Proper 28

This sermon I preached on November 13, 2011, at St. Paul's Cathedral in Buffalo, NY (it also was my 31st birthday). It was on Matthew 25:14-30



In the name of the Father, and of the Son, and of the Holy Spirit. Amen.

At the time of the Revolution, the Anglican church in the American colonies was the established church in Virginia, Maryland, South Carolina, North Carolina, Georgia, and the southern counties of New York. It was funded generously by monies coming from England. It had legal standing, wealth, and power. It was comfortable. But, it was entirely absent of bishops. Nominally, the bishop of London was solely responsible for every single Anglican in the colonies. All of the priests serving in the colonies had to face the perilous journey to England for their ordination, and also submit to the requisite oaths of allegiance to the Crown.

After the eruption of the Revolution, the Anglican parishes in the colonies were ripped apart by division and argument over the rifts between the colonies and Great Britain. Gone was the security they had known under English rule. Many of the clergy, in particular, felt bound by honor to respect the vows they had taken to the Crown, and publicly opposed the Revolution. By the end of the war and the emigration of Loyalists to Canada or back to England, the Anglican parishes in the new United States were disestablished, no longer received funding from England, and half of the parishes were closed or destroyed. It’s estimated that almost 65% of clergy left for Canada; North Carolina had no priest; Virginia’s pre-Revolutionary parish count of 107 dropped to 42. And, there was an ocean and some sour feelings dividing the Anglican churches in the US and the closest bishop. Eventually, though, priests traveled to Great Britain, and were consecrated bishops for the American church, first in Scotland, then in England. But the sense of loss and change wasn’t entirely gone even after America obtained its own bishops: the first bishop of New York, Samuel Provoost, despaired that the church would survive, so in 1801, he retired as bishop and became a botanist, convinced that the Episcopal Church would fade away when the last members of the pre-Revolution generation died. At his time, there were only 10,000 Episcopalians in the entire nation of 4 million.

But that wasn’t the end of the story. The Episcopal Church rose and grew and changed and flourished. Like the first two servants in the Gospel, it returned to its master more than it had been given, by having faith that its efforts would bring growth, that the seeds it planted would bear fruit. It accepted its call to mission, to spreading the Gospel, to proclaiming the message of the love of God given in Christ. For those of you who remember well the 1928 Prayer Book, you may recall the popular passage from the first book of Chronicles commonly used in the Offertory: All things come of thee, O Lord, and of thine own have we given Thee. Our forebears in the Episcopal Church here in the US trusted that all things would come from the Lord, and they returned to the Lord what they had been given. They returned it multiplied and flourishing.

In the Gospel this morning we heard about the three servants, the first two servants who returned double what their master had entrusted to them, and the third who hid the gold out of fear. He allowed what he had been given by his Lord to lay fallow, undeveloped, unused, and returned it: sterile, stale, and useless. Instead of using the gifts his lord had given him to grow and to develop, he hid it out of anxiety. He refused to accept his lord’s call to mission and growth because it might be too hard, might be too costly, and certainly was too scary. Instead of mission, this servant delivered barreness.

Less than 70 years after Bishop Provoost had lamented the end of the Episcopal Church, in Cambridge, Massachusetts, a group of religious brothers, the first in the Anglican Communion since the Reformation, founded a house. In their Rule, or constitution, the Society of St John the Evangelist, which still flourishes on the banks of the Charles River, writes about mission as follows:

Knowing that grace is powerful in weakness, we hand over to Christ any anxiety about our own adequacy. We are to trust our own experience of God and draw directly from it so that our witness can be authentic. We also need to let go of any grasping for immediate results; much of what the grace of God achieves through us will be entirely hidden from our eyes. We also expect to experience failures. Some of these contain lessons that can help us become more skillful in the future. Other failures are means by which we enter further into the mystery of discipleship; we are not greater than the master.

The Society of St John the Evangelist enjoins its brothers to be like the first two servants in the Gospel, to use the gifts God gives them, to plant seeds of grace that might grow, to take risks, to try and maybe to fail, but, then, to try again.
None of us is wholly adequate, none of us is perfect: we are each flawed, and limited, given specific gifts and talents, but not all talents, and none of our talents are given in complete perfection. We are weak, prone to faithlessness, distraction, and sin. But that imperfection means that, like the first two servants, the gifts that we are given and the fruits that they produce are the product not of our own power, but of God’s grace working in and through us. All things come of thee, O Lord, and of thine own have we given Thee.

That grace works not only for our own individual growth in holiness, but for the spread of the Gospel, for the service and relief of our neighbors, and for the advancing of Christ’s reign on earth. Reflecting on our imperfection drives us to recognize that no matter how hard we try, no matter how long we work, or wealthy we become, no matter what we do or try to be, we will not be able to do anything under our own power. Only the power of God working in our lives can accomplish anything, only grace can call forth fruit in our lives.

And that is freeing. It frees us from the anxiety of always having to be right, of always having to be perfect; it frees us from the anxiety of trying and failing, of feeling that all burdens are borne on our shoulders alone. It allows us to lay aside the lie that unless we achieve, unless we produce, unless we work our fingers to the bone, then we will be a failure. It allows us to accept that we are creatures who have limitations. But when we embrace those limitations, and ask for God’s grace to overcome our limitations, there is no force in heaven, earth, or hell that could stop us.

Releasing our fear and trusting in God’s churning within us allows us to be released from the apprehension that entraps each of our hearts. It also allows our hearts to be changed. When we recognize that we have room to grow and that our hearts could be more pure, we become more patient and understanding of others and their own struggles. I’m not perfect, and neither is the person with whom I disagree. But God is moving in both of us. I have inadequacies that God is using to work out my salvation and to remind me that I’m dependent on Him, and so does my neighbor. So, I can reflect that I should cut my neighbor some slack, maybe give my neighbor the benefit of the doubt, and pray for myself and for my neighbor.

Accepting that we are given gifts by God to grow for our edification and for his glory, we will come to recognize the giftedness of others around us. We’ll also be led by grace to see that any actions that belittle or demean others must be acknowledged for what they are: blasphemy and derision of God’s handiwork. In our own hearts are where change must first occur if we desire to move past our fear and convert from being the third servant who hides his gifts to the first two who grow them.

Christ’s call to mission is a call to each of us individually, and to all of us gathered together as the Cathedral family. Christ begs us to enter out into the harvest, using the gifts he has entrusted to each of us and to the Cathedral, so that we might return to him with doublefold, like the first two servants in the Gospel. The Cathedral exists for the sake of mission, for the blossoming of grace in the world, for the preaching of the Gospel, and for the salvation of souls. The gifts each of us has been given and the gifts entrusted to the Cathedral are intended for the growth in holiness of its members, and for the spread of Christ’s love to those who are not yet its members. Our unique talents and the talents of the Cathedral are given so we can invest in our future, not so we can sustain our present. As St. Paul, our patron wrote, “We preach Christ crucified”. That is the mission of every single Cathedral parishioner and the mission of the Cathedral itself.

We are not called to give up and all become botanists like Bishop Provoost. What would the world possibly do with all those botanists, anyway? We are called to convert our hearts, marshal our gifts, and unite together as a family gathered here, in this Cathedral, so that our love and our work might bear fruit and help bring healing to a struggling world. The fields are ripe for the harvests, and we can either bury our treasures or grow them and return them doublefold to Christ, and hear the sweet words in return from the King of heaven Himself: Well done, good and faithful servant! Come and share your master’s happiness!

Amen.

Proper 11

I preached this last weekend at St Paul's Cathedral, Buffalo, on the Gospel Matthew 13: 24-30



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

In pre-Reformation English churches, painted on the wall behind the altar is often a harrowing depiction of Christ returning to judge the world, and to separate out those living into the sheep who enter into heaven and the goats who don’t fare so well. These paintings, called dooms, are rather blatant means to remind church-attending Christians of the realities of the presumed consequences of their actions and to motivate them to move over toward the sheep side if they have some concerns they might be leaning toward goathood.

We don’t often see depictions of dooms too frequently any more, though the material they convey is still present in our world. The Gospel today is a pretty straightforward parable that decides to skimp on the sugarcoating and go right to the heart of the matter: Heaven is real. Hell is real. Judgment and eternal loss and eternal bliss are real. And the one who delivers the message is Christ Himself, the God who came among us in flesh out of love and accepted death on the cross out of love. Christ Himself, the messenger of love, tells us that there is a hell.

When I was younger, I had the amazing opportunity to experience the Spiritual Exercises of St. Ignatius of Loyola over 8 days. During those 8 days, all of us lived in absolute and complete silence, never once speaking and each day we had a series of meditations. And St. Ignatius designed his Spiritual Exercises so that they begin first with what are called the Eternal Truths: Heaven, Hell, Sin, Judgment, Salvation, Damnation. The goal of these meditations is for the retreatant to reflect on his own relation to these eternal truths: what do I think about Heaven? What is Judgement like? How does it relate to me, and what is my place in the economy of salvation? After the end of the retreat, I seriously was convinced that my intensified understanding of God’s love and of the Eternal Truths would lead me never again to sin. But how that didn’t really pan out is a different sermon for a different day.

But I was fortunate in how the Spiritual Exercises were preached, for those who led it did not lead us to meditate on Heaven and Hell as just rewards for our holiness or depravity, did not use fear of pain to scare us from sin and desire for comfort to win us over to heaven. They preached on love, and that following a path of deeper and more convinced love for Christ that would bring about our own growth in holiness, and that heaven might blossom in our hearts now, in our own mundane lives. I remember that one preacher wondered if the saints who had reached perfection in their earthly lives would even realize at their deathbeds that they had died, as they had been living in heaven for so long that the transition from life to death may not even have been noticeable.

It is interesting in today’s Gospel and in thinking about the medieval Doom paintings to consider that the wheat that is saved and the weeds that are burned are not the only thing that composes a person, that a person is not only weeds or only wheat. But instead, that we are a blend of wheat and weeds, what is burned away as weeds are the aspects of the person that are unloving and inhibit the person from love, and the wheat that is treasured are the aspects of the person that have embraced love of God, neighbor, and self. Understanding the parable and the doom paintings this way, then, we are not wholly lost or saved, but those things in us that need to be changed are purified and lifted up, and those things in us that are already configured to Christ’s love are acknowledged as beautiful and as small pieces of heaven already dwelling in our souls.
I’d like to read briefly what the Book of Common Prayer teaches in the Catechism about the eternal truths, particularly in light of understanding that each of us is composed of a mixture of wheat and weeds:

Q. What do we mean by heaven and hell?
A. By heaven, we mean eternal life in our enjoyment of God;
by hell, we mean eternal death in our rejection of God.

Q. Why do we pray for the dead?
A. We pray for them, because we still hold them in our
love, and because we trust that in God’s presence those who have chosen to serve him will grow in his love, until they see him as he is.

You may have noticed a subtle phrasing in the answer given to the question: What do we mean by heaven and hell? The answer says that heaven is eternal life in our enjoyment of God, while hell is eternal death in our rejection of God. Heaven and hell, then, are not places to which we travel after death, but states of being that exist due to our choices to love God and to continue in that love even after the death of our body, or to reject God, and to live without Him after we die. Our hell is of our own making, our own choices to reject the gift God extends us, the gift to love Him through Christ, through our neighbors and through strangers, through loving ourselves. Hell, as Christ Himself preached, is a very real state, an eternal truth, and each hell is private, of a person’s own choosing and making, it is loss, it is absence, it is not God’s plan, and it is entirely avoidable.
The second Catechism question, the one regarding why we pray for the dead, also had an answer that might have been startling once you consider it. I’m not sure if many of us have reflected on why we pray for the dead. We doubtfully think too often about hell, so prayers for the dead might be even further down on our laundry list of eternal truths to consider. The answer the Catechism provides as reasoning for these prayers is twofold: first, we recognize that our beloved dead are not gone from us, and that they still live in the love of Christ in which they lived while still in an earthly life. Their death, then, was not a break, not even an interruption, but a change from the physical and natural to the metaphysical and supernatural. But we also pray for them because we trust “that in God’s presence those who have chosen to serve him will grow in his love, until they see him as he is.” Here, then, is a reference to there being both wheat and weeds in a person, and there being room to grow in God’s love, room for wheat to replace weeds, even after death.

CS Lewis describes this concept in his book The Great Divorce. In that book, a busload of people die and eventually are transported to a field. The narrator in The Great Divorce witnesses people all around him in this field conversing with bright beings. In one of those conversations, the narrator overhears a bright figure talking to a man with a large lizard on his shoulder. The bright figure invited the man to travel with him over the mountains to go further up and further in, to enter into joy evermore. But the man is concerned about his lizard, and the bright figure tells him that the lizard may not come. It cannot enter into the Kingdom to which they will be traveling. The lizard whispers to the man, telling him that the bright figure is jealous, that he is wrong. The lizard reminds the man how long they’ve been together, how sad the man would be if the lizard were to leave. The man truly wants to leave with the bright figure, and achingly desires to go further up and further in, but the lizard hisses that the bright figure cannot be trusted, that the man knows the lizard and should trust him. The bright figure offers to kill the lizard, but the man asks “Will it hurt?” The bright figure confirms that it will. The man agonizes and considers, weeps and confronts his desire to enter the Kingdom over the mountains but also his attachment to the lizard that even still is clawing into the man’s shoulder. Finally, the man consents, and the bright figure crushes the lizard. The man cries out in loss, and the lizard dies a hissing, violent death. But the narrator then notices that the lizard begins to shimmer, and is transformed into a great winged horse. The bright figure invites the man to mount the horse, as it will fly him quickly over the mountains into the Kingdom. For, the very flaw, the very sin, the very thing to which the man clung though it damaged him, when it’s given up for the Kingdom was transformed into the means by which the man entered into everlasting joy.

We all have weeds mixed in with wheat. We all have lizards we pet and cherish even though they damage us, even though they hold us back. We all struggle on our progress toward growing in love, as the weeds choke us, hold us back, and make us less than we would like, less than Christ dreams we could be. Our progress to grow in holiness, to grow in grace, will not be successful unless we are growing together, as one large field of wheat and weeds. We pray for the dead because we remember that they are with us still, that they are still our mothers and fathers, grandparents and friends, and we also ask their prayers for us. We pray for one another who still are in this life. For we all struggle together to grow into perfection, into the eternal life that has been offered us in Christ.

And remembering the love given us in Christ, the Doom paintings should no longer frighten us, but invite us to seek out in our own souls when we have allowed weeds to choke our grain, when we have ignored pleas for help from strangers, when we have accepted that the poor remain crushed, that the starving remain hungry, that the lost remain unguided. When we look into our own souls, let us pray that Christ’s grace can help us see how to replace weeds with wheat, through works of mercy among those in need, through prayers for those who have died, and for those who are living still and are suffering. When we look into our own souls, let us pray that we may see how the lizards which speak poison into our ears can be set aside and transformed even into strengths that build us up and more completely turn us to Heaven. When we look into our own souls, let us pray that we lay aside fearmongering and anxiety, and stop threatening ourselves and others with a fiery hell, and instead invite love to come and make a home in our hearts, and in others’ hearts that we may turn away from acting out of fear and toward acting out of compassion and love as Christ invites us. What a cheap religion we have if the only reason to love God is to avoid Hell.
God desires each of us to grow into complete perfection, to be all wheat, to become saints, and to bring others along with us. God desires that each of us accept the grace at work within us that strengthens our wheat and burns our weeds, and God desires that we bring others into the love we’ve already experienced.

Each year, on All Saints Sunday in November, we sing the words of I Sing a Song of the Saints of God, which concludes:
They lived not only in ages past,

There are hundreds of thousands still.

The world is bright with the joyous saints

Who love to do Jesus' will.

You can meet them in school, or in planes, or at sea,

In church, or in trains, or in shops, or at tea;

For the saints of God are just folk like me,

And I mean to be one too.

Amen.

Last Sunday I preached the following sermon at St. Paul's Cathedral, Buffalo NY.
It was for Good Shepherd Sunday (I threatened the Dean that I'd preach on German Shepherds instead), and was on the following propers:
Acts 2:42-47
1Peter 2:19-25
John 10:1-10


In the name of the Father and of the Son and of the Holy Spirit. Amen
Recently I attended a lecture at Hobart College by Bishop Gene Robinson, bishop of New Hampshire. He had a few things to say about scriptural reference points and how by imposing modern framework onto scriptural societies, we can create a square hole/round peg phenomenon. He likened it to a novel written in our own time that uses a phrase like “out in left field” requires complex understanding of baseball and its importance in American culture,. Without understanding about baseball being important to our society, understanding that it’s played on a field, understanding that Babe Ruth consistently hit in the right field and tickets for that part of Yankee Stadium sold first, leaving left field tickets undesirable, without that understanding, a person reading a novel containing the phrase “out in left field” in a culture without baseball is going to be heartily confused.
And that’s what many of us are facing when we hear about sheep. We probably think of them as fluffy docile little clouds with legs, baaing through their simple little lives. Apparently, however, sheep smell. Apparently, they can be nasty and tempermental, obstinate and difficult.
Today, from the Gospel of St John, we hear an interesting record of the interaction between Christ and the disciples using sheep as a metaphor. At first in the Gospel, Christ introduces the concept of a shepherd, alluding to himself as the shepherd, though not explicitly stating it. He introduces a shepherd who uses the gate to enter the sheepfold, rather than climbing in over the fence. So far, it sounds pretty good. He then mentions that this shepherd is a shepherd who’s known by the gatekeeper, and known to the sheep inside the pen. Sounds like everything is in order. The sheep know this shepherd, and the shepherd know these sheep. The sheep follow this shepherd and do not run away from him. Even though we urban dwelling-20th century folk have a rudimentary understanding of animal husbandry, all of this sounds like it’s on the up and up and pretty easy to follow. Jesus is a shepherd, he knows the sheep and the sheep know him. Got it.
But the disciples don’t get it. Something went over their heads, or they weren’t paying attention, or they were distracted , or they were texting and driving or something.
So, Christ tries a different angle. Strangely, he goes from the pretty straightforward shepherd metaphor to something out in left field. He calls himself a gate, which doesn’t seem like it’s going to be helpful, but let’s stick with it and see where he takes it. Christ then states that he’s not a thief…a bit weird. So far, Christ is a gate, but not a thief, in case the disciples who were easy confused by the shepherd-sheep relationship might have thought that Christ was comparing himself next to a thief gate, but he clears that up. Next, he says that the sheep listen to him. So, he’s a non-thieving gate that the sheep can hear. But it’s clear that the disciples must still be lost, because Christ scraps all of it and concludes eloquently by declaring: I came that they may have life, and have it abundantly.
So, for us, this is like reading that somebody’s out in left field, and having no baseball reference point.
We are likely all far from sheep experts, and pretty clueless about the role of sheep and shepherds in first-century Palestine. It helps to understand the practice in Christ’s time: sheep were communally penned outside the village, and a young child was assigned to gather all of the sheep each morning to take them from the pen out to a pasture to graze. Because the collected flock represented a significant amount of wealth for the village, it was guarded and fenced and gated. Each morning, the young boy would approach and enter the gate; this boy was known to the watchmen, and the boy usually employed a whistle or call that the sheep would recognize and follow. Since this was all done in the dark, an hour or so before the dawn, the importance of knowing someone through dim light as he approached the gate, the importance of knowing his sounds and his whistle were paramount. Intimacy was required, as the senses of those participating were limited. Someone who jumped the fence, someone who used the wrong call, someone unknown to the gatekeeper was not the shepherd, but was a thief.
Shepherd boys in Christ’s time were much like our own paperboys: get up early while everyone is sleeping, fulfill a relatively thankless responsibility for the community, collect a pittance, but be trusted to do your job and to do it well and to do it every day, no matter the weather or how you felt or whether you wanted to.
But we should also explore his sheep and shepherd metaphor a bit more, to see some of the strengths and weaknesses of understanding Christ as a shepherd and consequently, us as his sheep.
First a weakness to the metaphor. Like the paper boy, the shepherd did not do his job for fun. A shepherd did not shepherd out of a love of sheep and a desire to understand the fascinating species better. People kept sheep in order to shear them for their wool and also to slaughter them for food. The sheep/shepherd relationship was transactional for the shepherd: make sacrifices by getting up each morning, but share in the investment during shearing season. The shepherd got something out of the sheep. At times, we may think of our relationship to Christ as our shepherd this way, as transactional. If I do good things, good things will happen to me. If I do bad things…well, best not to think about that. We think of church like a bonus program on our credit card, where we save up points to redeem when we want to get out of a speeding ticket or when we want a parking spot at Wegmans close to the door when it’s raining. Remember, God, I went to church last week? I even held the door open for that person I never talk to? So…help me out here and get me a spot. Or when we hear Christ talk about storing up treasure in heaven, we think that all of the time we spend in church or helping others or not breaking commandments is like a spiritual 401K that we deposit into, hoping there will be enough to see us through eternity once we enter into the final retirement.
But that’s not what Christ is pointing us to in this shepherd metaphor. It becomes clear that a transactional understanding of the sheep/shepherd relationship, and by extension, our relationship to Christ cannot be based on give and take. Both relationships involve a shepherd who is far stronger who gives of himself to protect and to defend, of a shepherd who shockingly knows the sheep individually, calls to them to reassure them that all is well and that he can be trusted. A shepherd who disproportionately gives of himself, who sacrifices beyond the merit and understanding of his flock, and who also guides, directs, helps, and encourages. A shepherd who goes looking for strays, even to his own peril. A shepherd who seeks out the lost and wandering. A shepherd who does not give up. This is not a relationship built on a return on investment, but on affection, trust, and love.
In the epistle we also heard today, the First Epistle of St Peter, we heard that we were going astray like sheep. We were: you and me, sheep away from where we were supposed to be, ovine AWOL. We had left the shepherd and decided to forge our own path, wander off after that yummy looking flower (probably poisonous) or see where that pretty butterfly was off to (likely over a cliff), or what that strange gray streak in the wood could have been (clearly a wolf). We were going astray like sheep.
I know it’s no longer Lent and that I clearly have no business talking about sin in a sermon, but that’s what we mean here. We use the euphemism “going astray like sheep” but we’re talking about leaving Christ behind, Christ who woke us up and led us out of the gate to a verdant pasture. But we went astray, we followed something else, we turned elsewhere instead of following. We sinned.
Christ comes back to us, finds us where we’ve wandered off, and brings us back to the fold. In many churches there are touching Victorian stained glass windows of Christ carrying an abashed lamb on his shoulders back to the flock, or stretching out a hand to rescue a sheep caught in brambles. How touching! How moving! But those windows are euphemisms, too. We need to see ourselves as those sheep fallen into brambles because of our carelessness; we need to see ourselves exhausted and scared and carried back home on Christ’s loving shoulders. But as moving as the imagery of Christ the Good Shepherd might be, it is powerless unless we admit that there are things about ourselves that have gone astray, things about ourselves that need shepherding. Sometimes we do not see that we are lost, and only when God’s grace returns us to the pasture do we recognize how far gone we were. But at other times we know we’ve strayed, but stubbornly refuse to accept that we put ourselves in this situation, we refuse to accept that we might need help, that we might not be strong enough to pick ourselves up this time. We ignore the blinking light on our spiritual dashboard, and assume that it will all work itself out, and that the engine will get along just fine..
But remember, the good shepherd knows his sheep, and the sheep know his voice. God is closer to your need than you are to acknowledging it. As Good Shepherd, Christ is always seeking to shepherd you through rough spots, through arid lands, through floods, through darkness. Christ is always whistling to you, waiting for you to hear his voice and follow. Christ is always seeking, always inviting, always encouraging. In the epistle to the Hebrews, the author urges you that if today you hear God’s voice, harden not your heart. If, in your darkness, your pain, your grief, or even your success and joy, you hear the voice of the Good Shepherd bidding you to follow him, then obey him and go. Go and know that he will never leave you, no matter how lost you are, no matter how much in you needs to be shepherded.
In Eucharistic Prayer B in our Book of Common Prayer is the beautiful prayer to the Father: In the fullness of time, put all things into subjection under your Christ. There are things about each of us that need to be placed into subjection under the Christ, there are things about us that need to be shepherded. This Eastertide is a time of renewal, of accepting that we have died with Christ, and that we are risen to a new life with Him. We remember in Eastertide that Christ came that we might have life, and have it abundantly. So, whether we are in times in our lives that we are dying with Him or if we are in times when we are Rising in Him, he remains always our Good Shepherd, the same yesterday, today, and tomorrow.

Amen.

Good Friday

This year on Good Friday, I had the privilege of preaching at the Communion from the Reserved Sacrament and Veneration of the Cross at St. Paul's Cathedral, Buffalo NY. I also chanted the Solemn Collects antiphonally with the bishop, but I thankfully didn't record that!

I preached on the propers for the day:
Isaiah 52:13-53:12
Hebrews 10:16-25
John 18:1-19:42


All we like sheep have gone astray
In the Name of the Father, and of the Son, and of the Holy Spirit. Amen.
In his Gospel, St John offered a testimony to others of his experiences and thoughts about the mystery of God in Christ becoming man and taking flesh through Jesus of Nazareth. St John wrote his Gospel as a memory of Jesus’ life, of his ministry, and as we heard this evening, of his ignominious death. You may remember, however, that St. John does not begin this record of the story of Jesus of Nazareth with a birth, but begins it with the story of Christ before the Creation, of a Christ who is uncreated:
In the beginning was the Word, and the Word was with God, and the Word was God. He was in the beginning with God. All things came into being through him, and without him not one thing came into being.
The Passion St John records of Christ’s betrayal, scourging, trial, condemnation, crucifixion, death and burial began as the record of the God who became man, of the Word who was with God and through whom all things came into being. The Passion is the record of the murder of God, of our Lord who is uncreated and yet allowed himself to be subject to death. Of our Lord who is all love, but allowed himself to be subjected to hate. Of our Lord who is all mercy who allowed himself to be placed in the hands of persecutors.
After the death sentence had been pronounced, and wickedness given rein to destroy the God of Creation by hanging him on a cross, Christ was taken to a hill outside of the Holy City, to a hill called Golgotha., to the Place of the Skull. Tradition has given us the teaching that Golgotha was not just the Place of any skull, but of a particular skull. The Fathers of the early Church taught that buried in the dust of Golgotha was the skull of Adam, the skull of the first person, and that the bones of Adam were planted as a seed of Eden, of the inheritance given to us and to our ancestors out of love by the God of creation. For the God to be offered on the dusty hill was the God of all time, and his death would forever change all times, those that went before and those that followed.
In the late second century, St Melito, the bishop of Sardis, preached in the catacombs of his city to the faithful gathered to celebrate the mysteries of Christ’s death, much as we still do today. In that sermon, when speaking of the crucified Christ, St Melito proclaimed:
In Abel He was slain, in Isaac bound, in Jacob exiled, in Joseph sold, in Moses exposed to die. He was sacrificed in the Passover lamb, persecuted in David, dishonored in the prophets.
On a Friday, on the sixth day of the week, Christ stretched out his hands on the cross, on the new Tree of Life. In Eden, on a Friday, on the sixth day of the week, God had breathed life into Adam, and looked upon his creation, and saw that his Creation was good. Those whom God had created on the sixth day in Eden, men and women made in his own image would, on the sixth day in Jerusalem, nail their Creator to an instrument of painful death, and leave Him to hang in agony until dead. Christ came as a bridegroom, offering to be bound to humankind as in marriage. Instead of a ring of precious metal, on His hand, we placed iron nails into Him. His own mother, who had swaddled Him as an infant, watched as His dead body was wrapped in linen for burial, planted, like Adam, as a seed of Eden.
God created mankind in his likeness, and pronounced us good.
Good, but so far from perfect. From mankind have come acts of incomprehensible charity, of devotion, of piety and service. The scriptures recount the meekness of Job, the faith of Ruth, the trust of Mary, the love of John. God created us in his own image, and pronounced us good. Good, but so far from perfect.
For also from mankind have come acts of cruelty akin to the acts of the most depraved of hell: murder, envy, disdain and disregard for the downtrodden, contempt for love and life, murder of the very God made man. In the first Eden, God made us in his own image, pronounced us good, but not perfect.
Each of us carries within us the divine light of God, of the Creator who inspired Adam, who loved us and called us into life. We also bear the burden of our ability to ignore the love of God given to us. As Christ inhabits glory outside of time, as St. John recorded in the beginning of His Gospel, so too does Christ’s Passion and Crucifixion transcend time. Our choices freely made to turn away from the love of God, to seek a path of our own selfish choosing, to move toward sin rather than toward the good, all of this imperfection is the same imperfection that led imperfect men to condemn Christ, to flog him, to crucify him. Their actions in Jerusalem and our actions are the same. Their sin in killing the giver of life is the same sin each of us bears.
We might say: it was not my hand that placed the nail, not my voice that cried out for his death, not my whisper that denied him, not my kiss that betrayed him. The Polish poet Stanislaw Lec wrote: No snowflake in an avalanche ever feels responsible. Each action in the Passion that brought about the death of Christ was a small action, a single word, a single kiss, a single silence, a single sin. But combined, it led to a gasping God dying on a tree, condemned and forsaken by those to whom he came in love. My sin and your sin are not small, are not harmless, but are the very thorns that press down on Christ’s brow. My sin and your sin are very real things, very real pains, very real spears in Christ’s side. The sin of looking the other way when we are asked for help on the street is the same looking away when Pilate washed his hands. The sin of seeking comfort and peace and stability while others suffer and are destroyed by life’s inequalities is the same sin of the high priests. Ignoring the commandment to love one another as Christ loves us when a friend is grieving or a neighbor needs help is the same sin as Peter’s denial. I am not innocent of Christ’s death, you are not innocent of Christ’s death, for my sin and your sin stand before us, staring at us, as we look upon him whom we have pierced. The sin of the Romans, the sin of the Sanhedrin, the sin of Peter and Judas, my sin, your sin: they are all sin and they all lead to Golgotha, to Christ hanging dead on a tree in the garden.
We must acknowledge that we have sinned, and accept that we perpetuate the Passion by choosing selfishness and ignoring the call of God to love. Good Friday is not a story that happened 2,000 years ago, a story that has nothing to do with us, nothing to do with our lives. We must acknowledge our sin and beg Christ, even though we are the ones who placed him on the Cross, to remember us when he comes into his kingdom. Then, tomorrow, as Christ lays silent and still in the tomb, we can sit with Mary his mother, and weep that the Lord of life is taken from us, though we were complicit in it. When we accept that our own actions led to darkness falling upon the land, then we can move through the Passion into the embrace of Christ. Christ, on Golgotha, offers redemption to the world. But we cannot accept that offer and move toward redemption if we have not yet accepted that we need redemption, that we need Christ and his love to bring us from our dark self-love to a love of others that frees us, that acknowledges that we were made in God’s image in Eden, and that he proclaimed us good.
In the Prologue to his Gospel, St John also writes:

The light shines in the darkness, and the darkness did not overcome it

When we acknowledge that there are parts of ourselves that remain in darkness, then the Light can shine in us. When we call out our sins, when we name them, own them, and place our names next to the names of Pilate, of Judas, of Caiphas, of Peter, when we repent of our sins, beg foregiveness and mercy for our part in the Passion, pray for the grace of amendment of life then Christ the light shines in our darkness. All we like sheep have gone astray. The righteous one shall make many righteous.
Amen.

Last Sunday in Epiphany: Transfiguration

On the last Sunday in Epiphany, the last Sunday before Lent, I preached this sermon at St. Paul's Cathedral, Buffalo, NY, based on the Gospel appointed:

Matthew 17:1-9

In ninth grade biology, I learned how to fill out Punnett Squares, to determine the likelihood of offspring having certain genotypes from their parents. Many of you may remember these ingenious little charts, maps of all the possible combinations that genes can be expressed in the children of two parents. We spent a lot of time concentrating on multiple generations of green peas; if I were to go on and become a green pea researcher, those hours with Punnett squares would have been invaluable, as I would strive to make fascinating green pea offspring that those little four squares could predict. But back then, I wasn’t much of a vegetable savant, and so I was much more interested in what Punnett squares could tell me about a more engrossing topic: myself.
If I were to design Punnett squares from my parent’s characteristics, and see what the potential children would inherit, I would occupy entirely different squares from my older sisters. They are blond, while I struggled with wavy auburn hair that turned silver when I was 16 (thanks, mom!) and my green eyes look nothing like their sky blue ones. They tan; I turn different alarming shades of pink. They made it through adolescence gracefully, going through their teens and becoming adults in a way that made it all look so easy. I didn’t hit 100 pounds until ninth grade. My eyebrows and ears grew first, and then I grew an entire foot in a year. My adolescence was awkward, weird, and made me feel like a stranger in my own skin; I wanted to be different than I was, I wanted to look different than I did, I was inpatient with my imperfections and weaknesses; I wanted to be one of those shiny, happy people all around me.
If I could have selected my own Punnett squares, I would have made some dramatically different trait choices. My adolescence had me wishing I could change around some aspects of my face, of the way I looked, as easily as it seemed I could for green peas. Teen years are difficult enough, as it was difficult for any of us who wrestled with transitioning between two worlds: leaving behind a carefree childhood, and entering an anxious adult world with mysterious responsibilities and intimidating energy. And for some of us, not only do we have this psychological conflict of transitioning through our teen years, but we also to change the way we looked, to change the way we were changing: we want to control my transition.
On Mt Tabor, Peter, James and John witnessed the Lord Christ’s Transfiguration, his changing of appearance. We name this event the Transfiguration, because we single out this miracle of the rapid change in Christ’s appearance, and we name it from the Latin phrase transfigurare, to change shape, to change the way one looks. What Christ accomplished in a blink of an eye before the startled Apostles took me years. The inbetweeness and awkwardness I felt in high school was entirely absent when Christ changed Himself on Tabor’s slopes. That miracle of the Transfiguration, the miracle of Christ exposing His divine nature to the Apostles in a gleaming rapid change of his face, showed to those who witnessed that the power of God is always present with them, that the grace of God infuses all of His Creation, and that the Christ, as both our human brother and our divine Lord, rests always with us, walks always next to us, as both God and man.
But I really wish I could have just changed the way I looked as quickly as Christ did! How great it would have been to just be different, to be who I thought I should be. But I would have lost what I learned if I had missed out on those weird, awkward transitioning years. I learned to become more comfortable with in-betweeness, with incompleteness, with moving toward something new. I learned a bit about being more open to differences, to conflicting pulls and ideas; being an awkward teenager taught me to be less polarizing, and less polarized. And even Christ, in his changing on Tabor, was accompanied by two very different persons, representing two very different forces. Moses, giver of the Law, showing that rules, structure, lists are a divine gift. And Elijah, a shaker upper, a force for change and challenge and prophecy, witness to a God who speaks not though commandments, but through a small still whisper. Christ, alongside men who heard God through Law and through silent whispers: In betweeness, conflicting pulls and ideas.
Our Christian life is more like adolescence than it is like anything else. We frequently call the Christian life a journey, and it seems to ring true that we travel along in our life of grace, rather than arriving at it. A journey not yet completed, a walking of a path with opposing ideas, with law and with whispers, sometimes with awkwardness, with struggles, with feeling uncomfortable in your own skin, and sometimes with confidence. Our Christian life as journey can help us to reflect that we are all incomplete, all on a path to greater wholeness and to further change. We walk this path of life together, all gangly teenagers, trying to see how we fit in individually, and together.
There will always be things with which we struggle to overcome and change as we travel on as Christians; we’d like to be more humble, more caring, less irritable. But we need to own those faults, offering them up as characteristics that help shape us as who we are; our journey will help smooth out those rough spots, but they won’t disappear, they’ll be changed into a different and more complete wholeness. Christ’s wounds did not vanish from his Resurrected Body, but were changed into banners of sacrifice and love. So, too, will our journey in this life and its change into the next life, alter our faults and failings into Resurrected wounds, banners of struggle. Instead of looking at our spiritual Punnett squares, and wishing we could exchange some of our souls' less than perfect DNA for something a bit more glorious, we need to learn to be more comfortable and less judgmental about our own shortcomings, trusting in Christ to change them from weakness into strength.
Eventually, the rest of my face caught up with my eyebrows. Eventually, in life and through death, God perfects each of us, each solitary one of us, walking a pilgrim road; but we do not walk on that pilgrimage alone; we are surrounded by our brothers and sisters, by those who have gone before us, accompanied by Moses, by Elijah. We do this journey, we walk this path as a people, loved by a Transfigured Christ who strengthens us on our Christian journey to perfection.
This week, on Wednesday, you will be invited to begin a Holy Lent. We are leaving the Epiphany season, begun with a mysterious Child in a manger, featuring foreign kings with startling gifts to crown the Child as King, to worship Him as God, to anoint Him for His saving death. We heard proclaimed Christ’s love turn water into wine, we heard proclaimed that Mary’s heart would be pierced by a sword. We heard proclaimed bright gleaming divinity on Tabor, and now, in Lent, we enter a time of reflection, of preparation, of further journeying. Of preparation for the great sacrifice on Calvary, to which we will attend as witnesses that Christ has died, Christ is Risen, Christ will come again.
Lent reminds us that sacrifice and joy are never disconnected. Christmas must be followed by Good Friday, and then by Easter. Our Christian life also will include wonder, and sorrow, joy and loss. Lent should help us learn to reflect upon and learn to more tenderly embrace that conflict, that uncertainty, that inbetweeness. We are still spiritual adolescents, pilgrims along a path together that will bring us to completeness through the grace of Christ, grace given at Bethlehem, at Cana, on Tabor’s heights, through Calvary’s pain, and Easter’s trumpet. Our journey shows that we are the same person, even though our outward appearance will change, even though we are transfigured, we remain the same kid in high school who struggles to figure out his place in the world. And, in Lent, we must not be so penitent that our memories of Christmas fade. The entirety of the Christ story as one story should remain with us all year round. And our own stories are each one story, for we never stop being the person we were as children, as teens, as young adults: we simply add on new experiences. The same is true in Christ’s life, for He is our human brother. The baby’s voice that cried out from the manger for His mother was the same voice that cried out to His mother on the hard wood of the cross.
Though we’d like to change our lives around, arrange them to be more consistent, so that our lives would be less confusing, all joy, all neatness and clear lines, we must learn from the Transfiguration and from Lent that each of us is an amalgam of conflicting ideas, desires, strengths and weaknesses that Christ is always blessing, always lifting up, always working toward perfection. One day, as we pass through this life into the perfect life prepared by our loving God, we will see that our mismatched experiences, struggles, and awkwardness are transfigured into radiant glory, and are given as our offering, as our sacrifice to the Christ who sacrificed all for love of us.

Charles Simeon, Priest: Nov 12, 2010

I preached this sermon at St. Paul's Cathedral for the commemoration of Charles Simeon, a leader of the English evangelical movement.

Evangelicals can leave me scratching my head sometimes (real Anglican evangelicals, not the members of the scary American Evangelical movement; they just terrify me), and Charles Simeon is no exception. Sometimes I feel like we're not even talking the same language. So, every time evangelicals write or say "Bible", I replace it with "Sacrament of the Holy Eucharist", and every time an evangelical says "Jesus", I replace it with "the Lord Christ", and i switch out the phrase "the Bible says" and use "according to the Church Fathers". Then, everything they say makes perfect sense!

John 21:15-17

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

Charles Simeon, born in 1759 and dying in 1836, was a teacher and promoter of missionary work whom we commemorate today for his contributions to Anglican mission, to the evangelical Anglican charism, and for the beauty and sanctity of his life.

Charles Simeon was born into a wealthy family, and like many gentry, attended Eton and Cambridge. As was the custom in those days, chapel attendance was compulsory for young men at school, and reception of the Eucharist was rare, though mandated yearly. It often caused grave scandal and lack of regard for the Sacrament, that these young men were required to attend chapel services and that it was insisted that they receive Eucharist annually, but no preparation for receiving, no amendment of life, no true Christian zeal was given. Chapel services were similar to Latin or Greek: something required and to be endured.

But, sometimes this wretched system produced something wonderful; that was the case with Charles Simon, who wrote in his journal:

"On 29 January 1779 I came to college. On 2 February I understood that at division of term I must attend the Lord's Supper. The Provost absolutely required it. Conscience told me that, if I must go, I must repent and turn to God."

Simeon would go on to Holy Orders, and be an important force in the development of the evangelical movement in the Church of England, that stressed Scripture, the Gospel message of justice, personal piety and conversion. Chalres Simeon was a founder of the Church Missionary Society, responsible for the conversion of hundreds of thousands in Asia, Africa, and the Middle East. The strong evangelical movement in the Anglicanism of much of the global south today is a direct inheritance of the Church Missionary Society.

Simeon’s writings also influenced reformers like William Wilberforce to work to abolish slavery in great Britain and her colonies, and Henry Martyn, the Anglican missionary to Persia and India, who translated the New Testament, psalter, and Book of Common Prayer into Persian and Hindi.

The tradition of chapel attendance and the gross irreligious behavior of the young men would later inspire another clergyman to speak out about the practice, and work to convert students, instructing them on proper reverence and devotion; that reformer, John Henry Newman, would eventually become a founder of the Oxford Movement, helping to reassert and restore catholic identity to the Church of England. These two movements, evangelicalism and anglo-catholicism and their two contributors, Charles Simeon and John Henry Newman, would help to shape the future of Anglicanism beginning in the 18^th century up to our own day.

It is with joy that we celebrate Charles Simeon today, and his life and mission to spread the news of Christ. We are fortunate to have evangelicals and anglo-catholics in our calendar, men and women, children and adults, humans and angels. In our Anglican tradition, we celebrate all of the varied and beautiful ways that the Holy Ghost inspires sanctity and perfection in us, and it should inspire us to look for greater understanding f those from whom we differ. We need to remember to pursue unity, not uniformity, lifting up our differences, and giving thanks to God that we are all called to witness to His love for us, given to us through Christ.

Amen.

St Andrew's Day

God save Scotland!

I was able to preach at St. Paul's Cathedral in commemoration of Andrew the Protokletos on Nov 30, 2010. It was a great honor and distinct pleasure. Andrew's life holds so much of importance for us: examples of humble service, and an extended invitation to others to come and meet Christ.

Matthew 4:18-22

In the Name of the Father, and of the Son, and of the Holy Spirit.

Amen.

In his satirical autobiography Me Talk Pretty One Day, David Sedaris describes his attempts to learn French after moving to rural France as an adult. He struggled most with learning the gender of French nouns, and was constantly assigning the incorrect gender to objects around the house. He began to avoid the issue by always talking about things in plural, since plurals in French work the same for both masculine and feminine nouns. But he always ended up leaving the market with twice as many vegetables as he had planned on buying, and they would go bad before he could use them. Instead, he switched to a new way to remember the gender of objects: he came up with stories about the things surrounding him in his home. His hairbrush began to have a torrid affair with the mop, but the soap found out and jilted the doorknob in order to steal back the mop.

Mnemonics like the ones that David Sedaris used are most helpful when they are memorable. And they help us remember unimportant things like license plate numbers, mundane things like French genders, and important things like birthdays and anniversaries. The Church is aware that mnemonics are powerful ways to remember and to instill lessons, and so we’ve inherited an entire collection of them.

Today we commemorate St. Andrew, one of the Twelve Apostles, and the Apostle known in Greek as the Protokletos, the first-called. In St. John’s Gospel, Christ calls St. Andrew first, and St. Andrew goes home to tell his brother Simon about his encounter with Christ. Simon, of course, would have his name changed by Christ Himself, and be known to future generations as St. Peter.

Like many o the Apostles, St. Andrew is remembered for the way he died. The mnemonic associated with St. Andrew was the instrument of his torture and death. St. Andrew was crucified on a cross shaped like an X, and you’ll frequently see him depicted holding a cross of that shape. The X-shaped cross would eventually become the flag of the Kingdom of Scotland, a nation dedicated to St. Andrew, and through the Episcopal Church in Scotland, St Andrew’s Cross entered our American Episcopal Shield and our flag in the shape of crosses formed into an X. The mnemonic used to recall St. Andrew reminds us of his sacrifice in giving his life in witness to Christ.

But sometimes the devices we use to remember something or someone can’t capture the entirety of an idea. That is certainly the case with reducing St. Andrew to a pious story and to an X-shaped cross. Though St. Andrew is little mentioned in the Gospels, those places where his actions are recorded are powerful, and important insights into his life and his personality. He is recorded as bringing his brother to Christ. He is recorded along with St. Philip as bringing Greeks seeking the Messiah to come and meet Christ. He is recorded as telling Christ that there was a boy with five loaves and two fish, and invites Christ to feed the Five Thousand with the small amount.

St. Andrew brought others to Christ. His life’s work consummated at his crucifixion, was just as profoundly shown in his life of service and witness. St. Andrew invited others to listen to Christ’s words, to witness Christ’s actions, and to welcome Christ into their lives. St. Andrew had found in Christ the very reason for his own life, and made of his life an offering to the Lord who walked with him and offered him redemption. St. Andrew’s love for Christ and willingness to follow Him drove him St. Andrew to bring others to experience Christ as well.

We commemorate the saints generally, and St. Andrew today specifically, to recall the virtues they showed in their lives, and to pray for the grace to imitate those virtues in our own lives. We also recall that death does not separate us from one another, and we remember, then, that St. Andrew joins us at every Eucharist in praising and worshipping the Christ who came among us as teacher, king, and Lord. We pray that we might imitate St. Andrew in our willingness to witness to the action of Christ in our own lives and to invite friends, family, and strangers to join us in thanksgiving for God’s love shown to us in Christ. And we also ask St. Andrew to pray for us, that we might, like him, make our lives into confessions of the Gospel message to show forth God’s love to all those we encounter.

Amen

Christmas I: my dog is God

I preached this sermon at St. Paul's Cathedral, Buffalo, on Dec 26, which fell on a Sunday and made for a long Christmas celebration, with heavy festivities on the 24th, 25th, and 26th.

John 1:1-18

In the Name of the Father, and of the Son, and of the Holy Spirit.

Amen.

In the 20^th century, some of our best Anglican theology came not from our universities, from our bishops, nor from our great scholars; counted among the most influential and insightful among Anglican thinkers in our own age were children’s authors. One of those authors, Madeleine L’Engle, explored in her books the integrity and similarity in vast expanses of the universe, including stars and angels among her major characters, and also the smallest and atomic as characters, unfolding an entire plot in the mitochondria of the cells of a sick little boy. The ability for a riveting story to take place in both galactic macrochosms and cellular microchosms displayed L’Engle’s theology: no barrier, label, or dimension changes, stops, or mutes the story. Whether among stars or among cells, the story of redemption, of the Gospel is the same.

When we hear the Prologue of St. John’s Gospel, “In the beginning was the Word, and the Word was God,” and so on, we may think that the words are simply inapplicable to our lives, or only a beautiful allegory disconnected from our own experiences and needs. But, there is one Gospel, there is one Christ. The great Cosmic Christ, the hand of the Creator in the first moment of the Universe, is the same as the Man broken on Calvary’s hill. The uncreated Word in the Prologue and the squirming baby amidst the rough straw in Bethlehem is the same one Christ, the same one answer for a world in need of cleansing; a world so in need, then and now, of getting over itself and being honest about itself. To soften the hard hearts of men and women, a squishy baby was given. To convert the stony minds and the closed eyes of the powerful, a peasant child was sent. To bring down the tyranny of a cosmopolitan imperial oppressor, a meek teacher appeared in an insignificant backwater province. God likes literary irony. God likes paradox.

To all of Creation, God gave particular gifts to reflect His glory: to stars and to our sun, the self-consuming power of fire; to the seas, the cleansing bath needed to support life; to plants, to animals, the power to grow, to adapt, to evolve. To humans, the power to reason. Without the light of the sun, without the growing of plants, the teeming of the seas, the strength of animals, no life for humans is possible. Our reason, the gift uniquely given to us, should lead us to reflect on our own place in creation, and remind us of our call to use our reason to further Christ’s glory. Our reason brings with it not just a responsibility and burden, but wonder and fun.

The Irish-American author F Scott Fitzgerald reflected on the fun of human intelligence when he wrote “The test of a first rate intelligence is the ability to hold two opposed ideas in the mind at the same time, and still retain the ability to function.” Paradox is part and parcel of the human existence.

A baby: both the uncreated Word and a crying surprise.

A young girl: both virgin and mother.

A world: both grown old and dying in sin, and constantly renewed through the lives of holy men and holy women.

Each week, we join together to confess that we know Christ to have been born among us, to have given Himself to us in Eucharist, to have died for us, to have risen for our everlasting life; we confess that we know these things to be true. But we confess that we don’t know how. We confess with our lips and pray that we may accept with our minds that God is not either/or, but always BOTH. Not judge or redeemer, but both judge and redeemer. Not just the God of the afflicted and suffering and struggling and not just the God of the wealthy and comfortable, but the God of both. That we believe the Gospel to tell the story of Jesus of Nazareth as not just man and as not just God, but both. For no barrier, label, or dimension changes, stops, or mutes the story. Whether among stars or among cells, the story of redemption, of the Gospel is the same.

The same God who set the planets in their courses and the seemingly infinite galaxies in their million year rotations is the God who knows each sparrow, who decks the lilies in grandeur, and who mourns with me when I didn’t get the promotion I wanted, or the parking space I wanted, and exults with me at my niece’s second Christmas and my dog’s excited greeting when I come home each day after work. The Christ who joins with me in my life and who saves me is the same Christ who joins with each of you in your own lives, and binds us, along with the planets, with angels, and with the mitochondria of sick little boys into one Creation.

But, you are not called to explode in constant hydrogen fusion, giving light to a solar system; we leave that to the stars. You are not called to support life in your churning waters; and you are not called to be the Savior. You are called to be yourself, to use your reason, and work out with fear and trembling the plan of salvation Christ has given you. You are called to use your reason and emotions and gut instinct to puzzle out how the Gospel is shaping you into a saint, and then to go tell others what you’ve learned. Some of us will do that in our writing, some in our parenting, others in our witness to Christ in martyrdom, others through our life of prayer. But we do it together. None of us is called to figure it all out ourselves; the work is too big, and we weren’t made like that, anyway. We need to accept and love our limitations as the places where others will pick up the work. We can’t do it all; God has sent a Messiah into the world, and it wasn’t you.

Let the stars be stars, let your neighbor figure out the path to Christ’s perfection along a trail different from yours, and let God’s plan of salvation be carried out in tranquility by joining in and doing your part. You can’t do everything, and that’s ok. Remember that, and use the tension of that paradox to drive you to do what you can do: feed the hungry around you, love the loveless, take care of yourself and others, and be thankful. So do your part, and trust that your best is part of the mystery you confess, but don’t understand. Consider it a paradox that your flaws and imperfections will be paving stones to perfection, not burdensome weights to be cast aside and forsaken. Remember that Christ Himself said that He was to be a sign to be contradicted. Remember that you were created to be perfect as your Heavenly Father is perfect, and were also created with limitations: we need to embrace our limitations, love our weaknesses and mistakes, laugh at our failings in order to become perfect and move beyond our self-centeredness.

Each Sunday, we proclaim a different Gospel, following three-year cycles. Each year, we begin again in Advent, through Christmas and Epiphany to Lent, Good Friday and Easter. We hear of Christ as a promise, as a baby, as the fulfillment of hope, as a suffering servant, as a betrayed friend, as a pierced sacrifice, as a dead corpse, as a cold an unfulfilled expectation, as a risen Lord. 52 weekly Gospels, one Christ. Annual cycles repeated for four score generations, billions of listeners over the millennia, but always, one Christ. Through differences and across time, one. Among many, one.

In her poem, Christ in the Universe, reflecting on what other cultures and worlds will think when we tell them the story of redemption given us in Christ, Alice Meynell offers insight into how one Christ and one Gospel can work out redemption in an almost infinite number of ways. Across the universe, among innumerable peoples and planets (maybe Narnia included), Christ comes as Savior:

With this ambiguous earth


His dealings have been told us. These abide:


The signal to a maid, the human birth,


The lesson, and the young Man crucified.



No planet knows that this


Our wayside planet, carrying land and wave,


Love and life multiplied, and pain and bliss,


Bears, as chief treasure, one forsaken grave.

But in the eternities,


Doubtless we shall compare together, and hear


A million alien Gospels, in what guise


He trod the Pleiades, the Lyre, the Bear.



O, be prepared, my soul!


To read the inconceivable, to scan


The myriad forms of God those stars unroll


When, in our turn, we show to them a Man.

Christ marches across all Creation, all planets and stars, to heaven and hell to bring redemption and wholeness. Through different manifestations and faces, different reasonings and emotions, the unlimited God limits Himself in Christ to be for each speck of Creation, each star, each angel, each person and bird and leaf and cell what is uniquely needed to offer perfection. Each of us differently experiencing and living into the one Christ.

The mind of God holds these contradicting thoughts together, those contradictions in the form of you and me and all the universe created through Him. He even holds the greatest of contradictions, me and my sisters, in one bond. For our world is not black and white, clear cut and crystal clear. Billions of colors explode and create a big bang of contradiction and paradox, held in unity by the Word through whom all of those contradictions were created. Our world is a mixture of black, of white, of grey and brown and cerulean and polka dots and houndstooth tweed and those maroon and green paisleys on my grandmother’s apron. And instead of discord and competition, those disparate colors and voices are held together as one color, as one voice by the Word through whom all of them came into being: no barrier, label, dimension, difference, tension or paradox changes, stops, or mutes the story. Whether among stars or among cells, the story of redemption, of the Gospel is the same.

Amen.

Holy Name

This was the sermon I preached for the Feast of the Holy Name, or The Circumcision of Our Lord.

Luke 2:15-21

But Mary treasured all these words and pondered them in her heart.

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

My first experience of gardening happened when I was 5, at Winfield St Elementary School in Corning, NY, when I was in kindergarten. We had just started a new unit in which we learned about plants and seeds. Our teacher read to us about acorns and oak trees, and fuzzy gray dandelion heads. The most exciting day, though, was when we each received a white Styrofoam cup with dirt in it. I was something of a dirt eater, or at least, a dirt sampler, so I was very excited, but remembered that I shouldn’t eat this dirt, since my teacher told me we’d be putting a seed in it, and that the seed needed the dirt and water and the sun to grow. I made a sacrifice, and abstained from eating.

Along with the cup, each of us received a few cucumber seeds: they were small, flat, pointy at one end, and smooth to touch. We stuck our little fingers into the dirt and pushed the cucumber seeds down, poured a little water onto them, placed them on the ledge by the window, and left them there to grow.

Each day, the first thing any of us did when coming into class was run over to the ledge to check our dirt cups with our sleeping seeds. And cups of dirt they remained. Each day: nothing. The next morning, new bright expectation, a dash to the ledge: nothing.

Then one day, there was a tiny green bump in a cup in the first row, and 20 proud 5-year old parents peered into the Styrofoam cup, overjoyed at the tiny bump. Each morning, more and more and more bumps in the Styrofoam cups, then stems, then leaves. In my cup, one of my little plants came up and still had the husk of its seed wrapped around its leaf. I recognized the smooth white skin of the seed, opened like a butterfly in flight, and the point pulled apart and separated.

There are countless times in our lives when seemingly mundane outward appearances, like my little seed lead to events that are beyond our understanding, more than we could have guessed, like a huge full cucumber that tips over my Styrofoam cup. The Blessed Virgin heard the words of the shepherds, and pondered them; she knew them to be more than just a congratulations card for her delivery; Mary knew that the child born to her was more than met the shepherds’ eyes.

The Blessed Virgin pondered these things in her heart, and found within her thoughts a miracle: God, through ordinary means, enters and transforms the world. Mary would never be the same: at the wedding at Cana, it was she who invited Christ to perform His first miracle, changing jugs of water into the best wine. Mary had pondered and realized that God pervaded the world, and knew that Christ could turn water into wine, a seed into a cucumber. Sometimes, the actions of God are beyond explanation, beyond reckoning, and we ponder those wonders in our hearts; sometimes, the actions of God are explainable, like dancing orange flames consuming kindling, or a seed growing, but those actions are no less remarkable and miraculous just because we can explain them. The love of our God pervades all of Creation, and reflecting on the mundane and the extraordinary shows us that there is no part of our world, or of our hearts where God cannot go. There are no boring routines that cannot be holy, no hidden secrets too dark to be changed into light, no fear that cannot be overcome, no ordinary water that cannot become the best wine.

Christ was born for us, given to us as a child, and named Jesus. That holy name, meaning savior, is more than just an entry on a roll call: the holy name of Jesus is a mystical reality that is breathed into all creation, and imprinted on our own hearts. Something as ordinary as a name is exalted as a holy instrument, reminding us that all around us there is wonder, joy, and Christ’s sacred work in creation. The world would never be the same after that name was given; something as commonplace as a name is also a window into God’s presence among us.

In November of last year, Presiding Bishop Katharine Jefferts Schori preached from this very pulpit, and reflected on St Paul’s second epistle to the Corinthians: But we have this treasure in jars of clay to show that this all-surpassing power is from God and not from us. Though the outside, the passing glance, the first blush looks everyday and common, within our boring jar of clay is held treasure: treasure for which the Son of God chose to be born of Mary, chose to be named Jesus, chose to live, teach, heal, and die. Christ’s holiness is infused in all of creation, and we need only to look around us to enter into that holiness. Surrounding us on every side are clay jars, carrying precious treasure. Unless we look closely, take time and energy to ponder the treasure around us, we may miss an opportunity to find the Christ peering back at us, bidding us to enter in and join him.

That holiness and wonder in God’s work among us can easily be overlooked. We can complain to our friends about waiting on the tarmac for 40 minutes, rather than remark amazedly about flying through the air like a bird at thousands of feet above the earth, at speeds of hundreds of miles an hour. But the 40 minute delay sticks out in our mind. Or we can gripe about how annoying dropped cell phone calls can be, instead of concentrating on what a blessing it is to speak to friends and family from anywhere in the world, and to nurture and strengthen our closest relationships. But the dropped call is focused on, rather than the wonder of technology. We can zero in on how annoying our neighbor is by blocking our driveway with her garbage cans, rather than reflect and ponder that we are surrounded by others who are so dearly loved by God, loved enough that Christ came among us to die for us. But we ponder on the irritation from our neighbor, rather than her being a sacred and loved creature of God.

Unless we begin to appreciate the amazingnness of the world in which we live, we will continue to fail to appreciate the amazingness of our God who fashioned it, and the Christ who redeemed it. Our lack of wonder, gratitude, and appreciation makes us hollow, less fully ourselves and the people Christ calls us to be.

Each week, we gather together here, at St. Paul’s Cathedral in Buffalo to celebrate again the sacred mysteries. We join in unison in the ancient prayers taught to us by Christ Himself, and passed down by apostles for scores of generations. We repeat the words Christ used when He took bread, broke it, gave it to those gathered, and bid them to eat. Each week, in those moments, the outward appearances of bread and wine, of priest and congregation, of church and pew fade away. Bread and wine are transformed into the very flesh and blood Christ, we are joined by thousands of angels, billions of saints and ancestors, and these cathedral walls are replaced with the walls of the new Jerusalem. Heaven itself ruptures and spills out on us, and God Himself offers His life and love to us here. And while this awesome and impossible transformation is exploding, we ignore it, think about what Netflix is sending, wonder what we’re going to have for dinner.

By neglecting to ponder these sacred things in our hearts, we remain shallow, we shrug our shoulders at the mysteries surrounding us in weather, wonder, stranger, and sacrament. But we will never be completely ourselves, never completely fulfilled, until we open our minds, and look with heaven’s eyes at the world and people around us. When our minds begin to ponder, instead of to wander, during the liturgy and during our everyday lives, we will find secret mystical gardens, beauty everywhere, always. We will begin to worship God by loving ourselves, by loving our neighbor; we will encounter Christ as the mystical web tying together every heart; we will bow down and worship the God who calls oaks from acorns and cucumbers from little pointy seeds; we will hear the Holy Name of Jesus whispered on the winds, and on the lips of friend and stranger

Amen.

Scaife crosier

I started today to begin the restoration work on the Scaife crosier; Bishop-elect Franklin has chosen this crosier, I've heard, to use to request entry to his cathedral at his installation, May 1, the day following his consecration.

Bishop Michael Garrison found this crosier in his closet, and asked that it be restored for use by Bishop-elect Franklin. I have the 23K gold leaf!

Here are some images of its current condition.

The size has now been applied to a few places, and I'll be doing some gilding this evening. I haven't gilded with leaf in a few years, so I'm really looking forward to it!

I'll keep you updated as I progress, adding updated photos. In these, you can see the seal of the Diocese of Western New York and the seal of the Diocese of New York...it's really a beauty!

All of the red you see is what needs to be repaired; mot of it needs to be regilded, but there's some repair needed on the paint, as well. That red paint that is showing through is a clay-based red substrate paint in which the size (the fixative glue) is applied. The size takes a few hours to get tacky. After the size is ready, small pieces of 23K gold are laid on it and brushed over to get a strong, firm adhesion to the size. Then the leaf is brushed out, and excess is removed.

The gold leaf is only a few hundred atoms thin...it's so crazy to deal with. It's not brittle, but you need to use the static from a brush's bristles to pick it up from a flat surface!