John's Cosmic Prologue: A Grander Design

This week I watched the first part of Stephen Hawking’s documentary, The Universe: The Grand Design.  In the documentary we travel from the wide expanse of the universe with its infinite possibilities to the reasoned elimination of nearly all random events in life. Within the span of just 45 minutes, with the rules of cosmic physics setting the parameters, we are led to conclude that all of life is simply influenced by a set of predictable variables and that everything we perceive about reality is based solely on our own individual interpretation of those variables. Even the decisions we make are predetermined by a catalog of past events stored in our memory which effectively creates the illusion of free will. We are left with what amounts to being a single-planed matrix.  But because this is not a perfect system we can only see a partial picture of how reality appears at any one time, and so our minds fill in the blanks.  It is a if we are all fish in a our own small fishbowl, completely dependent on the set of variables we have access to and are at the mercy of the constantly firing synopses in our brains that supply our minds with the missing information so seamlessly that we do not even notice.  For instance, we see color because our eye and brain functions work together as part of our excellent machinery. We do not see color because objects actually have color, it is only how we are hardwired to perceive and interpret our surroundings. This is hardly new science. It first began with Descartes who first made the clear distinction between what constitutes the mind and what constitutes the body; and made a distinction between the two; an idea not disputed to this day.  If you are not up on your Descartes, does the phrase, “I think, therefore I am, ” ring a bell?  Hawkins and a whole body of other scientists have been building on this theory over many decades. But Hawkins goes on to ask that if all human life can be reduced to cosmic physics, is there meaning to life?

If you haven’t guessed, I’m not a big Stephen Hawkins fan. But I am hardly the first religious advocate to clash with such grand schemes that seem so offhandedly eliminate God by way of scientific reasoning. In fact, by scientific reason alone, God does not even merit a mention. God is not even on the radar or a part of the equation.  On the other end of the spectrum, it is the popular tendency to associate Christianity with anti-intellectualism and opposition to scientific knowledge. Given the Episcopal Church’s encouragement of critical thought I do not find our little corner on the religious market guilty of such charges.  But given today Gospel reading: John’s reasoned treatise on the God, the Word, and Jesus’ part in this universally grand theological statement regarding all of creation, the passage of time and the roles of light and darkness, it seems only fair that a thinking faith community should find its voice in such discussions.

The majority of our Christian forebears could not have fathomed such diversity of thought, much less a stand-off between scientific intellectuals and religious fundamentalists, which leaves both parties the poorer for it.   Far more broadly, our theological forebears left us with a way of thinking about the human capacity to reason; as opposed to reason itself being the topic of debate. They referred to reason in three ways: created reason, fallen reason and regenerative reason. Created reason is the human mind working for good, as was intended – in the beginning, as it were.  Some literalist would liken this to the Garden of Eden experience.  Others would simply say, having the capacity to reason made us human, it separates us from all other animals on this planet. But to reason alone was good enough for only a time. Eventually, some would say as we evolved, our ability to reason was fashioned into a tool for pushing us to extend beyond our means; coaxing us to believe that if we can dream it, we can do it, independent of either the help of, or the advice of, our creator. Another word for this is sin.  Which leads us to fallen reason, which is corrupt and corrupting, a distortion of a created good; but not a criticism of reason itself.  And finally there is regenerative reason, or reason reborn.  This is where a thinking person can find some refuge in the scientific/religious standoff.  It is regenerative reason that gives John such a powerful voice; a voice that has propelled the Gospel of Jesus Christ in to every nation on earth, and found a home in millions of hearts of soundly reasoned, faithful people, including scientists and intellectuals.  When reason is reborn, the boundaries of what is and what is not real or possible become impossible to declare, much less define.   

But to go where John wants us to go, "to go where no man has gone before", as it were, it will be of some use to us to revisit Stephen Hawkins.  Among his theorems, based in physics and cosmic science, is the idea that there are limits to what we are able to perceive.  Hawkins suggests that even as complex as human beings are we are only able to process a fraction of what actually makes up the world in which we exists.  Our version of reality is only defined by that single plane matrix after all.  Hawkins points out that this is one of the basic constants of the universe; the limits of each system’s ability to relate to another system; regardless of how interconnected it might be.  Imagine, if you can, the end of this universe, and the one it merges into and where that one ends.  We cannot imagine it; that’s the point. It’s not that an ever-expanding universe doesn’t exists, it’s just that we humans are limited as to what knowledge we will ever be able to acquire; it is far beyond us.  Our creator, the one we call God, or who John refers to as The Word, is in that category; the more than we can fathom category.   

We think and therefore we are, in fact does not make us rulers of the universe, or lords of our own creations (as Hawkins suggests), but very clearly points out that we are subjects bent to the will of forces far greater that even our wildest imaginings. It is in that place, the place beyond our wildest imaginings of a super complex matrix that is not single-planed but of multiple dimensions, it is there that God resides.  It is from that place that God spoke the Word, the Word that was with God. “He was in the beginning with God. All things came into being through him, and without him not one thing came into being. What came into being in him was life, and the life was the light of all people.  The light shines in the darkness, and the darkness did not overcome it.” There is a undeniably cosmic element to John’s reasoning.  This cosmic understanding of the divine and the world as part of that otherworldly reality is expressed similarly in Isaiah 55, “so shall my word be that goes out from my mouth; it shall not return to me empty, but it shall accomplish that which I purpose.”   

 It is within the expansive understanding that religious people have of the world we live in that we find meaning for life.  I do not dispute this science nor do I think it the church’s place to do so, but I cannot find meaning in life so narrowly defined by single-planed matrices; free will that is predetermined by predictable variables, and a reality that has been largely filled in by a data bank of memories and prior experiences.  For me, for the church, for all religious people, it is God’s purpose that gives our life meaning. God’s purpose that intends for us to have life and have it abundantly. 

As we travel through this life, and we have explored for ourselves the consequences of creative and fallen reason within our own lives, we purposely redirect our energy toward regenerative reason; that is, employing our God-given ability to think through the complex issues that face humanity for the common good.   In this way our purpose may more closely align itself with God’s purpose. We do this with the three tools of Christian thought passed down to us by the aforementioned theological forebears; also known in the Anglican world as the three legged stool: scripture, tradition and reason.  We appreciate and greatly benefit daily for the strides made by science that have transformed our lives of toil into lives of ease; and we reason that there has been a great cost in doing so. We go to Holy Scripture not for comfort and solace but for strength and resolve to align our purpose with God’s purpose; to make right our common wrongs; to admit the damage we inflict on one another and resolve to cease in doing it.  And we look to a long tradition, about 4000 years of religious communities who centered their lives on the single purpose of knowing and obeying God and making God known in the world. And in doing these things we are not shaken by the stark theorems of cosmic physicists but we embrace them as part of the greater mystery of life. It is after all our most complex scientific attempts to explain life that ultimately reveal how severely limited is our understanding of things truly cosmic and fantastic.

Christmas Homily 2013

As I was preparing this sermon, I could not help but be reminded of one I delivered some 10 years ago on the occasion of Mother’s Day while serving a large, very affluent congregation on Hilton Head Island.  I had based the sermon on the historical relevance of the holiday. Mother’s Day began  in 1872, when Boston poet, pacifist and women's suffragist Julia Ward Howe established a special day for mothers --and for peace-- not long after the bloody Franco-Prussian War. That fact, when combined with a politically charged gospel reading that weighs in heavily on the estachological hope of peace, well, you can imagine that this was no sweet Hallmark Card Mother’s Day homily.  The next day I received a message on my office phone from a very angry mother, who I’m guessing had never lost a child to war, who complained between curses that I had ruined her Mother’s Day. She let me know, in crystal clear terms that she had come to church to hear a lovely sermon on the virtues and blessings of motherhood and that my sermon was a complete disappointment.  Being a new preacher and hoping to please everyone at all times, I was truly devastated.  The senior pastor had heard the phone message as well and said something to the effect of this:  On holiday homiletical occasions, a choice must be made: One must either preach the gospel or preach what people want to hear, and rarely do those two things coexist within the same sermon. 

You may now be clued in to the problem we have this evening.  The way forward for us then is for me to trust that you value truth more than sentimentality; and for you to trust that the purpose of the Gospel is to proclaim Good News and it is the work of the preacher to deliver upon that proclamation.

As I’ve said the Gospels are politically charged. Because we are not trained as biblical scholars, it is sometimes difficult to see the venom, the irony, the play on words, the insults, and the passive aggressive undertones that co-exist with the metaphorically peaceable passages of the lamb, the shepherd, the vine, the light, and the bread of life.  There was a war brewing when Jesus came into the world.  And that long-simmering aggression would explode into full-scale warfare at the time the gospels were written, some thirty – fifty years after Jesus’ death.  The Jews had mounted a war against Rome, the greatest empire the world has ever known and they were going to lose, badly.  So anyone who believes that the Gospels would be sterilized of the cataclysmic political circumstances of the times clearly did not learn about the Jewish Revolt of 66 in their Sunday School classes. Yes, I’m being trite; but the point is this. You and I did not learn about the Jewish Revolt. No one ever said to us, as we were learning about the Gospels:  The truth is, we don’t know who Matthew, Mark, Luke and John actually were or even if those were their real names.  It is very possible they used pen names as to not be discovered because what they were writing were wartime documents.  Just listen to how our Gospel reading begins on this Christmas Eve:  “In those days a decree went out from Emperor Augustus that all the world should be registered. This was the first registration and was taken while Quirinius was governor of Syria.”  From the very outset, the entrance of Jesus into the world is linked with the political realities on the ground.  His gospel is intended for all those Christians who lived in hiding, in isolation and in fear for their lives. Those frightened families and small bands of Christians gathered secretly in house churches scattered across the Middle Eastern wilderness sang psalms and praised Almighty God for strength of his right arm, for his righteousness and mercy.  And they read from scrolls secretly delivered to them from writers such as Luke.

By the time Luke is writing his Gospel there has been so much bloodshed, and so much loss; not one woman, child or animal was spared in the Roman slaughter.  Jerusalem had been burned so severely as to leave no evidence that it had ever existed.  If we are to truly  to hear the Good News proclaimed, then we must begin by imagining we are there. It is only when we realize that all is lost, that nothing has been saved, and that the enemy has taken their victory with spectacular ferocity that we can hear the profound meaning of the angel’s words.  We must imagine the words of the angel of the Lord rising up from thick smoke that keeps the day as night for months and the unrelenting smell of war; it is from this place the angel proclaims: “Do not be afraid; for see - I am bringing you good news of great joy for all the people…… And suddenly there was with the angel a multitude of the heavenly host, praising God and saying, “Glory to God in the highest heaven and on earth peace among those whom God favors.” 

Now let that last phrase settle on you for a moment…. On earth peace among those whom God favors…. Which begs the question, whom does God favor?  Certainly not the Romans, that seems obvious.  But what about now?  For whom is this proclamation intended?  And have I in my arrogance assumed all along it was intended for me?  Martin Luther noted in one of his sermons, “[The angel] does not simply say: ‘Christ is born,’ but ‘for you he is born.’ What good would it do me, if he were born a thousand times and if this were sung to me every day with the loveliest airs, if I should not hear that there was something in it for me and that it should be my own?” 

Quite simply, if we follow the text, then it is clear that the message was intended for the shepherds.  But even this might not be as it appears.  Remember this is a wartime document.  The Good News announces that there is another conflict in play far beyond the temporal realm; a war between the hostile world that seeks to destroy the things of God, and the divine who has promised peace to those whom God favors.  A child has come into the world, and he is the messiah, the anointed one. Let this be a sign for you.  To who? To the shepherds. We have a coded message in these shepherds with three possibilities.  Because shepherds were known to be at the very bottom of the social and economic ladder, the Good News proclamation might have been intended for the very poor.  But because poverty is not accidental, nor is it a natural state of being but is rather the result of deliberate social policy, this might be a message for those who profit from the impoverished, or whose gains are the direct cause of poverty.  For these, this is not Good News; it warns those who deal in greed and human misery to beware because Almighty God has entered into the world to do battle the forces of evil. And God will not be defeated.

But these shepherds appear to be the owners of the sheep and not hired hands, which does not make them poor but of a very different circumstance. In that case they may be meant to represent the rulers of Israel – a sad history in itself; which points us to the rulers of today’s nations; again delivering a warning that should not be ignored.  For as much as we long for peace, we put our hope in a God that is still waging war against injustice.   

Or perhaps we are simply meant to think of another shepherd, David, King David, that is; to consider that God is always doing a new thing, and that God’s most daring promises are fulfilled in the most unexpected  of circumstances.  Like the promise of peace yet to be fulfilled by a child born in a stable, in the presence of shepherds, with unwed parents wholly blessed by the intervening of the Holy Spirit; parents who will very shortly flee to save the life of their son under threat from a King foolish enough to wage his own war against God.  

But in as much as the message was not delivered with us, or the state of the world 2000 years and many wars later in mind, it is undeniably meant for us to whole heartedly receive.  This Good News, this proclamation, this promise of peace is our inheritance.  It is ours to fully claim.  It is for us to ponder the depth and breadth and the beauty of it, even as we still long for the complete fulfillment of it.  Now the peace of which the angel spoke, was, within the context of Luke’s wartime document, clearly intended to deliver the promise of the ceasing of hostilities; an end to war, a very real and terrible war between the Roman Empire and Jews and the Christians who were associated with them.  To give those first generation, founding Christians hope that one day they would no longer be hunted down, tortured and killed for their love of Christ – to strengthen them as they spoke out to those with no hope – for converting Gentiles and Jews alike to practice a faith that for the first time ever, did not promote war and aggression, but insisted on peace.

But for many of us today, the peace God offers, and the peace we need, is much closer to home. It is the hope of peace for those who are fighting wars of illness, sorrow, anger, injustice, oppression, discord between family members, estranged spouses and children, regret, shame, imperfection, incarceration, addiction, incest, adultery, and all manner of things done and left undone.  It is the peace that rests in one’s heart that surpasses all human understanding.  It is the peace that comes from surrendering oneself and one’s battles into the hands of God.  It is comes from seeing the child in the manager as a sign – a sign meant for you.   For you Christ was born.  That you might find peace of mind, and rest for your soul. That you might cease whatever private war you are waging. That you might surrender your will to God’s will. That you might receive the peace of God, and that you might, one day, pass that peace on to another.

Perhaps it was this peacetime pondering that led a German pastor to set down a poem in the dark days of late December. At Christmas the church’s organ unexpected failed and the organist offered his guitar to take its place.  The humble pastor then offered his simple poem that it might be paired with the guitar for the Christmas Eve mass.  [Organ begins to softly play Silent Night] And so it was that in 1818, in St. Nicholas Church, the world heard for the first time, “Silent Night.”  In appreciation of our peaceable time and in honor of those for whom peace has not yet come, let us join our voices….

All sing Silent Night

Sermon for the Fourth Sunday of Advent, 2013

Once or twice a year, my son, Ian, and I, go on a puzzle spree.  The coffee table in our living room has two finished puzzles lying on it.  This week the oldest of the two was broken up into its separate parts for someone else to reconstruct.  And we began a new puzzle.  So far we’ve gotten the outside edge done and are working our way from those outer edges to the center.  When I think of how to explain the events surrounding Jesus birth, if only to myself, I begin in the same way.  

I practice pastoral theology. That is to say, I need my theological constructs to be rooted in something other than uneducated speculation or the mythological ideologies of a bygone era.  I need theology to actually make sense, because if it just doesn’t make sense, or if it asks people to believe in something that really is not quite believable then it becomes inauthentic.  We Christians are not unreasonable people, but we do require a solid theological base on which we can entrust our lives. It must be authentic; it must be real; it must be believable.  I’m not discounting mystery and its role in the least; but even mystery must function within an authentic construct. 

The most frustrating part of doing a puzzle is coming across that piece that should fit, except it doesn’t.  It’s so close, but it is shaped in such a way that makes clear it’s meant for another place. I confess that this is how I have sometimes felt about the biblical account of the virgin birth.  It seems it should fit perfectly, and yet the way we have been told the story, and the way we keep retelling it, well it seems a forced fit. 

So I was particularly happy when I came across the work of Czeck theologian Jan Milic Lochman. He died in 2004, but left us with a theologically sound and equally bold assertion regarding the virgin birth. It has aided me is framing in the edges of this puzzle of the charming Nativity scene that is repeated across the world in children’s pageants and as lawn statuettes.  It is a lovely scene, but it often reduced to the stuff of legend. It is a lovely scene, but when we try on our own to unpack it theologically we’re left with is an incomplete puzzle that cannot be finished because none of the pieces seem to really fit. And we can never get past that struggle, that frustration of trying to find the right piece in a pile of 500 or 1000 pieces. It is just too big a task for us, and so we are left with a partially complete Nativity scene, a one dimensional image of a coffee table puzzle, and no idea of how to complete it.  

One of the keys of puzzle-construction is that you work on it only for as long as you are making progress. When you’re stuck, its best to leave it for the other person to have a go. So in this case, I had gone as far with the Virgin Birth puzzle as I could. So I took a break from trying to work it out, to make sense of it.  Fortunately, Lockman (and a host of other capable theologians) have been working on the same puzzle. After reading of his work, I found a workable frame to put around this story that is foundational to the Christian ethos.  I would like to share a bit of it with you.

Charles Wood, a commentator for Feasting on the Word, which is an indispensible collection of commentaries on every lesson of every week for the entire three year lectionary cycle has offered the following remarks regarding today’s gospel reading on the topic of the virgin birth.

Modern, Czech theologian Jan Milic Lochman, “frequently noted the way both the communist East and capitalist West fostered ‘one-dimensional’ views of reality.  Truth is reduced to fact, and fact denotes what fits into the reigning economy, with its ideals of production and consumption and its corresponding ways of measuring and controlling reality.  For Lockman, Christian faith involves a deliverance from that sort of impoverished perception- or rather, lack of perception… Lochman’s treatment of the relevant passages in the Apostles’s Creed – [that being,] “conceived by the Holy Spirit, born of the Virgin Mary” – can be of substantial help to us as we consider Matthew’s account of the virgin birth. Lochman observed how the meaning of the Gospel text is lost when subjected to the kind of reductive reading our [modern] one-dimensional worldviews seem to force upon us. 

Many Christians, to say nothing of the wider population, seem agreed that the intent of this passage is to assert a factual claim, a biological/historical claim, about the parentage of Jesus.  That claim is as follows:  Jesus had a human mother, Mary, but no human father.  Mary was somehow impregnated (supernaturally) by God, so that the child was both divine and human. The question, then, is whether this affirmation is properly part of the Christian faith – perhaps an essential part – or rather a legend that somehow became part of the early tradition and is at best harmless. To deny the claim seems to amount to a denial of the incarnation. To deny the claim is to say that Jesus is just an ordinary human being, with two ordinary human parents . But to affirm the claim may be equally problematic.” What we end up with on the other end of the spectrum is a demigod – that is the product of the union between a human and a divine entity.

Fortunately for us, in about the fourth century, the early church worked out a solid Christology that has withstood the test of many centuries, and it did not include either of these possibilities.  Since the Council of Chalcedon, the church and its creeds has confessed Jesus to be “one person in two nature, ‘complete in his deity and complete – the very same – in his humanity.”  It is a grand statement, that makes perfect sense, but it does not tell us how to reconcile our creedal confession with the modern understanding of virgin birth narrative. We know who Jesus and what we believe about him. We’re just a bit fuzzy on how, exactly, he came into being.

So how do we post-modern Christians, who have been very much influenced by the North American Modernist-fundamentalist of a century ago, explain the mysterious circumstances surrounding Jesus’ birth?  Perhaps we should go back to the text.  Wood goes on to say, “When our Gospel text speaks of God’s involvement in the conception and birth of Jesus, it speaks of God not as Father but as Spirit.  Mary ‘was found to be with child from the Holy Spirit.” Here is our opportunity to break free of a one dimensional reading of this text and open ourselves to a fuller appreciation of Matthew’s birth narrative “by bringing the story out of the realm of Hellenistic mythology and relating is decisively to the history of God’s involvement with Israel.  Throughout that history, God’s spirit is the catalyst of the new; the Spirit is the Lord, the giver of life. [So] to say that Mary’s child is ‘from the Holy Spirit’ is to say that God is creating a radically new beginning. These reflections have followed the suggestion of Lochman that we think of the virgin birth as an ‘interpretative dogma.’ It is not an ‘article of faith’ in itself…. It is best construed as a pointer to a more central… affirmation, namely, that in Jesus, God has assumed our humanity” not through some supernatural human and divine union – rather as an act of the Holy Spirit, which is itself mysterious, but not beyond the scope of believability.  

This gives you and I something to say to people who confess to us that they are really struggling with reciting a creed they don’t believe. And the main struggle happens to be with the one part upon which all our faith hangs: the incarnation. This is because it is the incarnation that gives the resurrection its power. We cannot simply look at them and say “Where is your faith?”  Quite honestly, I need a reasoned faith too. I do not need proof positive, but certainly not something so fantastic that it too should seem to reside in the North Pole. 

 

Here’s what I can and do believe.  I believe in God, the Truine God, who is the Creator, Redeemer and Sustainer of the world. I believe that Jesus is the son of God, but was conceived by the Holy Spirit. I believe that having been conceived by the Holy Spirit, he was made man, fully human, and at the same time fully divine. I believe that Jesus lived as one of us and experienced the fullness of the being human.   I believe that this was done so that through him we might learn to trust, perhaps even love God.  People believe, I mean really believe, lock, stock and barrel, in all kinds of things they can’t explain:  UFO sightings, telethopy, clairvoyance, Tarot cards, horoscopes, myths and old wives tales.  I happen to think the workings of the Holy Spirit are more believable then any of those things.  So, if you happen to be struggling with the virgin birth, and it seems your puzzle is always only partially complete because you can’t get past the piece that seems to fit but actually doesn’t then reduce the story to its basic elements:  Mary and Joseph were engaged.  The Holy Spirit was present with Mary. Through the Holy Spirit God broke into the world in a way that would change history and positively affect the lives of millions upon millions of people over a span of 2000 years.  The Holy Spirit rested on Joseph as well and he accepted his role as husband to Mary and father to Jesus. 

As believers in the incarnation, that is, that God came into the world in the person of Jesus Christ, and through our baptism into the body of Christ the Holy Spirit rest upon each of us.  That is a mystery. A good mystery. The mystery to which I have committed my life.  A mystery that brings good news to the oppressed, widows, and orphans.  A mystery that has the power to set captives and prisoners free.  A mystery that provides all Christians with a worldview that is not narrow or one-dimensional, but full of promise and possibilities; that allows for a lot of gray area in a very black and white world.  It is a mystery that delivers on its promise of hope.  As Christians we speak in the language of hope and light and transformation; all of which are based in the mysterious workings of the blessed Holy Spirit. Most of which cannot be explained rationally.  I can live with that.

Remarks given at the Service of Remembrance, Dec. 14, 2013, Wilston’s Funeral Home

One of the prayers set at the beginning of today’s service of remembrance has a line in it of which I am particularly fond:  “we remember before you this day all those we have loved but see no longer... We thank you for giving them to us, their family and friends, to know and to love as a companion on our earthly pilgrimage.”  I appreciate it not just because the sentiment is lovely, but because it orients us properly to our purpose in gathering.  Today we remember before God the one we have lost. We rightly and humbly give thanks to God for the gift of that life.  We acknowledge that by God’s design we do not travel this life alone.  And we come face to face with our own mortality placed squarely in the sure and certain hope of the resurrection.  But for the next few moments I want to move the focus, ever so slightly, away from the ones we have lost, to our own sense of that loss. I am assured by my faith that those we have lost are now at peace in the eternal love of the Father, the Son, and the Holy Spirit.  Some consideration of the quality of our lives until we are reunited with the ones we love is of great importance. That is a long-winded way of asking:  How are you doing?

As a pastor, I most often find people so distraught by their loss that the even the best intentions of a funeral can be lost.  It is why I think that a gathering such as this can be so helpful and am grateful to Gary and Tina for hosting it each year.  Having the benefit of some time and space since the initial experience of our loss we might now be more open to looking beyond the rawness of grief and its overwhelming sense of finality and gently connect that loss to something bigger than ourselves.  

In an article written by the Disaster Recovery Coordinator for the Episcopal Diocese of New Jersey, Keith Adams spoke of the religious community’s experience in the process of their grieving after Hurricane Sandy.  His words effectively address something that many grieving people grapple with while in emotional turmoil: We secretly suspect that perhaps God has abandoned us.

Adams wrote:  “Most importantly we have learned the meaning of the word “with”. It has been ventured that the word “with” is the most important in [Holy] scripture. John’s gospel tells us, “The Word was with God”. From the beginning, God was with us. In the gospel of Matthew, Jesus tells us “behold, I am with you always”. To the end, God is with us. Not for us, like a stranger doing nice things or giving us random handouts. Not giving us everything we ever want, or protecting us from illness or hard times, but with us! When things go well and when they fall apart, in joy and in sadness, with us! In the aftermath of Sandy, we have learned what it is to be vulnerable. We have learned the very real difference between being there “for” our communities and being “with” our community. In the midst of a terrible storm or on a fine summer day…. God is with us, and we are with God.”

It is important to be assured that God is with us when we are hurting so deeply because this might be one of the loneliest journeys we will ever take.  Many of us will feel completely disconnected from everything and everyone; emotional isolation is a very real and its effects should not be underestimated.  But we are not alone.  Dear people of God be reassured:  God is with you. With you in joy, with you in heartache; unbidden God is there.  And most importantly, God’s presence is not dependent on your asking, or on your goodness.  From the very beginning of time God promised to be faithful and loyal to those he created and that promised has been fulfilled again and again; through the prophets and the sages, through the teaching of the apostles and witnessed to us in the lives of the saints.  This is not something dependent on you, so you cannot fail at it. The workings of God is far out of your control; you need but observe it and rest in the assurance of it.

Some years ago I lost my father to brain cancer. Now my dad was in his late 80’s and reflected positively on his long life. He refused all medical treatments to extend his life and despite his dementia, he never lost his clarity about the coming joy of being with Christ in the next life. So his passing was completely expected following several years of illness.  The surprise for me was that when I returned home from the funeral and immediately re-engaged with the activities of my life and work, it was clear that something unseen but very real was in play.  Everything seemed a little different, colored in unimportance.  Things that seemed pressing and weighty before, no longer had the same affect. I found myself surrounded by people, as pastors often are, but feeling strangely disconnected and unable to relate to anyone about anything.  The empathy I felt so easily for the concerns of others had suddenly abandoned me.  Outwardly, I’m sure I seemed unchanged, but my interior life had been greatly altered.  This phenomenon really caught me up short and I sometimes found myself more than a little panicked; knowing that as a pastor I really needed to be fully present and engaged and feeling really disturbed that something was just not right with me.  In a particularly distraught moment I confided my “problem” to someone who, as I unpacked my experience, began to complete my sentences.  Yes, she said, you’re grieving.  It will pass and you will be whole again, your life will feel like your own again but it will take some time.  While I knew, intellectually, that grief does not end with the funeral but actually is just beginning; I did not yet fully understand what that meant. I did not understand that even when death was completely anticipated and prepared for, that such loss takes months, years, from which to recover.  Her advice was to give in to it completely.  The more I tried to fight it or deny it, the more frustrated and unsettled I would be.  I was to think of my inner life as a wounded child and the task was to care for and nurture that child to wellness and wholeness, giving in completely to the process of grief.; to rest when I was tired; to sleep as much as a felt I needed too.  I was not to push myself to fully re-engage with life before I was ready.  But every day I was to get out of the house, even if it was just to take a drive and enjoy the scenery from the car window.  I was to journal about my days; what I was able to do, what I could not yet manage. I was to eat foods that were nourishing not just to the stomach but to the soul.  I was to find someone I could talk to about how the process was unfolding; speak out loud about the places I was beginning to feel movement and places where I felt I stuck. 

I imagine that most of you here today can relate to this process and that you are still working through it.  Take note of where you are in your own grief journey. Who are your companions, your confidants?  Are you struggling with sleep?  Are you eating food that is helpful to your body?  Are you talking to someone?  Have you surrendered to the process or are you fighting against it? Where have you felt Christ’s presence? in the silence of the small hours of the mourning or in the soothing voice of a friend? May this service of remembrance be for you a milestone in your journey.  Use this moment to mark the place you find yourself now.  Now is the time to make some course corrections should you feel it might be beneficial. 

In a few moments there will be an opportunity for you to come forward for anointing and the laying on of hands for healing.  The reality is that grief is an open wound upon the soul. At times it can feel unbearable; at the most unexpected times it can be overwhelming, or it can be more like a shadow that lives alongside us – always present, influencing every thought, every decision.  The act of anointing for those who are grieving is not to remove those feelings, but to ask for them to be made more manageable.  Not to bring an abrupt end to grief, but to ask that it might be more gently woven into the fabric of our lives. And to feel connected with God, in a very concrete way, through the touch of another human being acting as a vessel for the Holy Spirit. We receive anointing with an openness and trust in God, who has been revealed to us in the person of Jesus Christ.  We trust in the process: that through it we will grow in our humanity and our humility, that we will resume our lives with some degree of normality, that we will feel connected to the world again, that we will not feel so alone even when surrounded by people who love us.  It is God, after all who created us, thereby designing the process of grief.  God will not leave us abandoned in the midst of it. May this service be that assurance for you.

Resurrecting the faith, on Easter

For centuries now the resurrection of Jesus Christ has been the foundation for a theology of personal salvation.  Many a Christian has sought the sacrament of baptism, the gold standard of claiming one’s faith in Jesus as Lord and savior, to ensure their place in the eternal heavens. Emperor Constantine, under whom Christianity was first legalized and recognized as a legitimate faith tradition around 350, delayed his own baptism until he lay upon his deathbed reasoning that only then would he not have time to sin thereby rendering the sacrament null and void.  The driving force for the institutional church for centuries has been based on the mutually accepted agreement between the church and its followers, which goes something like this.  Membership has it benefits, not to mention it insures that you are, as some phrase it, "saved".  Whenever I hear this I cannot help but wonder: Saved from what?  Being saved  does not cover anyone else however, just you.  I wish I had a dime for every time I’ve heard someone lament the fate of a loved one because they haven’t been ‘saved’.  It’s every man for himself, as the saying goes. Within this narrow line of reasoning, anyone not baptized would not be welcome in heaven, including newborns.  And then there is the problem of those pesky mortal sins, which apparently have the power to trump the benefits of baptism.... and we’re back to Constantine.  This is just a minute sampling of  historical theologies of the cross.  But just because something is historical or even traditional, does not make it right.  In fact, what I have just described to you is good theology gone terribly wrong.

In the 300 years before Constantine took up the cause of Christianity, and had the vision of the cross as a sword, and before he build huge basilicas that spoke more of his delusions of grandeur then the Gospel it proclaimed, there was a kinder, simpler Christianity.  A Christianity that I think Jesus might have actually felt good about. A Christianity in which membership did not have benefits but was based on convictions that people felt so strongly about they died by the thousands to defend them.  These convictions had to do with proclaiming a kingdom that was primarily interested in caring for the poor and the ill, the displaced, prisoners, and the destitute, who were primarily women, widows in particular, and children. They did not confess any creed but relied on the simple tools given to them by the earliest believers: The Holy Scriptures, the Lord’s Prayer, the teaching of the faith and the sacrament of baptism in its most basic form, worship based on lessons from scripture and the sacraments of bread and wine.  These Christians worshiped in secret because it was illegal and the penalties were unimaginably horrible.  Nonetheless, there were a lot of them, and they were neither quiet nor invisible; so much so that Constantine decided it would be better to legalize the faith in order to bring peace to his kingdom lest it be torn apart from civil unrest. He employed the “if you can’t beat ‘em, join ‘em” strategy. And it worked. There was peace in Constantinople, but Christianity has never been the same.  So it seems to me that there is no better time than Easter morning to separate the goats from the sheep; to be reminded that the faith to which we hold fast is not rooted in doctrines or canon law or complicated theological constructs, nor in the authority of churches we have instituted or the offices that serve them, including the priesthood, but in the saving work of the cross.  We have made it very complicated over these last 1700 years. Ironically, our intellectual attempts to fully understand the resurrection and attach concrete meaning to it have made it less accessible.  Some of this work is very good and very helpful to lots of people.  And some of it is just shameful.  So how do we know what to believe?

This is an cartoon from a group called Christians tired of being misrepresented, that has been going around Facebook for a while.


Most Christians don’t want a complicated faith system and I count myself among them.  The basic things we need to know about God can be found in the Bible, which can be summarized as the following:
God made us.
God loves us.
God calls us home, repeatedly.
God forgives us, repeatedly.
God speaks to us through many voices, repeatedly.
God provides everything that sustains all life.
God requires:  That the love we have for God is all consuming and that we love all of creation just as much, including our neighbor.
God is eternally present and available.
God raised Jesus from the dead as a testament to these truths.
And as Rabbi Hillel says, the rest is commentary.

This is our story. It has withstood the test of time. Christianity might have changed significantly over the decades but human beings, not so much.  Perhaps that’s why Christianity, as an institution, often fails to deliver, but the story is still as strong as ever.  The story does not compel us to seek after personal salvation, but rather to proclaim the gift of salvation for all of humanity - those who deserve it as much as those who, to us, don't come close.  'Gift' being the key word: it is not a time limited offer, there is no Easter special, it cannot be bought, sold or traded, or even possessed.

When we train new acolytes, we pair them with someone who has been doing it for awhile and tell the new kid: “Just do what they do and you’ll be fine.  That’s how I started out in my own faith journey as a young adult.  I studied the people in my faith community that I admired for the strength of their faith and the power of their convictions, and I just did what they did until I was ready to do it for myself.  I still do this.  Many people, of all ages, serve unknowingly as my teachers.  One of those people has recently died. But his Christian witness will live on in all the ways he taught me about living out faith.   Here are a few things I observed about Bill that are filled with wisdom for the taking:  He loved spending Sunday morning in church.  He believed that Jesus lived, died, and rose on the third day and that in some mysterious way that made his life fuller and richer.  He believed that the sacrament of holy communion was essential to his spiritual health and well-being.  He believed in the mystery of the resurrection and felt no particular need to fully understand it or explain it. He believed that praying for others is as good for them as it is for us.  He believed that kindness was the first mark of authentic Christianity.  He never once told me what he believed, he just lived it. And I'm just going to do what he did.

A Meditation for Good Friday: A Blank Page

I have a love-hate relationship with writing. I hate a blank page. I love having words to edit, lots and lots of words. I hate having to write a lot to begin to feel creative. I love when the river of prose is flowing. It hate that what I write never seems finished. I love it when I actually like something I've written. 

I have a love-hate relationship with gardening. I hate the fallow plot in early spring that so closely resembles a blank page. I love planting seeds and young plants and watching them grow. I hate weeds. I love mulch. I hate dead plants that didn't winter over like the label promised. I love to see the bushes and trees with buds bursting with renewed life and vigor. I hate killing frosts in late spring. I love cold hardy plants and perennials.  I hate that by mid July, with little time to tend it, my garden will have gotten away from me. I love the growers market where I can buy the things I wish I'd been able to grow.

I have a love-hate relationship with Good Friday. I love the liturgy for this day. I hate that so few people participate in it anymore. I love the drama and music that sweeps us up into the story and makes it real again, even though we've heard it a million times. I hate that is has the longest reading of the church year. I love that God was willing to go to such lengths to claim us as his own. I hate that once Jesus has died, for at least a time, we're left with a blank page.

Blank pages: empty, stark, white, wide-open pieces of paper that hold nothing, they reveal gardens not yet planted, plans unfulfilled, and make pronouncements of death - the ultimate blank page.  Blank pages stare back of us, and can, ever so briefly and in the oddest way, have power over us. They simultaneously hold both the promise of what could be, but is not yet, and the dread of our deepest fears.

Still, the blank pages of our life are gifts from God. They were given to be filled, read, torn, crumpled, retrieved from the garbage, filed, folded, sent, received, returned, buried or burned, read, pondered. They can be vessels of promise as much as devices of demise. The possibilities are endless. On this day, Jesus has left us with only a single blank page; and the possibilities for it are both ended and endless. His death reminds us of things that we do not wish to be reminded. And the absurdity of the events that drove him to the cross seem bizarre to us: Do they not? How bizarre that Jesus' acts of mercy and kindness, healing and restoration, his proclamations of truth and wisdom, could end in this way. Isaiah frames it this way: "By a perversion of justice he was taken away. Who could have imagined his future? For he was cut off from the land of the living.... although he had done no violence and there was no deceit in his mouth."

We are vexed, stunned; bewildered by the speed at which injustice is dispensed. And yet, we, ourselves, by our inaction and muted voices, insure the proficiency of various machinery of injustice in every quadrant of the earth: child labor, human trafficking, modern slavery, torture, false imprisonment, bigotry, political corruption, environmental rape, preventable illness, hunger and thirst.  The silent role we play by our direct and indirect acts of co-mission, and more often, omission, is a blank page we dare not fill with the ink of truth, lest we be crucified.

At the time of the veneration of the cross, during the Good Friday service, the weight of our guilt and the depth of our dependence on God for redemption is blatantly apparent.  The Rev. Vicki Hesse observed the following regarding this ancient practice: “….the [veneration’s] physical and social awkwardness can sharpen one’s experience of spiritual gratitude and self-offering in a way that remaining seated [in] one’s pew cannot.” She recalls the first time she attended an Easter Vigil at an Episcopal church: “I had no idea what was going on. I found myself standing up and being swept along with the others toward the front of the church, where two acolytes were holding a wooden crucifix. I could see people ahead of me bobbing and kneeling in front of it. But then—to my horror—they kissed it too! I had never witnessed such behavior in the Evangelical churches of my childhood or adolescence and was not quite sure how I felt about this spectacle. But the prospect of stepping out of line was even more uncomfortable than that of going forward, so I stayed where I was and surreptitiously noted the number and style of bows, genuflections, and kisses of those ahead of me. [She concludes by saying] “[I]t is precisely this physical and social discomfort that conveys the painful reality of our inescapable spiritual ambivalence.”

In my experience, the blank page of the cross compels me to cross the line of liturgical perfection and enter the realm of unpredictable chaos. The only other time I have experienced this sensation was at the Wailing Wall in Jerusalem.  As I stood facing the wall, my face inches from it, I could hear the weeping of many of the women around me, some had their hands against it, some or the sides of their faces pressed against the cold stones, some knelt in front of it with their foreheads leaning into it, some were pushing small white pieces of tightly folded paper into the rough edged crevices, many stood facing it bowing rhythmically, reverently, almost trance-like, while praying the scriptures aloud from an open book of Hebrew text. I was overwhelmed by presence of every soul who had stood where I was standing.  In my imagination their translucent residues passed through me and around me. Millions of souls were there.  Likewise, when I kneel before the cross on Good Friday I am no longer aware of myself as an object of others curiosity but am enveloped by the millions of faithful Christians who for centuries have knelt, or stood, or fallen or prostrated themselves at the foot of an empty cross.  I am humbled to acknowledge the way their eternal presence has filled the vacuum of history.

On this day, in this moment, from this place all we have is a fallen hero, a victory for the wicked, an empty cross, and an occupied tomb; a blank page. We must do with it what we can: love it, hate it, ponder it, wonder about it, use it to scheme, to justify, to get real, to get a new perspective, to be inspired, to start over or use it as a starting point, write upon it a letter or plot a garden, embellish it with lovely drawings or silly doodles, sit with it and hear what we had not heard before.  Dare to touch it and know the anguish of God.