April 18 noonday Eucharist

I officiated at the daily noon, and led Communion from the Reserve Sacrament. My homily is as follows:


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

One of the great joys of being an Episcopalian, of worshipping according to the Anglican tradition, is the beauty of the language of our Book of Common Prayer. The phrasing in our prayer book is intentional: each word chosen for its layers of meaning, for the richness and depth of its imagery, an in cadence with the words with which it joins to form a melodic prayer to Our Father. The form and flow of the words in the prayer book are the product of some of the most talented and gifted men and women who work their art in the English language.
And it’s even on purpose! Many people describe the language of the prayer book as being beautiful, of being fluid and soothing, and it’s no accident. Our collects are designed not only for the beauty and simplicity of their language, but for the number of syllables, for the repetition of consonant and vowel sounds. The language is not just subjectively beautiful, but is objectively crafted to repeat sounds, is structured to have balance of syllables in its phrasing. It is objectively ordered toward harmony.
Part of what makes so much of the prayer book memorable is that structuring of its language. Consider the prayer book words and phrases that have entered our common language: “dearly beloved, we are gathered here”. “Ashes to ashes, dust to dust.” “The quick and the dead.”
Our reading from the Acts of the Apostles refers to a part of the life of the early church that also passed down to us a simple and beautiful phrase. But first the background. It is soon after the death and resurrection of Christ, and His followers have been galvanized by the miraculous life He lived, energized by the love He showed to them and to others, both in His living of His life and in His leaving of it. These men and women who followed Him have been changed, and their lives will never again be the same. They go out into the public places and tell others of the changes inn their lives because of Jesus of Nazareth, telling their neighbors, telling strangers of the life, the death, and the glorious resurrection of this man whom they’ve come to know as God among them. And, like the prayer book would do hundreds of years later, they told that story in language that was direct, simple, vivid, and beautiful. This period of the spreading of the Gospel, of the beginning of the growth of those who knew Jesus to be the God of Israel, is termed in Greek kerygma, which simply means proclaiming. Among the first kerygmas, among the first ways that the early Church proclaimed this thing we now call Christianity was in the simple phrase Jesus is Lord.
This phrase, Jesus is Lord, like the prayer book phrases mentioned earlier, is rich in its layers. It communicates all of the following: a specific man, Jesus of Nazareth, who was named with a common name and whom many of us here knew and loved, this Jesus was a man among us whom, through the living of His life, was special. We witnessed that He was different. Through the beautiful life He lived, through His terrible death, and when on the third day He rose from death, through all of these things, we knew this Jesus to be Lord. We knew him to be Lord, the Lord who created Eden, who revealed Himself to our fathers Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob, who led Moses and our forefathers from bondage in Egypt, who prepared the Law for us, who sent the prophets to us, who loved and sheltered us. This Jesus is that Lord.
That message that was first told in Jerusalem, that kerygma, has continued from those days down to the present. Each day, all across the globe, in churches, in chapels, in homes, in cars, on sidewalks, millions of Christians, some alone and some in groups, proclaim that Jesus is Lord. For millennia, Christians have told the story of the life, death, and resurrection of Jesus, and confessed that Jesus is Lord. We do it here today, now in this place. The storytelling of the first apostles continues now: we come to share the story that Jesus is God’s love for us, given in His entirety, given simply, given beautifully, and given in love. We tell the story of the love of God for us, and of our love for Him.
And, we tell others. Evangelism isn’t just the work of missionaries in foreign countries, it’s our work. We can also proclaim that Jesus is Lord as the first apostles did, using words that are simple, beautiful and powerful. We can speak to our families, our neighbors and friends about how we have felt the love of God by knowing that Jesus came among us so that nothing would ever separate us from God’s love. We can evangelize by living lives of love for ourselves and others, showing that Jesus’ love completely pervades all that we do and are.
More than any beautiful phrase, more than any harmonious sentence, the proclamation that Jesus is Lord can change our lives so that we ourselves become testaments to the beauty and love of God. Let us pray that we might know more completely how we can accept God’s love into our own lives, and that we might be given the strength and grace to accept God’s invitation to make us living examples of His eternal proclamation of love. Amen.