Last Sunday was my final Sunday in my internship at St Simon's. It's been a wonderful experience, and I've really enjoyed it. On my last Sunday, the kids in the church school gave me a Build A Bear they had designed and stuffed. The bear, of course, was wearing a Yankees hat.
In the Name of the one God in three Persons: Father, Son, and Holy Spirit. Amen.
In the early afternoon of January 3, 2007, on the platform of the New York City subway at 137th and Broadway, a first-year film student suffered a seizure, and collapsed. Two strangers rushed to his aid; as they helped him to his feet, he stumbled, and fell onto the subway tracks below. The lights of the No. 1 train approached, and one of the strangers who had come to the student’s aid now leapt onto the tracks, pressing himself and the disoriented student into a 1-foot gap as the subway passed over them, inches above their heads. When they emerged, in a blue hat now slicked with grease from the subway that raced above him, the hero refused medical help, as there was nothing wrong with him. He told bewildered lookers-on “I don’t feel like I did something spectacular; I just saw someone who needed help. I did what I felt was right.”
On April 9, 1940, an ascendant Germany attacked its northern neighbor, crossing the border with Denmark, seizing King Christian X who remained in his kingdom during the occupation. The occupation of Denmark was an uncomfortable one; though many of the nation’s vital functions continued, it was a difficult time for Denmark. By 1943, Danish resistance to Nazi occupation had increased; as a result, Germany dissolved the Danish government. News was leaked that the Danish Jewish population would be extradited from Denmark to the camps in Eastern Europe. Thanks to the willingness and generosity of countless Danish civilians who endangered their lives and their very kingdom’s existence, almost every single one of the 7,500 Danish Jews were secretly ferried across the Baltic Sea to Sweden and to safety. The Danes saw that these women, children, and men were their friends, their neighbors, or even only strangers they passed on the street, but they were most certainly Danes, and must not be sent to their deaths, even at the risk of the destruction of their entire kingdom and national way of life.
We frequently pass our days in a manner which requires enough energy to get through the day, get food on the table, the bills paid, the laundry done, and maybe a few minutes to read or relax before going to bed. We frequently pass our days encountering dozens of others in the street, driving down the road, in Wegmans, at work, and we pass by, untouching and untouched. Every once in a while, we encounter heroism, greatness of heart, saints with halos glowing, seraphim with six wings fluttering, heroes like the subway rescuer, like the people of Denmark, who placed virtue and love for strangers above their own safety, above any other good. Sometimes, not only do we encounter heroes, we are heroes.
In a silent garden, dark with the night pressing in, a man came in secret to speak to another man. The man who came in secret had likely been passing his days in a manner that requires enough energy to get through the day. But, he had encountered a man who lived his life differently. And so, in secret, Nicodemus enters the garden at night to speak to that man. Nicodemus encounters Christ in that garden, and is changed. Nicodemus encounters the invitation from Christ to live deeply, to live in a manner that sees radiant shining glory in every moment, which finds in each person the image of the living God. Christ invites Nicodemus into the very life of God, offering the opportunity to move from living by just scraping by to living in explosive potential. Nicodemus is invited to be reborn, to accept the power of the Holy Spirit working in Nicodemus and through Nicodemus. Christ invites Nicodemus to allow the Holy Spirit to sweep him into the life God shares with Himself.
What is this invitation to new life? What does it mean to live in the life of God? It begins by accepting that the way we perceive the world and our place in it is not reality. We can only sense our tiny little part in a massive cosmos, our small little place in an incomprehensible large whole. Frequently, our perspective causes us to feel insignificant, normal, mundane, and anything but holy, glorious, and mighty. Our lives have a tendency to wear us down, rather than energize, invigorate, and send us out in mission. Living the life of God, as Christ invited Nicodemus to do, means shifting from our outlook to the outlook of the Undivided Trinity. We enter into the mind of the Trinity in the same way that the Trinity entered into our world: through Christ. Christ is the window into God’s soul, the door, the gate. We live in the life of the Trinity when we confess that Christ is Lord, Lord reigning in heaven, Lord reigning from the cross, and the Lord of our own daily lives. Christ is Lord of our lives on Sunday mornings, but we must also work to allow him to be Lord in our marriage, in our work, in our relationship with our children, with the people I can’t stand at Verizon, with the annoying man who thinks it’s appropriate to brake when merging onto the 190. We enter into the life of God when we think about who Christ is more often than just Sunday morning.
The life of God is one which reveals wonders: we see strangers walking by: living the life of God, Christ helps us to see the threads which bind us together as a people damaged by one another’s racism, sexism, pride, snobbery, and failure to respect. We go to work and do enough to get by; living the life of God, we find those ways to show that Christ is our Lord by working with kindness, with sympathy, and with joy.
All around us, the world is lonely, lost, and scared. The world emits a rocking sigh, a sigh which only the Trinity can hear. But, when we live our lives united to the Trinity, we become the means to reach out and minister to the world, to heal it, to help it through its struggles, and to make it joyful. We work together with those who have gone before us, like St Nicodemus, and with those who hear the world’s sighs, like the hero in the subway and the Danish people. When we continue to expect mediocrity and mundaneness from ourselves and others, we will continue to receive it. When, in union with the Trinity, we see hidden mysteries, and challenge ourselves to live with joy, with completeness and in service to others and a hurting world, then the Trinity walks among us here in Buffalo, and the face of strangers we pass in the street are seen for what they truly are: a reflection of the undivided Trinity one God.
We find in living in the Trinity, being born again, as Christ described it to St Nicodemus, an alternate way of seeing the world, for we see it with the Trinity’s eyes. We take so much for granted: that life surely must be harsh, grueling, and with only a few bright spots to get us through. That strangers are different, hostile, and not worth knowing. That other cultures and religions are threatening, dangerous, and polluting. That Republicans are stingy. That Democrats are out-of-touch with reality. That we live as flawed people who cannot be healed, as boring drones whom God must surely love because he has to, not because he wants to. This is our worldview, and we cling to it. But Christ, as the gate into the Trinity, shows that those things that we have taken for granted are illusions. Christ shows that the true reality can only be seen by looking with the Trinity’s eyes. All around us: joy. Joy and wonder, wholeness and healing being offered, life blossoming and being hallowed by the Trinity who always reaches out in love to shelter and sanctify. When we live with our view, we live a lie; when we live as the Trinity lives, we enter our bliss.
So do not be fooled: our faith is not one of crushing burdens and obligations. Our Church is not dying and fading away; the truth of our Christ is not being lost to a generation that no longer needs it. This is the view of the world, not of God. The Trinity knows that Christ is still Lord, and that the Church will thrive and through it, God will continue to dialogue with the world. Living the life of the Trinity means looking between the gaps and finding divinity in the smallest things, even the dandelions in the front yard, and in your neighbor’s barking dog. So do not be fooled: the life of the Trinity to which we are being invited is not far, is not impossible. St Nicodemus accepted; the hero in the subway chose to live in the Trinity; the entire nation of Denmark looked with God’s eyes and chose to live a divine life. Christ will invite us again today, as we receive him in the Eucharist, to be born again and live in the Trinity. I extend to you, in the name of Christ as he waited in the dark garden for one who was seeking him, to receive the Eucharist today in a way that you never have before, with joy and fervor, and recognize that God is come to you today, to bid you to live his life with him. When you say Amen as you receive today, let it be your acceptance of entry into the life of the Trinity, and leave behind your dusty ho-hum outlook, and take on the mind of the Trinity.
Amen.
And the Fourth Sunday after Pentecost
In the Name of the Father, and of the Son, and of the Holy Spirit.
This is my last Sunday here at St. Simon’s, and the Gospel today has a line in it that intrigues me. This line has very little to do with the story told in the Gospel; and so, in fact, my entire sermon has very little to do with the story in the Gospel today of the raising of Jairus’ daughter. Today’s excerpt from St Mark’s Gospel concludes with “He gave strict orders not to let anyone know about this”.
The ‘he’ in this sentence is Christ, and he’s ordering all those who witnessed him bring a young girl back from death never to speak of it. Ironically, this command to remain silent was recorded in the Gospel of St. Mark, who himself was not an apostle, and therefore was not at this particular event, so it’s clear that someone blabbed. Christ ordering silence about his miracles? Why would he do that? It may be that Christ knew that for Jairus and for those who witnessed it, the return to life of this little girl was a beautiful, moving, and private thing. A thing that struck them deeply, and would remain with them until death. Events like this, when holiness touches mere frail humanity and when life returns where death had lurked, these events are holy and are occasions when there is a thinness in the world, and hidden things are revealed. Christ may have ordered silence about this event, in order to allow that sacredness that each person witnessed to remain with them, a secret shared with few people, a time when God showed his face. It may be that Christ knew that announcing such a thing publicly would pass along the news of it, but not the grace of it.
The Gospel on my first Sunday here, however, was very different. It’s been a long and very rewarding six months, so let’s reflect back to the Gospel on Epiphany, my first Sunday here at St. Simon’s. That Gospel, from St Luke, tells of the visit of the Wise Men from the East, who came to Bethlehem to worship a king whose birth had been foretold to them by a supernatural heavenly object. Epiphany shows us the infant Christ, visited by foreign nations, adored and worshipped by strangers, by aliens, by Gentiles. The Gospel story of Epiphany is anything but a command to keep secret. In the Epiphany, we see Christ’s presence shouted from the rooftop, with foreigners coming to worship and carrying back to their homes the tale of a great soul newly born. There are no commands to keep silent, no whispers to keep mouths shut. In Epiphany, we proclaim Christ as God made man, come to live among us. At the resurrection of Jairus’ daughter, we are told to keep it to ourselves.
This concept of secrecy is fairly common in St Mark’s Gospel. It’s referred to in 20th century biblical theology as the Messianic secret. Frequently in St Mark’s Gospel, Christ commands his followers, and even demons, to remain silent, to tell no one. He hides his divinity in parables, and when he performs miracles, enforces a gag order. How can we reconcile a Christ who sometimes demands silence and who sometimes loudly proclaims his divine glory?
For each of us, the lives we live are two-fold: the perceptions and interactions we share with others around us which bind us together as a people, which hold us together as a thing united; and on the other side, our own personal interior lives in which we speak silently and dream dreams, rehash previous failures, relive our former victories, and assign to ourselves the adornments of our own personalities and characters. With one face, we turn to the world, allowing ourselves to see and be seen, and with the other face, we reflect inward to what only our own hearts may know, to the secrets and joys which our language and art, our scripture, literature, and blogs, our prayer books, morning newspapers, and evening news can describe but never fully capture. We are creatures who turn toward one another, and who also fold inward, talking to the world and also talking to ourselves.
For each of us, the way the world perceives us and the way we truly are in ourselves are frequently at odds. A woman as a public figure infrequently is the same woman in the quiet of her own mind, and the man whom we all admire is not always the same within his deepest thoughts. No one can escape the friction of living simultaneously in community and living within her own mind; no saint was only contemplative, no hero was only enmeshed in the lives of others, no man has ever been untorn between others and self, and the conflict this creates. Even the Christ, when he clothed himself in human flesh, becoming human in Bethlehem, faced the great duel of having both an interior and a corporate life.
It is through the Gospels that we have passed down to us the story of Christ as he lived as a man, and it is in the Gospels where we see the duel in Christ as he struggled, as all of us do, with being on the threshold which places us both in a world peopled by others and in a world where we are the only citizen. Christ is not exempt from this effort to remain unified, whole, and yet divided. The Gospels relate to us the very thoughts of Christ, how he felt, his ideas about himself and his relationship to the Almighty God. In these places, we have a glimpse of the interior life of Christ, as Christ was to himself. Just as we have slow, meandering thoughts as we drift to sleep on warm summer evenings, and terrifying worries that paralyze us in fear and inaction, the same was true for Christ. He shared with us the fullness of our own individual experiences of having an interior life. The interior life, by definition is lonesome, and can be lonely. No one may ever enter another’s interior life. Yet, we live together, united by our commonalities, and by our relationships to one another, and our corporate relationship to our creator. Our individual interior lives, our own secret minds, are matched with the way we interact and share with one another. And this is where some of our trouble begins.
Having a foot on both shores causes some tension: it’s easy to be generous in your own thoughts, but starts to get difficult to be generous when someone else is there in need. It’s sometimes easier to be honest with ourselves than with others. We push on one side and pull on another, our striving to manifest externally how we feel internally frequently is imperfect. Christ, however, models to us an example of a person who communicated to others the completeness of his interior life. His translation from interior to exterior was flawless, and without blemish or miscommunication. Those with whom he interacted are frequently recorded in the Gospels as being amazed at his words, shocked by his actions, dumbstruck by his convictions. Christ’s ability to manifest to others his interior life is known as genuineness. No person was ever more genuine, more able to perfectly express to others his own mind.
But Christ experienced this pull of his interior life and so commands silence and experienced the push of public life, and publicizes himself as Messiah. Though he is entirely genuine and in him there is no insincerity, he still lives in two very different spheres.
Frequently, we are willing to see ourselves in the best light, and other in the worst light. We allow ourselves some latitude, knowing that we acted with the best of intentions, or at least we tried hard, or gave it our best shot. However, we often expect that others do not do the same, that the part of their lives which we see is as flawed as the life they live to themselves. We do not give others the benefit of the doubt, do not extend mercy and understanding, do not give others the chance to live up to their calling. We experience conflict between how we see ourselves and how others see us, but we don’t always remember that others experience that conflict, as well. The ability of Christ to reflect that all those around him want to be saints, but are weak is what made Christ the great model for all: he saw into the hearts of others, into their good intentions and feeble efforts to make those intentions come to life. He saw them as they saw themselves, striving toward the Kingdom of Heaven, but confused on how to get there. He knew that a command to silence and another command to proclaim his greatness were not contradictory, but were both parts of himself, but understood that others were confused, were missing the point. He always gave them the benefit of the doubt.
It is clear from the disparate ways Christ acted in the world that he understood that we do not live among hard and fast rules, always applicable and never changing. He saw shades of gray, and maybe even of brown, blue, pink, and other colors. Christ knew that there were times to reveal and times to remain silent, and also knew that those around him struggled with knowing when to do each. Christ witnessed that those with whom he lived judged their neighbor for a mistake, looking past their own error. Christ saw that those around him struggled to live in a world that wasn’t only black and white.
A world that contains both Epiphany and the command to silence about the raising of Jairus’ daughter is a world far from black and white. This is a world in which interior and exterior lives need to be reconciled, a world where the person I think I am and the person others think I am are never going to match up perfectly. This is a world that works best and is most Christ-like when forgiveness, openness, and a desire to see the strengths of others is paramount in our minds. We imitate Christ when we recognize that others struggle with being the person they want to be, the person Christ calls them to be. We all have within us conflicting demands, parts that attract us in different directions. And yet, though we are individuals, we are one Body, held together by the Christ who both commands us to witness to others and bids us also to remain silent and ponder secrets in the depths of our hearts. We are a people of many differences, who struggle to be genuine. We help one another and become more like Christ when we remember to always think well of one another, forgiving one another easily, and looking for the best in our neighbor. I conclude my time with you now, thanking you for sharing with me these past six months the depths of your interior lives, the secrets of your inmost hearts. I have been changed by the love you’ve shared and the openness and greatness of heart you’ve shown me. Though I will not continue to be here each Sunday morning, remember that we are bound together as one Body, that our stories do not stand as only single monologues, but a great chorus. You have helped me to learn that the efforts of others as they struggle to become the persons Christ desires them to be are my struggles too. I leave with you, summing up both the tale of the conflict between our inner and outer minds and also summing up my experience here at St Simon’s these past six months, a prayer attributed to Mary Stuart, Queen of Scots:
Keep us, O God, from all pettiness.
Let us be large in thought, in word, in deed.
let us be done with fault-finding
and leave off all self-seeking.
May we put away all pretense
and meet each other face to face,
without self pity and without prejudice.
may we never be hasty in judgment,
and always be generous.
let us always take time for all things,
and make us to grow calm, serene and gentle.
Teach us to put into action our better impulses,
to be straightforward and unafraid.
Grant that we may realize
that it is the little things of life that create differences,
that in the big things of life, we are as one.
And, O Lord God, let us not forget to be kind!
Amen.
