as belonging to no religion. Often, when this answer is probed, respondents mention that they are “spiritual, not religious” that they have spiritual lives, even nurture them, but they do that outside of traditional religion. My guess is that for at least some of you, something similar is true. You may come to church, but if asked to describe spiritual experiences, you might mention something that had no connection with traditional worship or life in community.

I have no doubt that those of you who fall into that category have authentic spiritual lives. In some respects we have been culturally programmed over the last two centuries to seek spiritual experiences outside of traditional religious institutions. Many of us might find ourselves as likely to pursue meditation practices that have more in common with Buddhist techniques than with traditional Christian forms of prayer.

Even more important than the “spiritual not religious” idea is the notion that we are seekers, each of us in some way on some sort of spiritual journey or quest. From time to time, we may find ourselves in pursuit of deeper and more fulfilling spiritual experiences, trying to quench a thirst that never seems to end. We might desire ever greater highs without taking the time to understand them or their effects on us. For most of us such quests are deeply individualistic, often occurring entirely in solitude.

As we come to the end of the season of Epiphany and begin to look toward Lent, making a connection between the experiences of the sort we read about in today’s scriptures and the hard work of deepening our faith, may be what binds Epiphany and Lent together. Isaiah, Jeremiah, and Paul did not satisfy themselves with the religious high of their experience. For it was not just a high, it was also a low. Each of them responded to the glory of God with an awareness of their own finitude and inadequacy and each of them came out of their experience on fire to do God’s work in the world.

The quest for spiritual experience is not enough. Our communal worship, the Eucharist, and our individual experiences may be ways of encountering God, but we should never allow them to become ends in themselves. Our lessons make the case that spiritual experience should lead to a sense of call and mission, a new awareness not just of our finitude or even a deeper sense of our relationship with God. As we end Epiphany and look ahead to Lent and Jesus’ journey toward Jerusalem and the cross, may our experience of the glory of Christ become strength and nourishment for the journey ahead.

More on Holy Women, Holy Men

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I’ve continued to think about my reaction to Holy Women, Holy Men. My earlier post is here. It was initiated on Friday when I went on Episcopal Cafe and found no mention of the Martyrs of Japan and instead a quotation from a work on Anne Hutchinson. I think I’ve figured it out. I’ve not read it carefully. It’s not available in print and I haven’t been interested enough to go back to the materials presented at General Convention. So, my only exposure to it is through Episcopal Cafe.

Speaking to the Soul provides no historical context for Williams and Hutchinson, no discussion of what influenced them. There’s nothing that would help a non-expert make any sense of their relation to Anglicanism, why they are worth commemorating, and how their commemoration might enrich our current life as a communion.

To me, that reeks of arrogance–assuming that anyone who is of interest religiously or spiritually is inherently worth recognizing by Anglicans and worth coopting.

Granted, I come to this as someone from an outsider background whose academic specialty was religious outsiders. Still, I think it more hubris than humility to pay lipservice to the diversity within Christianity without acknowledging it, and without acknowledging the deep differences that persist between the Anglican tradition and others, like the Baptists, of whom Williams was one of the leading lights.

Holy Women, Holy Men

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I suspect I posted something on this last summer in the run-up to General Convention. There is a major revision in the works for Lesser Feasts and Fasts, which is the liturgical book dealing with commemorations of the saints and other notable figures in the history of Christianity and the history of the Episcopal Church. There has been some debate about the inclusion of this or that figure (John Muir, who wasn’t a conventional Christian by any stretch of the imagination), people who left Anglicanism for the Roman Catholic Church, like John Henry Newman, and many more.

My sense when I first looked through Holy Women, Holy Men was that it was something of a politically-correct attempt to acknowledge everyone who has made an important, or not so important, contribution to contemporary religion and culture. There are two aspects of it that deeply bother me. First, the expansion of commemorations. One of the things the Protestant Reformation did was simplify the religious calendar, removing the commemorations of many saints from the annual ritual year. Now we are back where we were in the Middle Ages. Perhaps that’s not so bad, but on the other hand a proliferation of commemorations might lead to the lessening importance of the whole enterprise.

Secondly, I am deeply concerned about what I suppose I should call religious imperialism. One of my most memorable moments from the time I spent teaching History of Christianity in an Episcopal Seminary was when a student commented after our discussion of Erasmus, “He was an Anglican.”

Well, no.  He wasn’t an Anglican, he remained a Catholic and died one. As I was reading on Episcopal Cafe the entry on Roger Williams and Anne Hutchinson yesterday, I sensed the same thing. To adopt or assimilate members of other denominations or Christian traditions, or even from other religious traditions, seems to me rather arrogant. Williams challenged not only the Puritan orthodoxy of colonial New England, he would have been equally vocal against the Church of England. To learn from and respect those who would have had deep disagreements with Anglicanism is one thing, to place them in our ritual calendar is quite another.

I presume the goal is to honor their contribution and their faith; but how can we do that authentically by eliding the deep differences between themselves and us?

The Martyrs of Japan, 1597

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February 5 (in the “old” calendar of the Episcopal Church) commemorates the Martyrs of Japan, Franciscans who were crucified in an act that marked the beginning of the end of the remarkable expansion of Christianity in sixteenth-century Japan.

Few American Christians, especially non-Catholics, are aware of the missionary expansion of Christianity across the world in the sixteenth century. Perhaps that expansion is best exemplified by St. Francis Xavier, a Jesuit who was one of Ignatius Loyola’s first companions and who took up the missionary enterprise when Ignatius himself was unable to do so. He traveled first to the Portuguese colony of Goa in India, then to the Philippines, and finally to Japan. He died as he was preparing a voyage to China.

Christian missionaries met with great success in Japan. It’s estimated that by the end of the sixteenth century, there were some 300,000 Christians. Unfortunately, competition between the religious orders and conflict between Spain and Portugal contributed to the ultimate rejection of Christianity by the Japanese state and Christianity’s virulent suppression. Part of the story is told brilliantly in the novel Silence, by Shusaku Endo.

Perhaps most remarkably, in spite of intense persecution, Christianity went underground and survived in Japan. Indeed, when Japan was forced open in the 1850s and European missionaries arrived, they encountered small groups of Christians who had maintained their faith through the centuries. Some of them adopted the Christianity they now encountered, others maintained the faith and practice that had evolved during the centuries of persecution. Their story is told in a moving documentary Otalya: Japan’s Hidden Christians.

Can we talk?

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I’ve been in Madison for over six months now, and one of the things I’ve learned is that agencies, organizations, even communities of faith don’t talk together. For example, there is apparently no structure for clergy to meet regularly and share information and support one another. Presumably, this is done on the denominational level. Certainly we Episcopalians meet regularly. But even though Grace is within three or four blocks of two Lutheran churches, a United Methodist church, and a Catholic church, I have met only one other member of the downtown clergy.

What that means is that it is difficult to find out what other churches are doing, especially in terms of social services. Are we duplicating one another’s efforts? Are there ways we might cooperate on larger projects? Such questions can’t be asked because there is no one to whom one might ask them.

Take homelessness for example. It turns out there are conversations going around all over the downtown area, that involve homeless men and women, clergy, social service providers, and advocates. At these conversations many of the same topics come up: conditions in the drop-in shelter, the availability of social services, etc. People want to mobilize to do something, but the first thing they think of is to develop a new program or organization. It might be better to broaden the conversations and above all, gather the data about programs and problems.

To that end, we at Grace have done something fairly simple–compile a list of meal programs in the downtown area. Sure, such lists exist, but when we began to compare the list with the programs that homeless men and women actually know about, the list suddenly became much longer. So here’s what we’ve come up with: Free Services.

What surprises me most is that more than 25 years ago, when I was doing Field Education at a downtown church in Boston, one of my jobs was to create a roster of services provided by downtown churches, and to develop a way for those churches to communicate what they were doing with one another. Perhaps such efforts took place in Madison’s past, but today, we churches are the proverbial “left hand not knowing what the right hand is doing.”

To be honest, I have reached out to other clergy and most of those whom I have contacted have been welcoming and gracious in their response. So perhaps we have the opportunity of turning things around.

Sermon post-mortem

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I’m never quite sure whether I pull off what I’m working on. Yesterday, given the constraints of other commitments, I wasn’t happy with the final shape of the sermon. But some of what I was groping toward must have come through. A parishioner called me today and said lovely things about my sermon yesterday.

That’s not why I’m writing. Instead, I’m writing about two other things. First, a series of conversations at coffee hour about our decrepit dishwasher and how we should proceed. We can get it fixed. The problem is, it doesn’t do what we need it to do. It constrains our ministry because our kitchen is not adequate for the purposes to which we put it, or could put it, with the proper equipment. Our food pantry can’t re-package bulk food for example.

Then, I saw a post on the Episcopal Cafe that led me to this. There’s much here with which I disagree but it seems to me that the right questions are being asked. I especially like the parable of the life-saving station. I’d heard it before but it had slipped my mind. In some ways, it captures the history of Christianity in America. The full parable is here.

I was involved for a couple of years in a parish that was a fairly recent church plant. It was successful at the level of bringing people in, but I don’t think it was particularly at shaping and forming disciples.

I do think on one level that it is all about liturgy or worship. The old Anglican/Episcopal mantra was lex orandi, lex credendi, praying shapes believing. We have a gift to offer the larger church and the world–a gift of an experience of God rooted in beautiful music, beautiful language, and at Grace, a beautiful space. We need to find ways of sharing that.

More on the Trinity Institute

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Rowan Williams wrote a brief essay for this week’s Newsweek that summarizes much of what he said last week at the Trinity Institute. The essay is available online. In it, he points out pervasive the use of economics to understand relationships (customer, consumer, for example, even in the church), and how any perspective that narrows the range for understanding human being to a single factor diminishes humanity. He concludes:

Our job as human beings is to imagine ourselves—using all the raw materials that science, psychoanalysis, and economics provide us—in the hope that the images we discover and shape will have resonance and harmony with the rhythms of what Christians, and others, call the will and purpose of Almighty God.

He consistently stressed during the institute the importance of both a full account of human being and developing ways to nourish fuller human being. If that truly is the goal, not just of political institutions, but of churches as well, then one might think finding ways of nourishing people who find fuller human being in same-sex relationships, and nourishing those life-giving relationships, ought to be a priority as well. Of course, he argued just that in essays written long before he became Archbishop of Canterbury.

Sermon for the 4th Sunday after Epiphany

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A More Excellent Way

Grace Church

Epiphany 4, 2010

January 31, 2010

I know that for most of us, our primary exposure to scripture comes on Sunday morning. A few of us might read the text more closely, study the bible either individually or in groups. Some of us are relatively familiar with the texts from Sunday School, but I don’t think it’s an exaggeration to say that most people who attend Episcopal Churches have at best a superficial knowledge of scripture. Now don’t get me wrong; I’m not criticizing you. If anything, I’m criticizing the church, and its lay clerical leadership, for not taking the education of children and adults seriously enough.

What that superficial knowledge of scripture leads to is a pretty fuzzy, incomplete, and misleading understanding of who Jesus was. Most of us have a picture of him in our minds as a nice guy, good teacher, who didn’t ruffle many feathers, or if he did, it was only because they needed to be. That image of Jesus as a nice guy may be so deeply engrained in us that when we hear stories like the gospel that was just read, we either miss the conflict entirely, or totally misinterpret it.

As I said last week, Luke dramatically alters this story of Jesus’ return to his hometown, moving it to the very beginning of his ministry, telling the reader what Jesus said, and shifting the focus away, at least slightly from the reception he receives there. Perhaps the most striking element in Luke’s story is that it seems as if Jesus goads the crowd into taking action against him. There’s an odd and abrupt shift of sentiment. Luke reports that all spoke well of him and were amazed at his gracious words.. Then the crowd asked, “Is not this Joseph’s son?”

It’s after that question that Jesus seems to provoke them. First he quotes the proverb, “Doctor, heal yourself;” and says that they will want him to do the sort of healings in Nazareth that he has done elsewhere. Instead of answering those objections directly, Jesus cites the two examples from Hebrew Scripture, the great prophets Elijah and Elisha, and their healing of two gentiles.

The meaning of this exchange is obscure. Does Jesus want to incite the crowd’s anger? Or is something else going? Is his challenge to them a response to the question, “Is not this Joseph’s son?” If we think back to what I said last week about the Isaiah text quoted by Jesus. It serves in Luke as what we could Jesus’ mission statement and his identity as Messiah is measured by the extent to which he preached good news to the poor, gave sight to the blind, etc. So, he is basically laying out his future ministry to his listeners, identifying himself as the Messiah, and declaring the year of the Lord’s favor. And the response from the crowd was not recognition that he is the Messiah, but recognition that he is one of their own, Joseph’s son. They are given everything they need to see him as the Messiah, but all they can see is the one who grew up among them.

Sometimes it is hard to see what’s in front of our eyes, and sometimes it’s hard to accept the message coming to us—whether that message is good news or bad. In fact, it’s often the case that the best news is the hardest to hear. Jesus came to Nazareth, proclaimed the year of the Lord’s favor, proclaiming, in other words, the coming of God’s reign. His listeners didn’t understand what he was talking about, but when he put it into words they could understand, they recoiled and resisted. When he mentioned Hebrew prophets healing gentiles, their ears closed up and they attacked him.

Accepting the new can be dangerous and scary. We don’t know what might happen down the road. We can’t see clearly into the future. For most of us, we’re pretty comfortable with doing things the way we’ve been doing them. They seem to work pretty well, after all.

But closer examination reveals that isn’t the case. I mentioned last Sunday some of the discussion the vestry had on our retreat two weeks ago. We talked about our vision for the future, and we also did some hard work laying out some of Grace’s strengths and weaknesses. Inevitably, as is always the case in such conversations, talk turned to the way things used to be. Long-time members can remember when our congregation was much larger, when we had a youth group of fifty members and a Sunday School that filled the education wing. Often, such reminiscences can turn into discussions of how we might get back to that time.

Well, the reality is that the world, Madison, and the church have changed dramatically. To make the point, I will use a very different example than Grace Church. A few years ago, I did some consulting work with a parish in the county seat of a largely rural county in South Carolina. Their congregation had declined significantly since the sixties, and they were hoping to turn things around. The mantra I heard repeatedly was “We’ve got to attract young families.” The county’s population was declining, because the textile mills that had provided employment had closed and there was around 20% unemployment. I did some demographic research and learned that something like a third of the children under age 18 lived in single-parent households. In other words, the chances of attracting two-parent families with stable employment were pretty low. If they wanted to be the church and grow, they were going to need to do some creative, and hard, thinking.

We at Grace need to do some hard thinking too. It’s easy for many of us to think back to the “good old days” of the fifties through the eighties when the church thrived. But those days are long gone. As I said, the world, Madison, and the church have changed. Many of these changes are gigantic—like the lessening role of religion in America and in Madison, increased ethnic diversity—I could cite dozens of things. Some of them may seem relatively insignificant, like the growing importance of Sunday as the only day when families can spend time together. We can do little or nothing about many of them, but taken together they mean that to expect the church to look like what it did thirty or forty years is not only unrealistic, it would lead to its complete irrelevance, and probably its death.

But still, we hold on to that vision of the past. It collides with the present and impedes our future. That is true for an individual parish like Grace. It’s also true for our denomination as a whole, and indeed for mainline Christianity. So what do we do? How do we capture a vision of the future, that brings what is best of our tradition forward and brings the life-giving message of the gospel into a new world?

Well, that’s the question. It may seem innocuous, but in fact, different answers to that question, different ways of approaching it, can lead to intense conflict. In a very profound way, conflict over that question is what has driven conflict within the Episcopal Church and the Anglican communion for a very long time and it threatens to tear our denomination and our global communion apart. But there can be, and often is, equally intense conflict on the local level. When facing such conflict, it’s important to remember that in spite of our differences, there are deep and lasting bonds that tie us together.

That’s what Paul is talking about in I Corinthians. The past few words we have read his famous analogy of the Christian community as the body of Christ, in which each member is of equal importance. He didn’t write that in a vacuum. In fact, the community of Corinth to which he was writing was embroiled in nasty conflict internally, but also externally, with Paul himself. He writes in order to hold that community together, and in order to preserve his relationship with it. That’s the context for today’s reading, the so-called love chapter.

He has just been saying that there is a variety of gifts, but the same spirit, varieties of services, but the same Lord, varieties of activities, but the same God. He uses the metaphor of the body to stress the organic relationship of all members in the community, the necessity of all, the importance of all. When he comes to the end of that discussion, he transitions from it by saying, “But let me show you a more excellent way.” And with that, he begins “Though I speak with the tongue of mortals and angels, but have not love, I am a noisy gong or clanging cymbal.” Paul was talking about relationships within the body of Christ. Love is that which binds us together; indeed love creates the body of Christ.

But love is also the path showing our way into the future. We live in a culture in which it seems impossible to disagree and remain in relationship. Our political discourse is impoverished, little more than shrill rhetoric aimed at scoring points, whether that conflict is over healthcare or the Edgewater development. In the Episcopal Church it seems easier to walk away than to remain in conversation with those with whom we disagree. And for many, when there is conflict in a parish, we find it easier to leave than to stay and struggle. Yet, if we are to be the body of Christ, if we are to offer God’s Christ’s reconciling love to the world, there is no more excellent way, than to show that love in all that we do as God’s people in the world, as God’s people in this world.

Trinity Institute: Building an Ethical Economy

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This year’s Trinity Institute is taking place today and tomorrow. The topic is Building an Ethical Economy. I was invited by Luther Memorial Church to participate as one of the theological reflection group leaders. To be honest, I was somewhat hesitant, because my background and interest in economics is quite limited. I only took one class in college, and I must of spent much of it sleeping (it met at 2:00 in the afternoon, nap time). I certainly haven’t thought much or read much about the topic in the intervening years, either.

Besides that, Rowan Williams was on the agenda. He’s a brilliant thinker, but a turgid writer. I’d heard him speak more than ten years ago and was very impressed, but I’ve always had trouble understanding his prose, and my perception of him is shaped in part by his work as Archbishop of Canterbury. So I wasn’t expecting a great deal.

Today was great. Williams was brilliant and comprehensible. He pointed out that economics was only one way in which human beings relate to one another and that to reduce everything to economics or the marketplace is false. Money is only a symbol, as language is a symbol. Most importantly, he stressed that the questions we should be asking are about are ultimate end and purpose: human well-being, and that our focus should not be only on the individual but on our shared life, as communities, and as a world community.

He ended by saying that “what makes humanity human is sheer gift, sheer love;” that is to say, God created us in and from love. Love requires relationship and community; that we are “helpless alone, gifted in relationship.”

In the panel discussion that followed his talk and Kathryn Tanner’s, tomorrow’s speaker, Partha Dasgupta said some very insightful and provocative things. I am looking forward to hearing what he has to say tomorrow.

It was fun to sit around in a room and talk about these questions with others. We had an intelligent and provocative conversation.

There’s much more info about the Trinity Institute at its website. Transcripts and webcasts should be available soon.

St John Chrysostom, January 27

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St. John Chrysostom, whom we remember today, was one of the great theologians and bishops, and perhaps the greatest preacher in the early centuries of Greek Christianity. Born in Antioch in 349, he spent some years as a monk and apparently practiced extreme ascetism. Ordained a deacon in 381 and a presbyter in 386, his preaching brought widespread fame. Because of his renown, he was made Archbishop of Constantinople in 398. In Constantinople he repeatedly aroused the wrath of the imperial court and was banished twice and died in exile in 407.

He is most famous for his sermons, of which many survive. He attacked the ostentatious show of wealth and repeatedly urged his listeners to care for the poor. Here is an excerpt from a homily on Matthew 14:

For what is the profit, when His table indeed is full of golden cups, but He perishes with hunger? First fill Him, being an hungered, and then abundantly deck out His table also. Dost thou make Him a cup of gold, while thou givest Him not a cup of cold water? And what is the profit? Dost thou furnish His table with cloths bespangled with gold, while to Himself thou affordest not even the necessary covering? And what good comes of it? For tell me, should you see one at a loss for necessary food, and omit appeasing his hunger, while you first overlaid his table with silver; would he indeed thank thee, and not rather be indignant? What, again, if seeing one wrapped in rags, and stiff with cold, thou shouldest neglect giving him a garment, and build golden columns, saying, “thou wert doing it to his honor,” would he not say that thou wert mocking, and account it an insult, and that the most extreme?

Let this then be thy thought with regard to Christ also, when He is going about a wanderer, and a stranger, needing a roof to cover Him; and thou, neglecting to receive Him, deckest out a pavement, and walls, and capitals of columns, and hangest up silver chains by means of lamps. Homilies on the Gospel of Matthew, 50, (from http://www.ccel.org)

He is also famous for a series of sermons directed against Jews, the full texts of which can be found here.

In addition to his sermons and many other writings, The Liturgy of St. John Chrysostom continues to be used by Orthodox Churches. An English translation is found here.

The “Prayer of St. Chrysostom,” which appears in The Book of Common Prayer, is a late-medieval addition to the Liturgy of St. John Chrysostom and was not written by him.