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!

Votive Mass of St. Stephen

Tonight, Fr. Wipfler at St. Matthias, East Aurora celebrated Holy Eucharist in celebration of the ordination to the Sacred Order of Deacons of Pete Cornell and Kim Greene.

Here's the homily I preached:

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

I'm the baby of the family, so by the time I turned 16, my older sisters were in college, and only my parents and I were left in the house. My sisters' absences left a social gap in the house, but it also left a more important gap that impacted me acutely as a junior in high school: when they went to college, they took my parents' hand-me-down cars with them.

And so, I always had to borrow one of my parent's cars to get around. They were very practical cars, the kind that had only ever heard NPR on the radio, so I didn't relish borrowing them, but a 16-year old beggar can't be a chooser. Each time I wanted to borrow one, I'd have to ask parental permission, get the key, and provide a checkout and checkin time for the car. Needless to say, I hitched rides with friends as often as practicable.

After about a year, I asked my father to borrow his car one day, and he handed me my very own set of keys to both cars. He gave them to me, telling me that they were my own set, and that I was old enough to make sure I used the cars responsibly, and I was mature enough to coordinate our three schedules and two cars, and that I'd been very responsible the last year in using the cars. They were my own set of keys, a jingling sign of my responsibility.

When they were given me, I did not suddenly become responsible because of them. They were conferred due to the recognition that I was already responsible, that I had been a responsible driver and car sharer for a while. It was recognition of what i already was, not an action that made me something to which i aspired.

Ordination works the same way: it recognizes something already present, always present, and ordination names that thing, names it deacon, and sanctifies it by binding that thing to the Church's life, by ordering it within the larger Body of Christ.

In the first Book of Common Prayer 1549, the ordinal published a year later in 1550 named the ordination rite for deacons as the ordering of deacons. The 1662 Prayer Book revision changed that title to the making of deacons. Not until 1979 would the American Prayer book restore the name of the service to the ordination of a deacon, rather than the making of a deacon, emphasizing the eternal and ontological nature of ordination to the diaconate: a candidate is ordained a deacon forever, for all time, outside of time, in life and in eternity.

Part of the gift of the diaconate in particular, and Holy Orders in general, is the grace given to the Church to celebrate and hallow the gifts of individuals, given not for their own glory, not for their own building up, not for their own pride, but for the glory, the building up, and the pride of the entire Body of Christ, the Church. In the ordination of deacons, we are reminded that the unique gifts and offerings of all, bishops, priests, deacons, and laity are needed in the body, and without those offerings, the Body is lessened.

Deacons are uniquely called to serve, to serve the Body of Christ through works of love, pity, and mercy, especially to the poor and downtrodden among us. Deacons are the Body of Christ's immune system, rushing in to seize and bind infection, to promote healing and wholeness, to protect and hold fast when pain and suffering are present. Without deacons, the Body suffers, cannot repair itself, and the weakest part spreads, causing the whole to fail.

But deacons are not the only ones called to service. We do not ordain for service, we baptize for it. Deacons are ordained to grow and develop servanthood among the other orders: deacons must nurture and encourage servanthood among the laity, among priests, among bishops. Deacons keep the body whole and healthy, reminding all of the orders that Christ came among us to serve, not to be served, that He came as physician to heal the sick, not the well. Deacons are ordained to see in others those eternal gifts that were seen in them and that were hallowed in their ordination. Just as deacons are recognized by ordination, not made, deacons must help the other orders to recognize the gifts Christ has given each one of them for the strengthening of the Body. Deacons are ordained to recognize gifts in others, to encourage the growth of others' gifts, and to serve others by helping to develop each person's gifts into ministry for the Body of Christ.

The English poet, Christina Rosetti authored the much-loved carol In the Bleak Midwinter, the last verse of which concludes:

What can I give him, poor as I am?

If I were a shepherd, I would bring a lamb;

if I were a wise man, I would do my part.

Yet what I can I give him--give my heart.

Each of us, each shepherd, each wise man, each deacon, is given gifts to render in worship of our Creator and for the edification of our brethren. Deacons are the Church's midwives, given by Christ to His Church, to teach and assist others in the acknowledgment, growth, health, and delivery of the gifts Christ has given to each of us for our mutual growth in the life of grace.

Amen.

Lightbulbmas

This is the sermon I preached at Calvary Church, Williamsville, NY for Candlemas, at the gracious invitation of Fr. Ethan Cole.

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

Amen.

Evolution is an elegant process, one that cements a bond between all living things. Trees grow taller so that herbivores will leave their leaves alone. And, giraffes develop longer necks to vex those same trees. Maybe sometime in the very distant future, we’ll have skyscraper trees and very very tall giraffes.

But sometimes one side of the arms race (or neck race) jumps ahead, leaving its counterpart in the lurch. Over tens of thousands of years, human hunters preyed upon deer and elk and moose and caribou and other large beasts with four hooves and they responded by becoming faster, and the ones with better hearing escaped, breeding offspring with better hearing, and so forth. And so, humans and deer were in a Cold war for generations.

But, we jumped ahead. And so when a deer no longer hears us coming in our car, but sees us rapidly approaching, sees two tiny, strange dots of white light suddenly grow bigger, brighter and louder. The deer, as I’m sure everyone in Williamsville has experienced, is riveted, and is fixed on our headlights. Let’s not go into what happens next.

And tonight is all about light. We use the same word light to describe so many and such very different experiences we have. Light can stop you in your tracks and fixate you like the deer, light can be a quiet humble flame of a single candle, light from the refrigerator wraps me about when I’m eating chocolate cake right off the plate with a fork at 1am, light beams down unemotionally in the grocery store, on the sidewalk, in the operating room. Light leads the lost to safety, exposes the hidden to the seeker, unveils secret things we’d prefer remain cloaked. Light heals, light burns, light warms, light refines.

St Luke’s Gospel records that Simeon, the Temple priest, witnessed a shimmer of light from an infant he saw in a young girl’s arms, while her husband carried a basket of two turtledoves as an offering. That infant, a firstborn son, was to be consecrated to his LORD; Simeon felt a shimmer of brightness around that child, took him in his arms, and saw the wrinkled and sleeping face of his deliverer. With joy, he whispered to the infant and to his parents that this child would be a light to enlighten the gentiles, that this child was light from light.

This child would shine into the world’s dark recesses, exposing to all the corners of darkness, left unattended from neglect, or from fear, or from pain, or from intent to conceal. This child would be the light that would cause the rising and the falling of many in Israel. This child was a light who would comfort the afflicted and who would afflict the comfortable.

We hold this solemn feast of Light, celebrating the witness of Christ’s light in the Temple during a time of darkness in our year. We are 40 days from Christmas, and Candlemas falls in the bleak midwinter, at the halfway point between winter and spring. In the midst of darkness, cold, blight, to us is given a deliverer, a light to cheer us, to embolden us, and to strengthen us. But remember, with that comfort comes a promise of difficulty, of suffering. During that moment in which Simeon shuffled across the Temple floor over to the Holy Family and confessed that the Messiah had been given to Israel and to all humanity, in that moment of joy and wonder, of light and of glory, Simeon lowered his eyes and whispered to Mary, the child’s mother: And a sword will pierce your own soul, too. Amidst joy we must also welcome sorrow. Never can we separate Bethlehem from Calvary, manger from Cross.

And we find that it true in our own lives: rarely are our triumphs and successes not tempered by sadness in the lives of others which reminds us that our victories are passing; and rarely are our pains, our mournings, our crushing defeats not softened by the presence and love of family, of friends and community. And recognizing that we cannot set up walls between our emotions, between our pain and our joy, the Church always points to the interconnectedness of the hope of new birth in a swaddled baby, and the pain of loss through nail and wood and thorn and spear.

Just as our lives are mixed with happiness and travail, in Christ is the human mixed with the divine. There are no longer discreet lines between an incomprehensible God and a trembling lost humanity. In Christ, the two are messily mixed, forever changing both God and mankind.

And this evening, we celebrate the sharing of divinity with our humanity, and we humbly worship the messy mixing of our creaturehood with the Godhead. We confess that Christ has made this world different, made this a world of light, a world where the creator who strode the Milky Way in the moments of the deafening boom of the Universe’s birth chose also to walk a dusty path that took him from Bethlehem to Nazareth, to Jerusalem and to His Cross on Calvary.

No longer will our everyday lives have no meaning beyond a blur of grocery lists, oil changes, and meeting after meeting after meeting at work. By becoming flesh, the Christ sanctified all human life and work. In Christ, God made sacred all that we do. Tonight we gather to show in a concrete way that the mundane and the sacred cannot be teased apart.

On this day of Candlemas, it is the Church’s ancient tradition to bless the candles to be used in the liturgy for the year. We take the opportunity of a sacred event, Christ coming suddenly unto His Temple as light and Messiah and combine it with a more mundane thing: we have to be able to see in Church. We use the sacred event of Simeon’s confession of Christ as the world’s light and tie it to a needful thing: candles for church. Before the advent of electricity, candlelight was the only means of seeing in church, and by connecting that necessity with Christ’s epiphany in the Temple, the shape of the current Candlemas liturgy emerged. To put it into perspective, how real and everyday candle blessing really is, the equivalent today would be for Fr. Ethan instead to bless the church’s lightbulbs every February 2, and to remind us that Christ is the lightbulb of the world. Maybe one day, when we have skyscraper trees and crane-necked giraffes, on February 2 we’ll all gather to celebrate Lightbulbmas.

The light that warms cannot be removed from the light that purges and refines; Christ’s birth cannot be separated from His Passion; Mary’s joy in the stable cannot be undone from the sword that pierced her heart at Golgotha; our everyday lives that bore and wear us down cannot be separated from the divine life we’re given in Christ. Candlemas teaches that impossible things happen alongside unremarkable things. We bless candles for our use, for practical and needful reasons, and moments later, we celebrate the very heavens rupturing open and Christ manifesting Himself anew on the altar. Though seemingly commonplace bread and wine is offered, it is truly the very flesh and the very blood of the God who cried out from cradle and from Cross. In the Eucharist, Christ veils his glory in simple bread, simple wine.

Remember the story of Candlemas and treasure it in your heart the whole year round: for you, light was given, light to strengthen, and light to challenge. For you, the sacred came down to earth and for you the earthly was made sacred. Out of love, for you, Christ gave Himself in Sacrament, so that never would your everyday be separated from the eternal.

Amen.