April 1, 2010
Grace Episcopal Church
From time to time, I share with you some pieces of my Mennonite background. I do it occasionally, because it both helps you get to know me a little bit better, and because the very different Mennonite tradition from which I come is an important witness to the depth and breadth of the Christian tradition. Mennonites have a great deal to teach the larger Christian tradition.
Palm Sunday
Grace Episcopal Church
March 28, 2010
Two processions approached Jerusalem that week nearly two thousand years ago. The first is the one we re-enacted. In fact, we didn’t even re-enact the story that we heard in Luke. Luke doesn’t state that it was a triumphal entry. He doesn’t even say that Jesus entered Jerusalem. Nor does he mention of palm branches. Instead, he puts the event several miles outside the city.
According to Luke’s version, an obscure Galilean prophet on his way to Jerusalem staged some sort of demonstration with his followers outside of the city. How many people were there? Fifty? 100? A man riding on a donkey, hailed by people: “Blessed is the king who comes in the name of the Lord!” This was a claim of Davidic kingship. What did Jesus have in mind? What did his followers intend? Did they mean to stage an uprising? A revolution?
The second procession, even though it wasn’t recorded in history, was much bigger, much more impressive. This particular procession, in the year 30, wasn’t recorded, but we know of it from other years, other Passovers. The Roman governor came into Jerusalem with his troops, as he did every year at Passover, for one reason, to make sure that things would remain quiet. But it wasn’t simply a march into town by the local governor and some troops. When Rome came, it came projecting its imperial power and majesty. It came to demonstrate to one and all that Rome held all of the power and would keep the peace.
Jump forward to today. This morning we reenacted that first procession, waving palm branches and saying Hosanna! This morning, even though we didn’t have a donkey and someone playing Jesus (they loved doing things like that in the Middle Ages), we were the crowds welcoming Jesus into Jerusalem.
There’s a sort of schizophrenia about Palm Sunday. The mood shifts drastically from the time we begin the service. We begin in joy, celebration, waving palms and singing “All glory laud and honor.”
Then we settled into our pews to hear the reading of the Passion Gospel. We hear the drama of the last days and hours of Jesus’ life—his betrayal, trial, crucifixion and burial. The service that began in joy ends in sorrow.
But before we heard the story of Jesus’ arrest and crucifixion, we heard another reading, one of the most powerful texts in all of the New Testament: Paul wrote to the Philippians:
“Let the same mind be among you that was in Christ Jesus, who though he was in the form of God, did not count equality with God as something to be exploited, but emptied himself, taking the form of a slave, being born in human likeness. And being found in human form, he humbled himself and became obedient to the point of death, even death on the cross.”
Everything in our devotion, our hymnody, even our theology, drives us to see what happens in Holy Week, to see the crucifixion as all about us and our sins, about Jesus’ dying for our sins. The hymn we just sang, “Ah Holy Jesus, how have I offended?” is an excellent example of this tendency. It presents a conversation, really a set of questions that we humans ask Jesus as he suffers on the cross. We have put him there, the theology goes, he is suffering for and because of us, and all of that should intensify our sense of guilt, and the forgiveness we receive. We answer our own question in the second stanza of the hymn: “I crucified thee.” That’s a great part of why Holy Week is so powerful and evocative.
But the gospel writers may have had something else in mind. Certainly, Paul when he paints this image of Christ emptying himself, and being obedient, is not using it to emphasize our sinfulness and God’s forgiveness. Rather, he is using it to make a point: “Let this mind be among you…” In other words, this is how you should act; this is what you should do.
Two processions approached Jerusalem that week. One was led by an obscure Galilean rabbi, the other by a ruthless Roman official. At the end of the week, Jesus was brought into the presence of Pilate. He was all alone but Pilate was surrounded by all the trappings of Roman power and majesty. Jesus left Pilate’s presence, a condemned man. Pilate remained what he was. Rome and their surrogates in Jerusalem, everyone who had a stake in the preservation of Roman power, saw to it that Jesus was executed like so many others who challenged Rome. The imperial records of Rome record nothing of the events told about in the passion narratives of the gospels. What happened in Jerusalem that week was so insignificant that the empire didn’t even notice.
But to read the passion narrative in this way, faithful to the text of the gospels, is to interpret Jesus’ life and death as the outcome of a confrontation with power. In all that he did and said, Jesus taught love. He was love—incarnate. He offered his listeners an alternative to a world in which those who have get more, where they dominate over the poor, the weak, the powerless. He offered a different way of being in the world, a very different kind of kingdom. He humbled himself, taking on our form, and became obedient, even to death on the cross. The kingdom he proclaimed was symbolized by the donkey on which he rode. Yet in the end, his way was thwarted, at least for a moment, by the powers that be.
Where do we stand? Are we in that procession, that little band of disciples who walked with Jesus from Galilee, who heard him say, “If you would be my disciple, take up your cross and follow me?” Are we in the smaller procession, those women who followed Jesus from Galilee and continued on to the very end. Luke tells us they watched from afar while Jesus was crucified? Are we members of that little group of women who had come with him from Galilee and stayed for the very end?
Or are we in that other procession, among those who marched in our weapons at hand, to display Rome’s awesome power? Or perhaps would we be among those who sought Jesus’ death, because he threatened to upset the status quo, our comfortable life and our power? To ask these questions is to penetrate the heart, the power, and the meaning of the passion story. And if these questions unsettle us—all the better.
Fifth Sunday in Lent
March 21, 2010
The anointing of Jesus is one of the few stories other than the crucifixion itself that appears in all four gospels. But there are such significant differences among the gospel accounts, that it is not at all clear they are describing the same event. John’s version bears some resemblance the story in Mark and Matthew. In all three, there is a clear connection between this story and the crucifixion.
I’m the youngest of five children; I have four older sisters. There’s a story in my family, at least it’s the story three of my four sisters tell, that my parents wanted two children, a daughter and a son. And having had a daughter the first time around, they kept on trying, having children until they got their wishes, their longed-for son, and then stopped. Of course, that’s not the end of the story, the end of our family mythology, because what lies behind that story is a perception that there were two favored children, three who were not. But given the reality of the world, there was really just one favored child, me, the only son.
It seems like it’s inevitable. Every time some great tragedy happens, whether it be 9-11 or hurricane Katrina, or the earthquake in Haiti, Pat Robertson is going to make news for saying something outrageous about how this event is God’s punishment on someone.
But it’s not just Pat Robertson and it’s not just great disasters like those I’ve just mentioned. We do it too. We do it when we seek an explanation for the suffering of a friend or loved one, ourselves, or even a stranger we hear about it. What did they, or we, do wrong, to deserve this?
Lent 1, Year C
February 21, 2010
Grace Episcopal Church
I sometimes wonder what visitors or newcomers think when they come to our services on a day like today. I mean, there was the Great Litany which I love. But its language is archaic and the chant itself sounds more like something out of the Middle Ages than the twenty-first century. Then there are the lessons we heard today, which themselves come from a far distant past and don’t seem to speak to us. As I read the gospel for today, images from Hollywood movies came to mind—especially “Devil’s Advocate, that Al Pacino movie in which he plays a devil figure and takes Keanu Reeves to the top of his tower and tempts him with wealth and power. How do these stories, how does our liturgy connect with the lives we lead here in the twenty-first century?
It takes a curious sort of person who would look forward to the self-examination and self-discipline that the season of Lent encourages. Most of us want our religious lives to focus on celebration and joy, not the repentance, the gloom and doom, of Lent.
In fact, that is only part of what Lent is about, and perhaps not the most important part. The “Invitation to a Holy Lent” that is read during Ash Wednesday services, refers not only to repentance and confession of sin, but also to the fact that Lent began as a period of preparation before baptism. So it was a time of instruction in the Christian faith. But whether or not we celebrate baptisms on Easter, Lent should serve as a season in which we deepen our understanding of our faith.
But that’s a hard thing, because the small corner of our lives which is dedicated to our relationship with God has to compete with everything else that demands our attention—our families, work or school, our leisure time. We may find it difficult even to get to church many Sundays—the roads might be bad, it might be too cold, or we might not be able to find a parking space when the square is blocked off for something like Winter Festival. For many of us, perhaps for most of us, no matter how much we want to nurture and deepen our relationship with God, there is simply to much to do from day to day, too many other demands on us. In the end, it may be that all we have time for is an hour or an hour and a half on Sunday morning.
The rigors of a Lenten discipline that deepens our understanding of our dependence on God, that deepens our faith, and that makes us more deeply aware of our of our relationship with Christ, that sort of discipline seems infinitely remote from the daily existence we lead, the routines of work, family, and whatever else that occupies our time and energy.
So we come to church this first Sunday of Lent, and hear the alien language of the Great Litany, and encounter the penitential tones of the litany and of our liturgy today. And then we hear the words of scripture; the story of God and the people of God two thousand years ago, and we wonder how our stories, the stories that brought us here relate to that story.
For there is an enormous chasm between our lives and our world, and the world of the texts we’ve heard. The texts we heard had their origins in very different worlds from each other too.
With the gospel, we are actually picking up the narrative we left off back in January when we heard the story of Jesus’ baptism. Today’s gospel recounts the very next episode in Jesus’ life. It may be a familiar story, but like so many familiar stories from the gospels, we often overlook those details that are most important for helping us make sense of them. In this case, the story begins with the observation that “Jesus, full of the holy spirit … was led by the Spirit into the wilderness.” Luke is reshaping Mark’s version of the vent significantly, for Mark says that the Spirit “drove” Jesus into the wilderness. For Mark, at least on this occasion, the spirit seems to be a less than benign force, while Luke emphasizes its comforting presence for Jesus.
The temptations, too, are significantly in the two gospels. Mark says only that Jesus was tempted in the desert. Luke and Matthew agree that there were three temptations although they change the order slightly. They are temptations about who Jesus is, about his relationship to God, and about the nature of his ministry: Satan tests Jesus, perhaps even taunts, by asking him to make bread from the stones. Satan tests Jesus, by offering him earthly power. And finally, Satan urges Jesus to test God, by urging him to throw himself down from the pinnacle of the temple, so that the angels might save him.
Each time, Jesus responds to Satan by quoting scripture; more precisely by quoting the book of Deuteronomy. In Luke’s sequence, in the last temptation, Satan quotes scripture of his own to Jesus. In a way, theirs is a battle over scripture, but in a sense, too, Jesus is battling with other Jewish interpreters over the meaning of scripture. It is a battle over the story of scripture, of what it means and to whom it belongs. It is a battle he would continue to wage throughout his public ministry.
The story of the Israelites in the wilderness is a story of a people testing God, complaining when there was no food or water, when the way looked long and arduous. The Jews of Jesus’ day were looking for a political Messiah who would deliver them from their Roman occupation much as the Maccabees had freed them nearly two centuries earlier.
But Jesus rejected that way and as he did, he interpreted scripture in a way that was new and challenging to the religious elites of his day. He was telling a new story. The temptations he faced are a clear rejection of the path of political and military power, and the full implications of the path Jesus chose would only come clear on his last journey to Jerusalem.
Paul, for that matter, is battling in a somewhat similar way in the letter to the Romans as he tries to find a way for including Jew and Gentile in this new community that is being birthed. But Paul gives us reassurance, again quoting from Deuteronomy, that scripture is not beyond our ability to understand or grasp—indeed, scripture lies within us: “The word is near you, on your lips and in your heart.” The passage from Deuteronomy that Paul quotes makes clear that the “word” refers to the commandments, the law. But for Paul, the story of scripture was not an exclusive one, it extended to Gentile as well as to Jew, to all of us.
The Invitation to a Holy Lent that is read on Ash Wednesday also encourages us to “read and meditate upon God’s holy Word.” It is an invitation to enter into and make scripture’s story our own, and to interpret our stories in light of scripture. I suppose that if I could encourage you to do anything this Lent, it would be that, to take the time, even if it’s only a few minutes, to read the weekly lessons, but to do it early in the week before they are read on Sunday. That’s what I try to do each week. Ideally, on Sunday afternoon, after I’ve recovered from Sunday morning services, I will read through the next Sunday’s lessons and allow them to float around in the back of my mind for a few days.
To read and meditate upon scripture is to enter into and reflect on the story of God and the people of God, to let that story begin to shape our own stories. We see in today’s reading from Deuteronomy what seems to have been some sort of ritual enactment. As part of that ritual of giving thanks for having received the promised land, the story of God’s mighty acts on behalf of God’s people was recited. It is a story that defines the people of Israel in a particular way, “My father was a wandering Aramean” and goes on to recite all that God did on their behalf.
We tell such stories repeatedly, our liturgy is itself such a story—We give thanks to you to God, for the goodness and love you have shown to us in creation, in the calling of Israel. … in the word made Flesh. Stories like this tell us who we are, where we belong, and for what purpose we live.
Yes, it may seem sometimes as if all of that—the story of the liturgy, the story of scripture—seem infinitely remote from the stories we live out each day but Lent invites us to reflect anew on those deeper connections and as we do, to deepen our connection to God.
Ash Wednesday
February 17, 2010
Grace Episcopal Church
I love beer. I love its crisp, cold taste. I love the carbonation and the hoppy-ness. I love the finish, the way my mouth feels and tastes after I’ve taken a good swig of a good brew. I especially love IPA’s—India Pale Ales for those of you who are not beer aficionados. Now, I don’t drink beer every day, but I’ve long enjoyed them as a way of relaxing after an intense day’s work. It’s something of a ritual to have beer with lunch on Sunday or after a vestry meeting. One of the great things about Madison is that you’re never far from a bar or restaurant where you can get a really good beer.
I’ve made quite a public display of my fasting this year. I’ve given up beer for Lent. I drank my last one, last night among friends, across the street at Barrique’s. Yes, it was an IPA, Bell’s two-hearted. And for forty days, more actually, because I won’t abandon my fast on Sundays, as many people do, my lips will not savor the froth, hops, malt, and carbonation that I love so dearly.
For Episcopalians, Lent has long been a time when people give something up—often something like chocolate or beer that we love dearly. There are people who make jokes about what they give up—rutabagas was one I remember, or someone I know well who often claims to give up church for Lent. I’ve been rather amused today a Facebook friend who announced he was giving up Facebook for Lent early this morning but had posted again by 10:00. Well, he’s Baptist, or at least used to do. If you plan on giving something up, I hope you are more successful than he was this year. And if you are planning on it, you better decide quickly, if you haven’t yet, because here we are, it’s Ash Wednesday.
Of course, none of this is serious fasting. It’s not like devout Muslims for example, who fast from sunup to sundown during Ramadan, or those Christian monks and nuns who fast for long periods of time, or Jesus, who the gospels say fasted for forty days and nights.
So why do it at all? It’s a good question and deserves a serious answer. One way to think about it is see it as a matter of discipline and becoming more aware and conscious of our relationship with God, a consciousness increased by the reality that a common activity is abandoned for a time; that alternative choices have to be made. Another way to think about is that Lent is a time of reflection and repentance, not a time for celebration and joy. We have seasons of both in our liturgical year and it is not a bad thing to move back and forth between repentance and celebration, because each helps provide perspective on the other.
Given the public nature of my fasting; given the way many of us make ostentatious shows of our piety by having ashes put on our forehead, there is rich irony in the choice of lessons for today. We hear these words of Jesus each year on Ash Wednesday: when you pray, do not do as the hypocrites do; when you give alms, do not do as the hypocrites do; when you fast….
These lessons—the reading from Isaiah and the gospel challenge us at the very heart of our religiosity. They call into question not just the ashes that will be on our forehead, but our attendance at church, our pious kneeling, and bowing of our heads, and genuflection. They force us to ask ourselves why we do these things.
But an even greater challenge are the words I will use when I cross your forehead with my ashy thumb: “Remember that you are dust, and to dust you shall return.” They remind us of who we are and who God is. They remind us that God created us from dust and that one day our bodies will again be dust, in the language of the burial service: “Ashes to ashes, dust to dust.” The ashes on our forehead should not be understood as a display of piety but as a statement of our finitude and brokenness.
Perhaps more important still, they remind us that nothing we do can change who we are before God. As our creator, God knows us better than we know ourselves. God knows what lies behind our every act of piety or devotion, indeed God knows what lies in our heart. We may be able to deceive others or ourselves, but we cannot deceive God.
As I’ve thought about Ash Wednesday this year, and about Lent, the concluding prayer of the Good Friday liturgy keeps running through my head. It reads in part, “we pray you to set your passion, cross, and death between your judgment and our souls, now and in the hour of our death.”
In the end, the ashes on our forehead remind us of our humanity and of God’s judgment of us, but that’s not the whole story. As we walk this pilgrim way of Lent, let us remember our finitude and brokenness, certainly, but let us also remember the love of God that became incarnate in Jesus Christ to show us what true and full humanity means, and restores us to fellowship with God. Thanks be to God.
Transfiguration
Grace Church
Last Epiphany, 2010
February 14, 2010
I’m sure that by now most of you have seen or heard about the article from this week’s Isthmus about the homeless shelter. If not, it’s posted in the back and is available online. I urge all of you to read it. I knew it was coming out; I wasn’t quite sure when it would appear, and I certainly had no idea of the content. But Thursday morning I got up around early and was working on a couple of projects. I kept checking their website to see if anything was on line. Then I saw the cover and the headline: “Bleak House: Grace Episcopal’s homeless shelter is a dispiriting place.” And my heart sank. I still had no idea what was in the article, so when I came to the church, I stopped by Barrique’s to see if they had copies of this week’s issue yet. I went to the office and read the article.
I’ve preached about the shelter a good bit already in the months I’ve been here and if you visit my blog, you’ll read more of my ruminations. Seven months is not a long time to develop a perspective on one’s ministry in a new place, but it has become clear to me that right now, a good bit of my job is going to be involved in the issue of homelessness. I didn’t expect that, and I’ve had more than one parishioner say to me that they wished I hadn’t already gotten so involved in it.
I wished I hadn’t as well. I certainly didn’t expect it. Coming in, I suppose I thought that having a homeless shelter, run by an outside organization, would give me a little cache, my ministry a little edginess, without actually having to be very involved.
But I quickly learned that wouldn’t be enough. As winter came on, and as I walked past the line-up night after night, I began to be more and more troubled by what I saw, more concerned about what I heard, more passionate about what was going on. And I learned that there were others who were also becoming more involved and more passionate. Perhaps we are close to achieving critical mass. I don’t know.
The headline on the article was troubling. I immediately shot an email off to the author to complain about it, and he assured me that there would be a clarification in the next issue. For better or worse, it’s not “our” shelter. We rent space to Porchlight, but of course we bear responsibility as Christians for the treatment of the guests and for the kind of hospitality that is shared there.
The shelter is a reflection on us as a church. The conditions in it, the treatment of the guests by Porchlight, all say something about how we understand and live out our call to be Christ’s body here. That’s why that headline should bother us. My first reaction was quite natural, to get defensive, to attack the messenger. Perhaps yours was as well. Unfortunately, there’s a great deal of truth in that headline: the shelter is a dispiriting place. I hear it almost every day from the men who stay there and we at Grace share in the responsibility for what it has become over the years.
Again, don’t misunderstand me. I’m not placing blame or criticizing the past clerical or lay leadership of Grace, nor Grace’s membership. I’m not interested in exploring or analyzing the history of the relationship between Grace and Porchlight. I learned quickly that Grace is a complex institution that requires a great deal of energy, time, and commitment to keep going. We can’t do everything that needs to be done. We don’t have the resources: financial, human, spiritual, to do everything. So people have to make difficult choices about where to spend money, where to invest time and talent. You might have called a rector whose passion for the gospel and ministry lay elsewhere and would have focused her energies and your attention on different projects. Instead, you called me.
The story broke as I was thinking about my sermon for today and beginning to look ahead to Lent. As I pondered Luke’s gospel for today and thought about the situation of the shelter guests I remembered the quotation from Matthew’s gospel that I was quoted as referring to in the article: The church’s job, I said, is to clothe the naked and feed the hungry. I was alluding to Matthew 25 to the parable of the sheep and goats, and Jesus words’ “inasmuch as you did it to one of the least of these my brothers and sisters, you did it to me.” I’m perfectly comfortable thinking about encountering the face of Christ in the homeless, the hungry, in victims of violence and oppression, even in the faces of those suffering in Haiti. Yet I wonder whether my comfort is too comfortable, whether I fully understand what it means to encounter Christ in those faces.
I’ve said repeatedly these past weeks that Epiphany is a season during which we celebrate God’s glory and presence in the world, and above all the incarnation of Jesus Christ, who makes God’s glory and presence manifest in himself. The season of Epiphany always ends with a reading of the gospel story of the transfiguration, that eerie, otherworldly encounter of Jesus with Elijah and Moses on top of a mountain.
I’ve never found this story particularly compelling, probably because I’m not generally fond of those stories that emphasize Jesus’ divine nature or his miraculous powers and this one has nothing to redeem itself like the healing of someone who is blind or deaf or possessed. Instead, it seems to be all about the divine and kind of gratuitous at that, with the appearance of Elijah and Moses.
That might seem to contradict much of what I said last week about experiencing God, as Isaiah did in his vision, as Paul did on the road to Damascus, and as Peter did in the miraculous catch of fish. Each of them was transformed by the experience, each was humbled, each was called. They were other-wordly experiences. The difference, it seems to me, is that in the transfiguration we have two odd and unbelievable events—the first is the transformation of Jesus. Luke doesn’t call it transfiguration, saying only that the appearance of his face changed and his clothes became dazzling white. The second event was the sudden appearance of Moses and Elijah.
The Transfiguration confronts us directly with the problem and the mystery of Jesus Christ’s divinity. But it does so in a curious way. On other occasions, with the miracles, for example, the demonstration of Jesus’ power is on behalf of someone else, to heal them, to restore them. In this case, the demonstration of Jesus’ divinity is for no reason, or perhaps only to show forth Jesus’ divinity.
But to focus only on what happens to Jesus is to miss some of the significance of the story. Luke’s version is unique in several respects. First, only Luke mentions what the three talked about—“Jesus’ departure.” Literally, the Greek reads “exodus.” So not only are we put in mind of the children of Israel’s sojourn in the wilderness by the presence of Moses and the mountaintop setting; there is a connection here as well. And of course it is important that even in the context of a transcendent event like this, we are reminded of what is to come, of the cross and Jesus’ suffering. Another important point made by Luke is in the description of the disciples. It’s not at all clear what is meant here. The NRSV reads “they were weighed down with sleep, but since they were awake they saw his glory. Again, one is put in mind of Gethsemane, and of the same three disciples in Luke, sleeping, because of grief. In the midst of this glory, we have a foreshadowing of the cross.
Indeed, just a few verses along in the gospel, Luke will write: “And Jesus set his face to go to Jerusalem.” It’s a journey we will be walking with him in the coming weeks—the journey to Jerusalem. Lent is a time of reflection, penitence, and preparation for Easter. The glory of Christ that we experience in the resurrection, the glory of Christ of which we have a foretaste today in the story of the Transfiguration, is also the glory of the cross.
Lent has been most often seen as a time for individual focus and reflection, an opportunity for each of us to deepen our relationship with Jesus Christ. It is appropriate, however, that we thank of it as a communal experience as well, that our journey is not one we make alone, but with our brothers and sisters in Christ. It is fitting, then, that as part of our Lenten devotion in the coming weeks, we reflect together on our shared responsibility for Madison’s homeless. I would like to begin that process of reflection by inviting you to join me next Sunday at 8:45 in the library for an initial conversation. I don’t know where that conversation will lead us but I pray that together we will discern where God is leading us.
Peter wanted to build booths on the mountain so that he and the other disciples could continue to bask in the glory of the presence of Moses, Elijah, and the transfigured Christ. He wanted to linger there, as we want to linger in the joy and glory of Epiphany. But the memory of this event will have to suffice for a time, as we make our way through Lent toward Easter and the greater glory of the sorrow and suffering of the Cross transformed into Easter.
I’m working on my sermon for this Sunday, the Last Sunday after the Epiphany. The gospel is always the story of the Transfiguration. This year we hear Luke’s version, which is notable because it does not use the word transfiguration. Luke says only that “the appearance of his face changed, and his clothes became dazzling white” (Lk. 9:29). While Luke refers to Jesus’ face, both Exodus and Paul talk about a veil. Moses needs a veil to protect himself when he approached and talked with God. Paul uses that image to draw a contrast between the direct experience of the believer with God.
It puts me in mind of another image from Paul. In I Corinthians 13:12: “For now we see in a mirror dimly, but then we will see face to face.”
I’ve been reading Thomas Traherne’s Centuries of Meditation. Traherne was a seventeenth-century Anglican priest who wrote extensively. Little of what he wrote was published in his lifetime and manuscripts have been found within the last decade. The Centuries of Meditation were discovered in a used bookshop in the late nineteenth or early twentieth century.
I came across this in the Centuries yesterday:
O let me so long eye Thee, till I be turned into Thee, and look upon me till Thou art formed in me, that I may be a mirror of Thy brightness, an habitation of thy Love, and a temple of Thy glory. That all Thy Saints might live in me, and I in them: enjoying all their felicities, joys and treasures.” 63
I hope to write more extensively and seriously on Traherne at some point, but I’m intrigued by that statement “O let me so long eye thee till I be turned into thee.”
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.
Preaching Grace on the Square 