Category: Eucharist (Page 28 of 35)

A Theology of Gift Giving – Sermon for the Second Sunday of Christmas – January 5, 2014

January 5, 2014 / eric / 0 Comments

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This sermon was preached on the Second Sunday of Christmas, January 5, 2014, at St. Paul’s Episcopal Church, Medina, Ohio, where Fr. Funston is rector.

(The Revised Common Lectionary, Christmas 2A: Jeremiah 31:7-14; Ephesians 1:3-6,15-19a; Psalm 84; and Matthew 2:1-12. These lessons can be read at The Lectionary Page.)

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Gifts of the Wise Men Very recently in the church office mail there was this small envelope addressed to me personally — the address has been typed out on a separate sheet of paper, cut therefrom, and glued onto the envelope. There is no return address and the postmark is a Cleveland, OH, cancelation. Inside there was no personal note of any kind, just a page torn from the last quarter’s Forward Day by Day devotional. One side, as you can see, has been scribbled all over; clearly not the side I am supposed to read. The other is the meditation for October 30, 2013, which begins:

Have you ever suffered because you sat through a really boring, abstract, incoherent, and disconnected sermon? Most of us have. Believe it or not, some people report that after enduring something like that, they decide never to go back to that particular church or any church at all. Sermons can make or break some people’s relationship with the church.

(The entire meditation can be read at Forward Day by Day.)

I have to be honest — my first reaction on receiving this was to think, “Well, that’s not something I wanted to get!” And immediately I was reminded of one Christmas when our children were quite young.

Our family tradition is to wait until Christmas morning to open our packages, so even if we’d been to the Midnight Mass we would rise early to see what Santa had brought. On the Christmas I recalled, our daughter rushed down the stairs from her second-floor room to the tree set up in our first-floor den and tore open the largest of her gifts, ripping to shreds the wrapping paper with obvious excitement. However, when she saw what was under the wrapping her expression changed to disappointment and she cried out, “That’s not what I wanted!” I don’t remember what she had wanted; I don’t even remember what we had given her. But I remember that reaction.

It got me to thinking about the reasons we give things to one another, the how of it and the why of it. What is the “theology of gift giving?” The gifts of the wise men to the Christ-child help us to explore that question.

The first element of such a theology would be the recognition that the giving of gifts is perfectly acceptable! There are some who teach that it is not, but we have plenty of examples in Scripture including, of course, the very story we are told in today’s gospel reading of the visitation of the Magi. More basically, we have God’s own example starting with the gift of life to plants, animals, and human beings as described in the Creation stories and exhibited most clearly in God’s self-giving in Jesus Christ. Generosity and charity are fundamental to an active Christian faith. Giving is the very thing that defines our belief: God-made-human gave himself entirely so that we might be free to give ourselves entirely back to God. As James said, “Every generous act of giving, with every perfect gift, is from above, coming down from the Father of lights.” (James 1:17, NRSV) Gift-giving, in a sense, is the purpose of the Incarnation, so it is something strongly encouraged.

The second element of a theology of gift giving is that giving gifts allows us to be ministers of grace, the free and undeserved help of God. The gifts of the wise men were symbolic: the hymn “We Three Kings” lays out in verse what these are. Gold is a symbol of kingship, frankincense (used for incense in worship) is a symbol of deity, and myrrh (an embalming oil) is a symbol of death. (By the way, did you know that that hymn is quintessentially Episcopalian? It was written by John J. Hopkins in 1857 for a Christmas pageant at General Theological Seminary, the Episcopal Church divinity school in New York City.) In other words, they are symbolic of the full grace and mercy of God incarnate in Jesus. Every gift we receive, especially those from God but really from anyone, is a demonstration of God’s grace because, after all, grace is undeserved. How many times have you opened a present and sat there with the gift still in the box, looking at the giver with eyes and thinking to yourself, “What done to deserve this?” That question, of course, is rhetorical. The answer is “Nothing.” Gift giving is a form of grace by which we imitate the behavior of God and model the character of God.

The third element of a theology of gift giving is that it give us opportunity to display the love of God. “Each one must give as he has decided in his heart, not reluctantly or under compulsion, for God loves a cheerful giver,” wrote Paul to the Corinthians. (2 Cor. 9:7, ESV) And, of course, “God so loved the world that he gave his only Son.” (John 3:16, NRSV) Every gift should be a reflection of that love. If a gift is a real gift it is given with no thought of return. It’s not about starting an endless series of gift exchanges. It’s not about buttering someone up. It’s not about impressing someone or trying to get someone to do something for you. A real gift is an act of unconditional love, with no demands, no hints, no requirements of any return. Love, as Paul reminds us in the First Letter to the Corinthians,

is patient; love is kind; love is not envious or boastful or arrogant or rude. It does not insist on its own way; it is not irritable or resentful; it does not rejoice in wrongdoing, but rejoices in the truth. (1 Cor. 13:4-6)

Our gift-giving character should be one of genuine love. By giving a gift, we are symbolically recalling the gift of Christ for our salvation because “God so loved the world.”
The final element of a theology of gift giving, the element to which the first three point, is that it is relational. When the Magi encountered the Christ-child, they worshiped him: “On entering the house, they saw the child with Mary his mother; and they knelt down and paid him homage.” Worship is an expression of relationship at its deepest. However we define the word worship, it has its center in how we relate to God; it is the very reason, Scripture tells us, that we were created.

As I think I’ve mentioned before, one of my favorite poets is the African American James Weldon Johnson. At funerals, I often use one the poems from his collection God’s Trombones: Seven Negro Sermons in Verse. Another poem in that book is entitled The Creation; it explores this truth of our creation. The poem begins —

And God stepped out on space,
And he looked around and said:
“I’m lonely —
I’ll make me a world.”

The poem continues, as Genesis does, detailing the creation of earth, the seas, the plants, the animals . . . and then goes on —

Then God walked around,
And God looked around
On all that He had made.
He looked at His sun,
And He looked at His moon,
And He looked at His little stars;
He looked on His world
With all its living things,
And God said, “I’m lonely still.”

Then God sat down
On the side of a hill where He could think;
By a deep, wide river He sat down;
With His head in His hands,
God thought and thought,
Till He thought, “I’ll make me a man!”

Up from the bed of the river
God scooped the clay;
And by the bank of the river
He kneeled Him down;
And there the great God Almighty
Who lit the sun and fixed it in the sky,
Who flung the stars to the most far corner of the night,
Who rounded the earth in the middle of His hand;
This Great God,
Like a mammy bending over her baby,
Kneeled down in the dust
Toiling over a lump of clay
Till He shaped it in His own image;
Then into it He blew the breath of life,

And man became a living soul.
Amen. Amen.

“Like a mammy bending over her baby . . . .” We are created for relationship — relationship with God and relationship with each other. Like the gift giving of the Magi, that’s what our gift giving to one another is all about. It is a tangible expression of relationship; although gifts are given out of love with no expectation of reciprocation, they do provoke a response. They are relational, and in the way we relate to each other, especially in our giving of gifts to each other, we exhibit how we relate to God.

I’ll be honest. I was upset by this anonymous gift. But in the end I’m grateful for it because it is a reminder of this most important element of the theology of gift giving, this relational aspect. After that rather brutal opening paragraph, the Forward Day by Day meditation examines what it calls “Jesus’ methodology” of preaching by story-telling and then concludes, “In spite of all of our media gadgets, communications systems, and technological tools, we still need to truly perceive, listen, and understand.”

My mentor, the late Fr. Karl Spatz, taught me to think of a sermon as a conversation and as a gift. A sermon is not a lecture and it has many participants. Preaching is grounded in community, and like gift giving is relational. Preaching is not me or any clergy person standing in the pulpit telling you what we think that you should hear. A sermon is an exploration of the things we all struggle to understand, the troubles we all have to deal with, the things we all try to do better, the joys we all celebrate. A sermon is a priest’s prayerful and considered reflection upon these things, offered humbly as a gift to the gathered community. The congregation’s part in the conversation is to receive the gift and, as the meditation says, make the effort “to truly perceive, listen, and understand.” That may sometimes mean that we continue the conversation at a later time, perhaps through notes like this one — but we can only really continue the conversation that if I know who you are . . . .

When all is said and done, any gift giving (including any preaching) is an imperfect thing. It is an imperfect thing that seeks the perfection of the one true gift, the gift of Jesus for the salvation of the world. Amen.

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Father Funston is the rector of St. Paul’s Episcopal Church, Medina, Ohio.

The Logos Became Meat – Sermon for the First Sunday of Christmas – December 29, 2013

December 29, 2013 / eric / 0 Comments

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This sermon was preached on the First Sunday of Christmas, December 29, 2013, at St. Paul’s Episcopal Church, Medina, Ohio, where Fr. Funston is rector.

(The Revised Common Lectionary, Christmas 1A: Isaiah 61:10-62:3; Psalm 147:13-21; Galatians 3:23-25;4:4-7; and John 1:1-18. These lessons can be read at The Lectionary Page.)

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Selection of Raw Meats One of my favorite Christmas hymns is O Come, All Ye Faithful. The last verse of the hymn is:

Yea, Lord, we greet thee, born this happy morning;
Jesus, to thee be glory given;
Word of the Father, now in flesh appearing.

The last line is derived from our Gospel lesson this morning, from prologue to the Fourth Gospel:

“In the beginning was the Word, and the Word was with God, and the Word was God. * * * And the Word became flesh and lived among us.” These verses from the prologue to the Fourth Gospel are among the most beautiful, the most familiar, and the most abstract sentences in Scripture.

Although tradition tells us that the Fourth Gospel was written by the Apostle John, it’s actually highly unlikely that this is true. There are two basic reasons for this.

First of all, the development of the New Testament. A briefly sketched timeline of it would be something like this:

AD 30-33: Jesus is crucified and buried; he rises form the dead, appears to many over a period of about seven weeks; he ascends. The story of this is spread by word of mouth for several years and the “Jesus movement” grows as a sect within Judaism.

AD 35-40: Saul, a Pharisee, becomes a persecutor of the church, but is later converted and becomes Paul the Apostle to the Gentiles, founding churches in several Gentile communities.

AD 45-60: Paul produces the first written materials of what becomes the New Testament, his epistles (letters) to the various churches. These are written basically to solve problems that have arisen in the new Christian congregations.

AD 60-70: As those who personally knew Jesus begin to die, preservation of the story becomes important and the Synoptic Gospels (Matthew, Mark, and Luke) are produced; Mark is probably the first one written. In addition, more letters (the Catholic epistles of Jude, James, 1-3 John, the “letter” to the Hebrews, and so forth) begin to be produced.

AD 85-100: The Fourth Gospel is written.

Now let’s just think about this. Sometime during the third decade of the Christian era, Jesus called James and John, the sons of Zebedee, to be among his disciples. They were working men, possibly as young as 16, more likely in their early 20s, not too much different in age from Jesus himself. This would mean that by the time the Fourth Gospel was written, John would have been about 80 years old! That would have been more than uncommon in that day and age. It is very unlikely that he lived that long. I know that Christian tradition insists that John was the youngest of the disciples and lived to the ripe, old age of 98, but there is truly no evidence of that.

I believe the tradition may be accurate that the Fourth Gospel is based on the memories of John the Apostle, perhaps told (and possibly re-told) to someone who then built the Fourth Gospel from them, but I’m not convinced that John actually wrote this book.

The second reason for disbelieving the traditional attribution of the Fourth Gospel to the Apostle John is its literary style and erudition. Like all of the New Testament, it was written Greek, the common trade and international language of the First Century Roman Empire. Its Greek and its theology are surprisingly sophisticated; this prologue, which the lectionary makes our Gospel Lesson not only for today but also includes in one of the three sets of readings that can be used on Christmas, sets the tone. Its initial verse is probably the most abstract piece of prose in the whole of the Jewish and Christian Scriptures. It is a philosophical statement worthy of the greats of Greek philosophy. John the Apostle was a simple Galilean fisherman! It’s possible that he became a scholar of Greek philosophy and an abstract theologian in later life, but somehow . . . I just don’t think that likely.

So I don’t believe this Gospel was written by John the Apostle, the hot-tempered son of a Galilean fisherman. Instead, I believe it was written by an educated and erudite man, possibly a Greek-speaking Jew of the diaspora familiar with the traditions and texts of Greek philosophy. And from the pen of this man we have this beautiful but abstract explanation of the incarnation of God:

“In the beginning was the Word, and the Word was with God, and the Word was God. * * * And the Word became flesh and lived among us.”

The first verse could very easily have been written by a Greek philosopher living 500 or 600 years earlier. The concept of “the Word” or “the Logos” (to use the original Greek) was first introduced into Greek philosophy by Heraclitus in the Sixth Century BC. In his writings, the Logos seems to be a sort of independent, universal and ideal wisdom according to which all things come to pass, but to which humans cannot attain despite their best efforts. He wrote, “This Logos holds always but humans always prove unable to understand it, both before hearing it and when they have first heard it. For though all things come to be in accordance with this Logos, humans are like the inexperienced when they experience such words and deeds….”

For Aristotle, the Logos is a universal reason or rationality, movement toward which is the optimum activity of the human soul and should be the aim of all deliberate human action. Not long after Aristotle, the Stoic philosophers, starting with Zino of Citium, conceived of the Logos as an active reason pervading and animating the universe; they spoke of a logos spermatikos, the generative principle of the Universe which creates and takes back all things. They seem to have equated it with a psyche kosmou or “soul of the world,” and believed it to be the only vital force in the universe.

The author of the Fourth Gospel apparently knew of this Greek philosophical tradition and reaches into it to explain how it is that God became incarnate (I’ll come back to that word, incarnation, in a moment). It’s as if he’s consciously building a bridge between the philosophical world of the Greeks and the theological world of the Jews. There was precedent for doing so; the Greek-speaking Jews of the diaspora had used the term Logos in translating the Hebrew Scripture’s description of God’s creative activity, as for example in Psalm 33: “By the word (logos) of the LORD were the heavens made. . . .” (v. 6a) The Septuagint’s translators had used, but not expounded upon, the concept of the Logos, and — truth be told — the Greek and Jewish uses and understandings of the word were different.

For the Greeks there was a sharp distinction between the ideal, spiritual world and the mundane, physical world (Plato and Socrates with the “theory of forms,” which taught that there were unattainable ideal forms for every thing and every idea of which the things and ideas in the material world are only “shadows,” are perhaps the extreme case of this). The idea that the Logos, the creative force in the universe, might dirty itself with the material world, was unthinkable; the Logos might communicate directly with human beings, but entering the material world was out of the question. For the Jews, on the other hand, it was no problem to think that God might involve himself in the physical world, after all the Garden of Eden story portrait God as working with dust and clay, molding it with his own hands and breathing life into it from his own lips. For them, the direct communication was a problem! God spoke to humankind through intermediaries, through angels or through specially chosen people (Moses and the prophets); regular folks didn’t talk to God face to face. If a human heard the Logos of God directly, that human would die!

The Fourth Gospel takes on both and builds a bridge between them in this prologue:

“In the beginning was the Word, and the Word was with God, and the Word was God. * * * And the Word became flesh and lived among us.”

In the second of these verses, the author of John’s Gospel asserts (scandalously for the Greeks) that the ideal, the Logos, “became flesh,” sullied itself by taking on earthly form, and (scandalously for the Jews) “lived among us,” as one of us, someone anyone could talk to face to face, a man named Jesus.

The Greek translated as “became flesh” is rather more graphic than our lovely Jacobean archaic translation preserved through the centuries would suggest. Since the King James Version’s translation of these words as “the Word was made flesh” that (or the even more sterile “became human”) has been the typical English rendering of the Greek Kai ho logos sarx egeneto. The important word here is sarx. It might better be translated as “meat,” which would actually be how a speaker of Jacobean English would have understood the term “flesh,” as Strong’s New Testament Lexicon puts it, “the soft substance of the living body, which covers the bones and is permeated with blood,” the part used as food. Meat!

Today is the fifth day of Christmas . . . what should you have received from your “true love” today? Five gold rings! There is a legend that the song from which that is take, “The Twelve Days of Christmas,” was a catechetical device used by Roman Catholics in England and Ireland at a time when their religion was illegal; each of the days and each of the gifts is said to represent in code a particular lesson. A partridge in a pear tree represents Jesus; two turtle doves, the Old and New Testaments; three french hens, the theological virtues of faith, hope, and charity; four colley birds, the four gospels; five golden rings, the five books of Moses – Genesis, Exodus, Leviticus, Numbers, and Deuteronomy. Nice legend, not true! I recently read a musicological analysis of the song suggesting that, instead, the song is all about feasting and partying, and identifying the gifts as the dishes or entertainments that would be offered at a Christmas banquet. According to that author, the five golden rings are the rings on the neck of an English pheasant! The song is all about the meat served at the feast honoring the birth of the God who becomes meat. . . .

Those who speak a little Spanish will be familiar with the word carne, as in carne asada (which means “grilled meat”). Remember that when you think of the “in – carne – tion.” And remember that this incarnate God would later take a loaf of bread and say, “This is my body” of which we are instructed to eat. John’s Gospel, from these very first words in the prologue, is eucharistic in emphasis, insisting that the irruption of the Logos is for our nourishment. An absolute scandal to both Jews and Greeks! (The author of John seems intent on living up to Paul’s assertion that the Gospel is “a stumbling block to Jews and foolishness to Gentiles.” [1 Cor. 1:23])

And then there is that notion that this God who becomes flesh “lived among us,” a very weak translation of the original Greek which means something on the order of “and pitched his tent among us.” Here, the author is reaching back into Jewish history, in to the story of the Exodus. During those forty years in the desert, God was present with the Hebrews in the form of a pillar of fire and cloud which went before them to show them the way, occasionally behind them to guard them from harm, and when they would stop the pillar would stop and rest over the Ark of the Covenant. They were instructed to build a tent to house the Ark, a very elaborate tent but still, just a tent. When they encamped, they were to set it up and place the Ark inside of it. Once it was so housed, only Moses or his brother Aaron the high priest could approach it. Now, however, this enfleshed God was pitching his own tent and living among his people as one of them, someone to whom anyone had access, a man named Jesus.

“In the beginning was the Word, and the Word was with God, and the Word was God. * * * And the Word became flesh and lived among us.”

The prologue to the Fourth Gospel tells us that the Word was the light of creation shining in the darkness, that the Word became flesh that that light might be kindled in all people. There are bible scholars who assert that John was drawing on the wisdom tradition in the Hebrew Scriptures in which Wisdom is personified and portrayed as working with God in the Creation:

When he established the heavens, I was there,
when he drew a circle on the face of the deep,
when he made firm the skies above,
when he established the fountains of the deep,
when he assigned to the sea its limit,
so that the waters might not transgress his command,
when he marked out the foundations of the earth,
then I was beside him, like a master worker;
and I was daily his delight, rejoicing before him always,
rejoicing in his inhabited world and delighting in the human race.
(Proverbs 8:27-31)

I think the prophet Zephaniah might have been drawing on that wisdom image, as well, when he wrote, “He will rejoice over you with gladness, he will renew you in his love; he will exult over you with loud singing.” (Zeph. 3:17b)

And I wonder if the author of the Fourth Gospel might have alternatively used that image . . . or maybe he just left it for us to do. Could we not paraphrase the prologue:

In the beginning was the Word, and the Word was with God, and the Word was God. He was in the beginning with God. All things came into being through him, and without him not one thing came into being. What has come into being in him was life, and the life was the song of all people. The song sings in the silence, and the silence did not overcome it.

And could we not say, “And the Word was made flesh, and sang his song among us?” Someone with whom anyone might sing along, a man named Jesus.

“In the beginning was the Word, and the Word was with God, and the Word was God. * * * And the Word became flesh and lived among us.”

Two short, simply-stated verses from the prologue to the Fourth Gospel, perhaps the most abstract, meaning-laden of verses. I don’t think a simple fisherman from Galilee wrote them, though perhaps he did. When it comes down to it, it doesn’t really matter who wrote them. If we believe they were inspired by God and preserved by the church in the canon of Scripture under the guidance of the Holy Spirit, then we must take them seriously and seek to understand them. No amount of exposition in a sermon can unlock them for you, but I offer you these bits and pieces of information about their background with the encouragement to ponder them, to contemplate them, to pray and meditate about them. In them there is the reason for and the promise of the birth we celebrate in this season.

And it is a season! Despite the fact that the stores started their “after Christmas” sales on December 26, despite the fact that the radio stations are no longer playing Christmas carols, despite the fact that there are no more holiday movies playing on television, it is still Christmas. As I said, this is the fifth day of Christmas, the first of two Sundays in the season!

But I will give the stores and the broadcasters their way for a moment and close with a poem about Christmas being over, a poem by Howard Thurman, sometime dean of the chapels at both Boston University and Howard University, and an honorary canon of the Episcopal Cathedral of St. John the Divine in New York City. It is entitled The Work of Christmas:

When the song of the angels is stilled,
When the star in the sky is gone,
When the kings and princes are home,
When the shepherds are back with their flock,
The work of Christmas begins:
To find the lost,
To heal the broken,
To feed the hungry,
To release the prisoner,
To rebuild the nations,
To bring peace among people,
To make music in the heart.

“To make music in the heart.” Do you ever sing to yourself? I do that a lot. I don’t sing out loud much, but when I’m driving or vacuuming, shoveling snow or doing yard work, I often sing to myself, inside my own head, in my own heart. And I don’t just hum tunes, I sing the words. I sing of the Word incarnate: “Word of the Father, now in flesh appearing. O come, let us adore him.”

As you contemplate the Word made flesh, the light shining in the darkness, the song singing in the silence, pitching his tent and singing his song among us, may your heart be filled with song and may that song empower you to do the work of Christmas. Amen.

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Father Funston is the rector of St. Paul’s Episcopal Church, Medina, Ohio.

Four Christmas Poems – Meditation for Christmas Day – December 25, 2013

December 25, 2013 / eric / 0 Comments

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This meditation was offered on Christmas morning, December 25, 2013, at St. Paul’s Episcopal Church, Medina, Ohio, where Fr. Funston is rector.

(Revised Common Lectionary, Christmas, Proper Set III: Isaiah 52:7-10; Psalm 98; Hebrews 1:1-12; and John 1:1-14. These lessons can be read at The Lectionary Page.)

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Icon of the Nativity of Christ

Light Looked Down by Laurence Housman

Light looked down and beheld Darkness.
“Thither will I go,” said Light.
Peace looked down and beheld War.
“Thither will I go,” said Peace.
Love looked down and beheld Hatred.
“Thither will I go,” said Love.
So came Light and shone.
So came Peace and gave rest.
So came Love and brought life.
And the Word was made flesh and dwelt among us.

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Praise for the Incarnation by John Newton

Sweeter sounds than music knows
Charm me in Immanuel’s name;
All her hopes my spirit owes
To his birth, and cross, and shame.

When he came, the angels sung,
“Glory be to God on high;”
Lord, unloose my stamm’ring tongue,
Who should louder sing than I?

Did the Lord a man become,
That he might the law fulfil,
Bleed and suffer in my room,
And canst thou, my tongue, be still?

No, I must my praises bring,
Though they worthless are and weak;
For should I refuse to sing,
Sure the very stones would speak.

O my Saviour, Shield, and Sun,
Shepherd, Brother, Husband, Friend,
Ev’ry precious name in one,
I will love thee without end.

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I Heard the Bells on Christmas Day by Henry Wadsworth Longfellow

I Heard the Bells on Christmas Day
Their old familiar carols play,
And wild and sweet the words repeat
Of peace on earth, good will to men.

I thought how, as the day had come,
The belfries of all Christendom
Had rolled along the unbroken song
Of peace on earth, good will to men.

And in despair I bowed my head:
“There is no peace on earth,” I said,
“For hate is strong and mocks the song
Of peace on earth, good will to men.”

Then pealed the bells more loud and deep:
“God is not dead, nor doth he sleep;
The wrong shall fail, the right prevail,
With peace on earth, good will to men.”

Still, ringing, singing, on its way,
The world revolved from night to day,
A voice, a chime, a chant sublime,
Of peace on earth, good will to men!

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On the Mystery of the Incarnation by Denise Levertov

It’s when we face for a moment
the worst our kind can do, and shudder to know
the taint in our own selves, that awe
cracks the mind’s shell and enters the heart:
not to a flower, not to a dolphin,
to no innocent form
but to this creature vainly sure
it and no other is god-like, God
(out of compassion for our ugly
failure to evolve) entrusts,
as guest, as brother,
the Word.

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Father Funston is the rector of St. Paul’s Episcopal Church, Medina, Ohio.

What’s the Point? – Sermon for Midnight Mass, Christmas Eve – December 24, 2013

December 24, 2013 / eric / 1 Comment

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This sermon was preached at Christmas Eve Midnight Mass, December 24, 2013, at St. Paul’s Episcopal Church, Medina, Ohio, where Fr. Funston is rector.

(The Revised Common Lectionary, Christmas II: Isaiah 62:6-12; Psalm 97; Titus 3:4-7; and Luke 2:1-20. These lessons can be read at The Lectionary Page.)

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A few weeks ago, I was shopping at Giant Eagle and I wondered down the seasonal products aisle, which had been rapidly cycling through Halloween, then Thanksgiving, and now Christmas. On one shelf, I spotted something that pulled me up short; I had to have it and I knew that it would influence my Christmas Eve sermon. It was this Charlie Brown Christmas doll.

That same day, a ministry colleague who runs a tongue-in-cheek Facebook group entitled “The Society for the Prevention of Tacky Vestments” posted a picture of a clergy stole — this one — covered with pictures of the Peanuts gang opening presents around a Christmas tree. I knew I had to have it! I asked her where she’d found it and she directed me to an eBay page where I ordered it. It is truly tacky! It’s got all the wrong colors — it’s mostly red, the color of martyrdom — and sends all the wrong messages — it’s crassly commercial; it’s all about the worst of the secular observance of Christmas; it’s got nothing religious on it at all. (It made me sort of wonder: if your Christmas fabric has nothing about Jesus on it, what’s the point of making a stole out of it?) Nonetheless, I had to have it and I knew that, together with Charlie Brown here, it would influence this Christmas Eve sermon. Let me tell you why . . . .

When I was seven years old, about a month or so into the first semester of Second Grade, my mother decided that we (she and I) would take an extended Thanksgiving-through-Christmas holiday with her parents in Long Beach, California. At the time, we were still living in my hometown, Las Vegas, Nevada. My father had died a year and a half before; my older brother was living with our other grandparents in Kansas. So, it was just the two of us.

I guess she had made arrangements with her employer to take an extended leave, and with my school because I was going to have to do reading and arithmetic assignments while we were gone, but that was OK with me. At least I wouldn’t have to go to school and endure the daily routine with Mrs. Dougherty!

So for a little more than a month encompassing those two major holidays, we shared my grandparents’ second floor walk-up a block from the beach and the Nu-Pike amusement park in Long Beach. On the ground floor of the building where they lived were two businesses: a dentist’s office and my grandfather’s barbershop. For some reason, the barbershop was closed! My grandfather had packed up his tools (they were now in a case in the front hall closet of the apartment) and put the business up for sale.

I was later to learn that he had done so because he was suffering with late-stage colon cancer; he was struggling to wrap up his affairs and make sure my grandmother would be provided for after his anticipated death, which came just a few months later in March of the next year. What was an extended holiday vacation for me, was anything but for my mother. She was there to spend a last Christmas with her father, and to help him deal with all the messy reality at the end of human life.

Sometime during the week before Christmas, my grandmother and my mother went off to do some shopping, and my grandfather got it into his head that my hair was too long. (I had hair in those days and it was sort of longish.) So he set a stool in the bathtub, told me to sit on it, draped me with one of his barber’s capes, got his tools from the front hall closet, and went to work. The reason he could no longer barber became painfully obvious as the haircut progressed.

He suffered from recurrent stabbing gut pain because of the cancer, and while he was cutting my hair one of these occurred. He flinched and made a mis-cut with his electric barber sheers. He didn’t cut me, but he did shave a 2-inch stripe up the back of my neck and across the top of my head! There was nothing to be done for it but to shave the rest of my head . . . . so that I ended up looking pretty much the way I look now, without the beard, of course.

A few days later, my brother joined us for the holidays and his first words on seeing me were, “You look just like Charlie Brown!” referring to this character from the Peanuts comic strip which had been our late father’s favorite. For the rest of that holiday week, that’s what he (and everyone else) called me.

Eventually my hair grew back and the haircut was forgotten. But that name stuck, and for the rest of my childhood and youth, my family nickname was “Charlie Brown.” So when I saw these Peanuts-related Christmas things, I knew I had to have them; and I knew that I would preach about them tonight.

The Peanuts franchise proved to be even more durable than my nickname. In 1965 it was the source of one of the most memorable and still best-loved Christmas specials on TV, A Charlie Brown Christmas; in fact, it was rebroadcast by ABC just last Thursday. 48 years after its debut and 13 years after the death of its creator, Charles Schulz, that cartoon Christmas special continues to touch hearts. In part because of its endurance, TV Guide has ranked Peanuts as the 4th greatest television cartoon of all time. (The top three are The Simpsons, The Flintstones, and the original Looney Toons series.)

If you’ve seen the Peanuts Christmas special, you know that there is a point in the story — which revolves around the kids putting on a Christmas play with a subplot involving Charlie Brown’s forlorn-looking little Christmas tree — there is a point in the story when Charlie cries out, “Isn’t there anyone who knows what Christmas is all about?” Linus replies, “Sure, Charlie Brown, I can tell you what Christmas is all about,” and walks out onto the stage where the play is to be performed. He calls for a spot light, and then begins to recite St. Luke’s nativity narrative, the same Gospel story we just heard. He ends with the message of the angels, “Glory to God in the highest and, on earth, peace, goodwill towards men.” As he walks back over to Charlie Brown, he says, “That’s what Christmas is all about, Charlie Brown.”

David Michaelis, in his biography of Charles Schulz entitled Schulz and Peanuts, tells the story behind this. During development meetings early in the production of the special, Schulz “proudly announced” that there would be “one whole minute” of Linus reciting the Gospel. The producer, Bill Melendez, tried to talk him out of it. But Schulz, who was an active “lay preacher” in the Church of God, insisted, “We can’t avoid it — we have to get the passage of St. Luke in there somehow. Bill, if we don’t do it, who will?” Schulz was asking, as I had asked about my Peanuts-inspired stole, “If Jesus isn’t in Christmas, what’s the point?”

Peanuts Stole And it seems to me that that question, raised by Peanuts and Charlie Brown, by this doll and that special, by this silly stole that I will never wear again, is one we really need to think about: If Jesus isn’t in Christmas, what’s the point?

Now, I’m not a proponent of the nonsense that Bill O’Reilly and others put out about some mythical “war on Christmas.” There isn’t one. A war on Christmas might actually be a good thing: the history of the church throughout the world, from its founding by the Apostles to the present day, demonstrates that where the church is actively persecuted, where there is a war against the church and its message, the faith is strong and grows. The 2nd Century Church Father Tertullian wrote that “the blood of martyrs is the seed of the Church.” A real war on Christmas would be a good thing! But there isn’t one.

What there is, I think, is not so much a war on Christmas, as an indifference towards Jesus! There’s plenty of holiday music on the radio and in the stores, but precious little of it mentions Jesus! There are yard displays galore, although there are a lot more Santas, Frosties, Grinches, and elves than baby Jesuses and Holy Families! There are scores of people attending parties, concerts, and special programs, many more at those venues then there are in churches like this. The winter solstice is being celebrated all over the place and the world around us is calling it “Christmas,” while exhibiting a gross indifference to Jesus . . . but if Jesus isn’t in Christmas, what’s the point?

Christmas, as Linus told Charlie Brown and reminded us, ought to be about Jesus being born in a stable in Bethlehem. Born there because the emperor had declared a census, a crucial element in the Roman empire’s system of taxation. In the ancient world, taxes were profoundly oppressive, especially in an economic system filled, as our own increasingly is, with individuals living at the very edge of survival. In a world full of working poor with very little to spare, the insatiable appetites of Roman military might and power, like the insatiable appetites of today’s government-subsidized corporations, cost ordinary people a great deal.

From his very first breath, Jesus’ life was shaped by oppressive power. His very existence was threatened by distant rulers, by Herod who would try to kill him as an infant, and by the Roman empire which would one day work his death, a death he would conquer and in conquering give meaning to his birth and his life.

In a very real sense, Jesus was born homeless. If Jesus were to be born today, he would likely be found in a tent city, under a turnpike overpass, in a city-center shelter, not in the safety of a maternity ward. If Jesus were to be born today, he would be found among those who suffer most but hope for much better, with those who rely on the kindness of strangers, on the goodness of the society around them to survive.

Jesus’ birth, as Linus told Charlie Brown and reminded us, was announced to shepherds. The announcement did not ring in the throne room of Caesar, nor that of Herod, nor even in the city council chambers of Bethlehem. The good news was first heard by powerless, anonymous people in a dirty camp watching their sheep and yearning for something better.

The world around us is indifferent to these realities of Jesus’ birth. The world around us, filled with those who are desperately poor, encourages us to ignore them, to make merry with an abundance of glitz and glamor rather than exhibit a generosity of spirit. The world around us, filled with those who have nowhere to live, encourages us to disregard them, to celebrate consumption and excess rather than the sufficiency of family and faith. The world around us, filled with powerless people whose lives are a mess, encourages to take no notice, to revel in plastic perfection instead of the complicated, beautiful reality of untidy human life.

Sunday evening our Church School children performed their annual Christmas pageant. It was fun and funny. It was lovely and it was sweet. The kids did a good job and everyone had a good time, but as I watched it I was struck by how little of Jesus there was in it. In fact, when it was all over, one of the parents in the audience asked, “But where’s Jesus?” Joseph (who was a 15-year-old boy who stands about 6′ 3″) held up a small doll which had been tucked away out of sight in an over-sized manger crib. It was a funny moment, but it underscored our question: If Jesus isn’t in Christmas, what’s the point?

In Linus’s brief one-minute of Gospel recited in the middle of what was otherwise a cute children’s Christmas cartoon, the Peanuts Christmas special reminded us that Jesus is in Christmas and that at its core Christmas is not a holiday for children! The secular celebration of the winter solstice with its parties, with its gift giving (and receiving), with its glitz and glamor and plastic perfection — that is a holiday for children and for those who act like children. But the commemoration of the poor, homeless, messy birth of Jesus, given meaning by his poor, homeless, messy death, redeemed by his glorious and life-affirming resurrection, this Christmas is a holy day for grown-ups!

A little more than a decade ago, a priest of our church named Fleming Rutledge suggested that the idea that Christmas is entirely for children encourages spiritual immaturity. She wrote:

In these stress-filled times, virtually all of us, as we get older, will seek relief by visiting, in our imaginations, a childhood Christmas of impossible perfection. These longings are powerful and can easily deceive us into grasping for a new toy, new car, new house, new spouse to fill up the empty spaces where unconventional love belongs. Our longings are powerful, our needs bottomless, our cravings insatiable, our follies numberless. For those who cannot or will not look deeply into the human condition, sentiment and nostalgia can masquerade as strategies for coping quite successfully for a while — but because it is all based on illusion and unreality, it cannot be a lasting foundation for generations to come. (For Grown-Ups)

In other words, if Jesus isn’t in Christmas, what’s the point?

In the 4th Century, St. Augustine of Hippo wrote a prayer in his autobiographical Confessions. “You,” he wrote to God, “have made us for yourself, O Lord, and our hearts are restless until they rest in you.” If we are honest, we all have that deep longing — that sense of something missing in our lives. It comes with maturity and is a sort of nagging feeling that something about us is incomplete. We grown-ups, unlike children, are consciously aware of how fragile life is; we know how limited and unfinished we are. We know that if Jesus isn’t in Christmas, there is no point!

Samuel Wells, the dean of the chapel at Duke University, wrote an article a few years ago about his experience attending a Christmas pageant at a church in Delhi, India, where the parts were all played by adults. (Christmas Is Really for the Grown-Ups) His initial reaction, he said, was to be flabbergasted: “Everyone knows the unique charm of Christmas is lost if adults take it too seriously. I sat there in Delhi and thought, Don’t these people realize that Christmas is really for the children?” (Emphasis his.) But as the play went on his perception changed: “[W]hen you see a nativity play performed by adults in a country like India, . . . you see for a start that Christmas is about suffering people.”

“This is a story,” he wrote, “about political oppression, harsh taxes, displaced people, homelessness, unemployment, vulnerable refugees and asylum-seekers. That’s the danger of performing it in a place like Delhi and having it acted out by adults who themselves know the very real possibility of any or all of these realities. We might have to recognize what it’s really about.”

And there’s more. Making note of the biblical account of Elizabeth’s barrenness, Mary’s unplanned pregnancy, Joseph’s confusion and possible humiliation, Wells comments, “The Christmas story’s teeming with personal grief, unresolved longings, uncomfortable secrets, shabby compromises, intense fears, social humiliation, and aching hurts.”

“When you sit in a market square in Delhi and see adults performing the Christmas story in an open-air nativity play. . . . . You see that Christmas is about people struggling, not just politically, but personally. Everywhere you look in the Christmas story you see people clinging on with their fingertips to life, to sanity, to respectability, to hope.”

Then Wells considers the wise men scanning the heavens and making their pilgrimage to Bethlehem; he points to the shepherds shivering on the hillside and, later, to Anna and Simeon waiting in the Temple. “When you see adults performing a nativity play, not for their grandparents’ camera-shots but in order genuinely to inhabit the story and make it their own, you see people not just suffering, not just struggling, but also searching. . . . . The nativity story is full of people searching, people yearning, people wanting to believe there’s more than just appearances and surviving and making a living and staying cheerful.”

When we consider the Christmas narrative as a story for adults, says Wells, it “encourage[s] us to name and explore the edges of our own faith, and commitments, and convictions, and questions.” Christmas as a story for grown ups encourages us to get in touch with the suffering in the story, the discrimination in our own culture, the political oppression in our own world. Christmas encourages us as adults to get in touch with the struggling in the story, the disappointment, distress, and despair in the lives of the Holy Family, the wise men, the shepherds, and all the others, and to recognize their struggle in our own lives and in the lives of those around us. Christmas encourages us grown-ups to get in touch with the searching in the story, with the nagging incompleteness of human life, the unresolved questions of faith, the yearning of people aching for truth, longing for meaning, waiting for hope, reaching out for God.

The adults acting out the Nativity play in India and the Peanuts gang (especially Linus) putting on their Christmas pageant in the television special both underscore the importance of our question: if Jesus isn’t in Christmas, what’s the point?

Christmas is not a holiday entirely for children, but it is a holiday entirely about a Child, the child Jesus who is God Incarnate, the Son of God who chose to become as limited, as fragile, as human as we are.

Charlie Brown’s question, “What’s it all about?” is our question, and Jesus, the Child born in the stable, is our answer. Our lives, with all their nagging incompleteness, are in the hands of a God who became human, who was born poor and homeless, who joined us in all the messiness of human life. The God who comforts us and lifts us up when we can’t lift ourselves up became Jesus, the Child born in a stable and laid in a manger, an infant who could not lift himself up, who needed to be comforted and lifted up by others, and thus inspires us to comfort and lift up others — the ones he would call members of his family: the poor, the homeless, the suffering, the struggling, the searching, the ones who live in the messiness and incompleteness of our world.

Without Jesus in Christmas, there is no point, because Jesus is the point! In the end Jesus is the good news of Christmas: that God, made fully known in Jesus, is with us, in all our suffering, in all our struggling, in all our searching, in all the messy incomplete reality of grown-up human existence.

Linus answering Charlie Brown by reciting that one-minute of Gospel in the middle of what is otherwise simply a cute children’s Christmas cartoon reminds us that Christmas really isn’t for children. It’s for adults.

It’s for you.

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Father Funston is the rector of St. Paul’s Episcopal Church, Medina, Ohio.

Like Jesus – From the Daily Office – December 24, 2013

December 24, 2013 / eric / 0 Comments

From the Book of Baruch:

Take off the garment of your sorrow and affliction, O Jerusalem,
and put on for ever the beauty of the glory from God.
Put on the robe of the righteousness that comes from God;
put on your head the diadem of the glory of the Everlasting;
for God will show your splendor everywhere under heaven.

(From the Daily Office Lectionary – Baruch 5:1-3 (NRSV) – December 24, 2013.)

Nativity Silhouette It’s Christmas Eve! Probably my busiest and longest workday of the year.

The earliest part of my day will be spent receiving a shipment of poinsettias and completing the decorating of our church for Christmas services. In our own small way, St. Paul’s Parish will “put on the beauty of the glory from God” with those flowers, with our finest altar hangings and vestments, with special altar linens that are used only in this season, and with all the other trappings of the “high church” tradition that we enjoy from time to time.

The last part of my day will be spent in presiding at a festal eucharist with choir, organ, special music, chanted prayers, clouds of incense, and a congregation full of people dressed in Christmas finery. I’m quite certain all the splendor of the church will be on display in our nave and sanctuary, if not “everywhere under heaven.”

All of this . . . to celebrate the birth of a homeless, refugee infant in a borrowed stable. There is a marvelous incongruity to it all.

Our parish offered a service of Advent Lessons and Carols a few weeks ago. Many other congregations will offer a similar service as their early evening worship today. In the Episcopal Church, early in that service comes the Bidding Prayer, written by a Victorian bishop for the first such service at King’s College, Oxford, which includes this admonition:

And because this of all things would rejoice his heart, let us at this time remember in his name the poor and the helpless, the hungry and the oppressed; the sick and those who mourn; the lonely and the unloved; the aged and the little children; and all those who know not the Lord Jesus, or who love him not, or who by sin have grieved his heart of love.

In the midst of all our “pomp and circumstance,” in all our decking out in robes and diadems and splendor, sometime during this busiest and longest work day of the year, I hope to find a few minutes to pause before the altar, in the Presence of the Blessed Sacrament, to remember those who are much more like the baby in the manger than I am.

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Father Funston is the rector of St. Paul’s Episcopal Church, Medina, Ohio.

Stir Up – From the Daily Office – December 17, 2013

December 17, 2013 / eric / 0 Comments

From the Book of Revelation:

You are neither cold nor hot. I wish that you were either cold or hot. So, because you are lukewarm, and neither cold nor hot, I am about to spit you out of my mouth.

(From the Daily Office Lectionary – Rev. 3:15-16 (NRSV) – December 17, 2013.)

Hand Stirring a Cup When I was in college I was part of group that liked to go backpacking on weekends. Because we were in Southern California, this often meant a trek into some desert wilderness where there was no local water. As a result, we each had to carry enough water for the weekend; as a rule of thumb, that would mean one gallon of water for each day of the hike.

We had found these one-quart, cube-shaped, collapsible water bladders that weighed just an ounce or two, and were easily packed into a backpacked. Pack four of those per day and you were set.

Of course, the cubes weren’t insulated and neither were the water bottles or canteens we carried outside our packs for easy regular access. One’s water was whatever temperature the day was; most of the time that meant the water was tepid, or as this verse says “lukewarm.” It satisfied the body’s need for hydration, but it was not terribly refreshing or stimulating!

I’ve always understood these two verses from Revelation (part of the message to the angel of the church in Laodicea to be metaphorical. I have considered that being “hot” or “cold” equate to loving or hating God; being lukewarm, to being indifferent. Understood in this way, the verse encourages emotional commitment.

But as I think about drinking that tepid water on those college hikes and how much more I appreciated the water if it was chilled or used to make a hot beverage, I’m wondering if maybe the passage should be understood somewhat more literally. What if God really does want to be refreshed? What if God really wants to be stimulated? (I won’t say “needs to be,” but that would be an even more interesting question.)

That God enjoys refreshment and finds it good is witnessed in Scripture. In the Book of Exodus, God commands the Israelites to honor the sabbath because “it is a sign forever between me and the people of Israel that in six days the Lord made heaven and earth, and on the seventh day he rested, and was refreshed.” (Exodus 31:17)

That God might be stimulated by human beings was explored by the poet Louise Glück as she described an afternoon hike:

Even as you appeared to Moses, because
I need you, you appear to me, not
often, however. I live essentially
in darkness. You are perhaps training me to be
responsive to the slightest brightening. Or, like the poets,
are you stimulated by despair, does grief
move you to reveal your nature? This afternoon,
in the physical world to which you commonly
contribute your silence, I climbed
the small hill above the wild blueberries, metaphysically
descending, as on all my walks: did I go deep enough
for you to pity me, as you have sometimes pitied
others who suffer, favoring those
with theological gifts? As you anticipated,
I did not look up. So you came down to me:
at my feet, not the wax
leaves of the wild blueberry but your fiery self, a whole
picture of fire, and beyond, the red sun neither falling nor
rising —
I was not a child; I could take advantage of illusions.
(“Vespers” in The Wild Iris)

I wonder if God finds me refreshing or stimulating . . . or just lukewarm, tepid, and dull.

On Sunday, the Third Sunday of Advent, in the Episcopal Churches, we began our worship with this prayer, “Stir up your power, O Lord, and with great might come among us.” Perhaps it is us who need to stir up in Advent, who need to become hot or cold, stimulating or refreshing.

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Father Funston is the rector of St. Paul’s Episcopal Church, Medina, Ohio.

The Highway of Salvation – Sermon for Advent 3, RCL Year A – December 15, 2013

December 15, 2013 / eric / 0 Comments

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This sermon was preached on the Third Sunday of Advent, December 15, 2013, at St. Paul’s Episcopal Church, Medina, Ohio, where Fr. Funston is rector.

(The Revised Common Lectionary, Advent 3A: Isaiah 35:1-10; Canticle 15 (The Song of Mary, Luke 1:46-55); James 5:7-10; and Matthew 11:2-11. These lessons can be read at The Lectionary Page.)

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Highway though Blooming Desert

There are some numbers that made the news this week: 194 and 11,507. They are important numbers, numbers which represent an unpleasant reality of the world in which we live. I’ll return to them in a moment. but first let’s explore the Scriptures assigned to this, the Third Sunday of Advent, the second week in a row the Gospel focuses on John the Baptizer.

Last week we heard from John himself, this week we have Jesus asking people why they paid attention to John: “What did you go out into the wilderness to look at?” he asks them. “A prophet,” would be the correct answer, but more than a prophet – the forerunner of the kingdom of God. Jesus draws on the tradition of the prophet Malachi through whom God had said, “See, I am sending my messenger to prepare the way before me . . . . ” (Mal. 3:1) It was Malachi who predicted that the Messiah would be heralded by the return of Elijah: “I will send you the prophet Elijah before the great and terrible day of the Lord comes.” (Mal. 4:5) This was and remains in Judaism a traditional expectation known to all Jews. By equating John with Elijah, Jesus was announcing to one and all that, in himself, the reign of heaven had begun, that salvation was at hand. Some who heard him took this testimony seriously, but many others rejected. We take it seriously and because we do, we are preparing once again to celebrate Jesus’ birth.

We take it seriously that salvation is at hand, but what do we really mean when we use that word, “salvation”?

I know that many will say that salvation is a personal thing. “If you confess with your lips that Jesus is Lord and believe in your heart that God raised him from the dead, you will be saved,” wrote Paul to the Romans. Many people believe that what this means is that, doing those two things, each person will get into heaven when he or she dies.

On the other hand, we have the witness of the prophet Isaiah in today’s reading from the Old Testament that salvation is more communal than personal. God “will come and save you,” he says: “Then the eyes of the blind shall be opened, and the ears of the deaf unstopped; then the lame shall leap like a deer, and the tongue of the speechless sing for joy.” Hands that are weak will be strengthened, knees that are feeble will be made firm, and those who are fearful of heart will be made strong. Salvation is something that happens for the whole human community.

And not only is salvation communal, it is universal! Not only is salvation for the human community, it is for the whole of creation! “Waters shall break forth in the wilderness” and “the burning sand shall become a pool.” “The desert shall rejoice and blossom; . . . it shall blossom abundantly.”

Isaiah makes it clear that salvation is so much more than personal; it is so much more than simply getting into heaven when we die. Salvation is for everyone; it is for everything; and it is for the here-and-now. Jesus affirms this when John sends word to Jesus and asks, “Are you the one?” Jesus replies: “Tell John what you hear and see: the blind receive their sight, the lame walk, the lepers are cleansed, the deaf hear, the dead are raised, and the poor have good news brought to them.” Notice that everything Jesus says is present tense! It’s here! It’s now! It’s not “will be;” it’s not “might be;” it’s not sometime in the future. It’s not in heaven when we die! It’s here and it’s now!

So why, then, if salvation is for everyone and everything in the here-and-now, are we told to wait “until the coming of the Lord?” Why in our Epistle Lesson does James tell us to “be patient [as] the farmer waits for the precious crop from the earth, being patient with it until it receives the early and the late rains?” That question haunted me during my prayers and my meditations this past week as I thought about what to say this morning. As I pondered the question, however, I came to realize that I was focusing on the wrong things. I was looking at and questioning the waiting and the patience, and I should have been fixing my attention on the farmer.

I grew up in a farming family. My nuclear family weren’t farmers, but my maternal great-grandfather, Hinrich Buss, homesteaded several thousand acres of Kansas farmland in the late 1800s and quite a few of my Buss cousins to this day run farms on that land. Some grow corn and soybeans; others run dairy farms. I know from family example that while farmers do a lot of waiting and have to be patient people, they are never idle. “Waiting with patience” doesn’t mean sitting around doing nothing; to wait and be patient as a farmer patiently waits is to be active, to be attentive, to take a hand in bringing about that for which one is waiting.

Salvation that transforms the human community, that enables all creation to sing together in present and eternal joy happens as people’s eyes are opened to see and their ears are unstopped to hear both the Good News of God in their own lives and the needs of others to know that Good News in their lives. When that happens, the desert wilderness blooms and becomes a verdant landscape.

Passing through that lush landscape, says Isaiah, there will be a highway. “It shall be called the Holy Way” and the redeemed shall walk upon it to Zion, singing and rejoicing as they go. How will that highway get there? In a few more chapters, Isaiah will answer that question by saying to the People of God, “In the wilderness prepare the way of the Lord, make straight in the desert a highway for our God.” That highway, the highway of salvation, will get there because the People of God will build it!

There is an old story about a time of economic depression in France. The government decided that it would put the unemployed to work building roads. Initially, this worked well: the workers received paychecks, their spirits were high, and the government was pleased with itself. But then some of the laborers began to ask where the roads were leading. The government had to admit that these roads were simply make-work; they were going nowhere, just out into a swamp or something. The workers became dispirited; they lost a sense of purpose in their work. In a very real sense, their eyes were shut and their ears were closed up because they had been robbed of the hope that they were making life better for others and for themselves.

Salvation happens, the highway in the wilderness gets built, when there is hope; hope is there when our eyes and ears are opened to perceive that God is in our midst and to know that amazing things are possible. People of God have known this in every generation and they have seen it in every generation. God “has mercy on those who fear him in every generation.” God shows “the strength of his arm” and “scatter[s] the proud in their conceit” in every generation. God “cast[s] down the mighty from their thrones” and “lift[s] up the lowly” in every generation. God “fill[s] the hungry with good things” and sends “the rich . . . away empty” in every generation.

God does these things through God’s People who in every generation have seen Isaiah’s vision of a God of infinite and unstoppable hope, who in every generation have wondered how to see it more clearly, how to believe it more firmly, and how, like the patiently waiting farmer, to actively and attentively take a hand in transforming the often unpleasant desert realities in which they live.

I mentioned some numbers earlier, numbers that I suggested represent an unpleasant reality of the world in which we live: 194 and 11,507. Yesterday was the one-year anniversary of the murder of 20 children and six adults at Sandy Hook Elementary School in Newtown, Connecticut. We were tragically reminded of that massacre by another shooting incident on Friday at Arapahoe High School in suburban Denver, Colorado. In our country during the year between those two incidents, 11,507 people have died from gunshots; 194 of them have been children 12 years of age or younger. It is an unpleasant reality of the wilderness in which we still live, where we are still called to build the highway of salvation.

Let us pray:

Almighty God our heavenly Father, you have promised to come and save us as the eyes of the blind are opened and the ears of the deaf unstopped: Open our eyes and unstop our ears that we may know that you are in our midst and may share your vision of infinite and unstoppable hope, that we may do the work of transforming unpleasant realities and building the highway of salvation for all; for the sake of him who was and is and is to come, your Son Jesus Christ our Lord. Amen.

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Father Funston is the rector of St. Paul’s Episcopal Church, Medina, Ohio.

The Advent Question – Sermon for Advent 1, RCL Year A – December 1, 2013

December 1, 2013 / eric / 0 Comments

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This sermon was preached on the First Sunday of Advent, December 1, 2013, at St. Paul’s Episcopal Church, Medina, Ohio, where Fr. Funston is rector.

(The Revised Common Lectionary, Advent 1A: Isaiah 2:1-5; Psalm 122; Romans 13:11-14; and Matthew 24:36-44. These lessons can be read at The Lectionary Page.)

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Advent Wreath Friday was a Holy Day in America! It was a day when all across the nation thousands, if not millions, of people breathed prayers of thanks. It was a day when all across the nation thousands, if not millions, improved the lives of many, many others. It was a day when news organizations from the smallest local radio station to international broadcast and cable conglomerates asked Americans across the nation, “How did you participate?” Yes, Friday was a Holy Day in America!

Wait! Did he say, “Friday?” Yes, he said, “Friday.” It was Black Friday. The day on which, we are told, retailers whose businesses have been operating at a loss all year long finally find themselves making a profit, when the ink on the ledger changes (in accounting tradition and terminology) from red to black. The thousands, possibly millions, uttering those thanksgivings were the managers, executives, Chief Executive Officers, financial officers, accountants, stockholders, and owners of retail concerns from smallest local boutique to the largest retail chains. Those thousands, possibly millions, who improved the lives of those retail owners and managers were the shoppers, the consumers, the buyers of bargains who . . .

In Odessa, Texas, trampled an 8-year-old boy and got themselves pepper-sprayed by store security in a mad rush to tear open a WalMart pallet of bargain-priced tablet computers.
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In Las Vegas, Nevada, another shopper in the leg during a struggle over a bargain TV in a Black Friday sale at Target.
* * *
In incidents in Virginia and California, stabbed and slashed each other with knives in their efforts to get at sale-priced merchandise.

And they all did it in celebration of the birth of our Lord and Savior Jesus Christ. Or so those news organizations, from the smallest radio station to the international broadcast and cable conglomerates, tell us — this is all a part of “the Christmas Season.”

Somehow, though, I think we can be fairly sure that this isn’t what the Prophet Isaiah had in mind when he wrote:

Come, let us go up to the mountain of the LORD,
to the house of the God of Jacob;
that he may teach us his ways
and that we may walk in his paths.

Nor is it what St. Paul had in mind when he wrote:

Let us live honorably as in the day, not in reveling and drunkenness, not in debauchery and licentiousness, not in quarreling and jealousy.

Yes, the church has a rather different understanding of what we should be about during these days leading up to the celebration of the Messiah’s birth. Contrary to what the retail advertisers and the international news conglomerates tell us, this is not “the Christmas season.” This is the season of Advent. These four weeks or so leading up to Christmas Day are a time when the church bids us, as we make our preparations to celebrate the Messiah’s Birth, also to more consciously prepare for the his return. To ask ourselves a question . . .

But the question for Advent is not “When will Jesus come back?” Although the Scriptures continually remind us that one day God will, in Isaiah’s words, “judge between nations and shall arbitrate for many people,” Jesus reminds us that “about that day and hour no one knows.” So we must “keep awake” because we “do not know on what day [the] Lord is coming.” “The Son of Man is coming at an unexpected hour.” No, the question is not about when (or even if) the Messiah will return.

We all know that preparing to celebrate the birth of Christ is not a once-and-done thing. We do it again and again and again, every year. Sometimes we make mistakes doing it — We invite the wrong co-worker to our open house . . . next year we won’t do that again! We try using gorgonzola cheese in the stuffing . . . won’t do that again! Sometimes something new turns out to be something we want to do again — Apollo’s Fire’s Christmas vespers was lovely; we’ll take that in again next year. Going to church is great; let’s do that again soon! It’s not once-and-done; it’s something we do again and again and again.

Preparing for the Messiah’s return is also not a once-and-done thing. It’s something we have to work at and be ready at any time. This is what Jesus is saying when says that “two will be in the field; one will be taken and one will be left. Two women will be grinding meal together; one will be taken and one will be left,” or when he reminds us that “if the owner of the house had known in what part of the night the thief was coming, he would have stayed awake and would not have let his house be broken into.” It’s not that those things will happen at the end of time when he returns, but rather that they can happen at any time and, therefore, one must always be prepared. We must, in fact, always be preparing. We are to stay awake, to watch for signs of God’s activity in the world.

No, the question is not about when (or even if) the Messiah will return.

On the First Sunday in Advent, we are called upon to take our God and ourselves seriously. We are called upon to recognize that life can be changed, possibly even ended in an instant and to live our lives accordingly.

I was reminded earlier in the week by an old colleague from Kansas about something our bishop, the Rt. Rev. Bill Smalley, often said when we would gather as clergy. He liked to say that each order of the clergy, deacons, priests, and bishops, had a particular “iconic ministry.” Priests, in particular, he would say are the “icons of the story.” The role of the priest, in Bishop Smalley’s estimation, is to tell the story of God, the story of God’s People, the story of Jesus . . . to tell the story again and again and again. My colleague said, “Throughout the church year our worship tells the story over and over without much thought about how we live our lives, how we live in the Kingdom of God. We say we gather to praise God, but in truth we gather to tell the story, over and over. Our praise of God is in our lives.” And so, my old colleague suggested, a person who truly believes the story should ask him- or herself, “How does a person who believes this story live and praise God?”

That strikes me as a really good question to ask oneself during Advent, “How does a person who believes this story live?” Isaiah’s answer was, “they shall beat their swords into plowshares, and their spears into pruning hooks; nation shall not lift up sword against nation, neither shall they learn war any more.” St. Paul’s answer was, “Make no provision for the flesh, to gratify its desires.”

How does a person who believes this story live? It’s not a question that I can answer for you, but it is a question we can explore together and find answers that work for each of us, though our answers may not be exactly the same. And we may find answers that work for us today but won’t be right next year. It’s not a question with a once-and-done answer.

I was reading through a list of “things you can do for Advent,” things like read a chapter of Holy Scripture every morning, or reconnect with five old but not recently contacted friends, or reach out to a new charity. They were all good suggestions, but the one that particular rang a bell for me this year was to take five minutes every morning and make a list. Not a Christmas list of things to buy, or things to do, or things you want. Make an Advent list list of 24 blessings in your life, it could include the people you love, the people who love you in spite of yourself, the signs you recognize of God’s presence in your life. After you’ve made your list, each day in Advent pray a prayer of thanks for one of the things on the list.

That made sense to me this year because for me, this year, the answer to ” How does a person who believes this story live?” is “With gratitude.” And then my friend Mary Frances Schjonberg shared her sermon for this morning and in it introduced me to a poet new to me, Gunilla Norris. She is a psychotherapist who describes her work as “the practice of spiritual awareness in the most mundane and simple of circumstances.” In a poem called Polishing the Silver, she prays for the gift of gratitude:

As I polish let me remember
the fleeting time that I am here. Let me let go of
all silver. Let me enter this moment
and polish it bright. Let me not lose my life
in any slavery – from looking good
to preserving the past, to whatever idolatry
that keeps me from just this –
the grateful receiving of the next thing at hand.

Remember, it’s not Christmas yet. It’s Advent and Advent asks a question: “How does a person ‘keep awake’ because we ‘do not know on what day [the] Lord is coming?'” How does a person who believes this story live? Poet Norris suggests a pretty good answer to consider: By gratefully receiving the next thing at hand. Amen.

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Father Funston is the rector of St. Paul’s Episcopal Church, Medina, Ohio.

Drawing Water from the Springs of Salvation – Sermon for Pentecost 26, Proper 28C – November 17, 2013

November 17, 2013 / eric / 1 Comment

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This sermon was preached on the 26th Sunday after Pentecost, November 17, 2013, at St. Paul’s Episcopal Church, Medina, Ohio, where Fr. Funston is rector.

(The Revised Common Lectionary, Proper 28C: Isaiah 65:17-25; Canticle 9 (Isaiah 12:2-6); 2 Thessalonians 3:6-13; and Luke 21:5-19. These lessons can be read at The Lectionary Page.)

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Illustration of Chinese Fifteen Buckets Idiom “You shall draw water with rejoicing from the springs of salvation.”

Their placement in the Book of Isaiah suggests that these words were written early in the career of the first prophet whose writings are collected into this book (there are three), a time when Judah had been conquered by and was a tributary-state of the Assyrian Empire. In the first eleven chapters of the book, Isaiah had prophesied against the Jewish people and the nation’s leaders, condemning their failure to follow God’s Law, their failure to take care of the widows, the orphans, the poor, the resident alien. He had even given his son a prophetic name, Maher-shalal-hash-baz — meaning “He has made haste to the plunder!” — to reflect God’s judgment against them. Isaiah prophesied of desolation and loss, and those prophecies seemed to have come true. It was a time such as Jesus describes in the Gospel today, a time when nation had risen against nation, kingdom against kingdom. Yet, in the midst of it, Isaiah offers this song of hope.

“You shall draw water with rejoicing from the springs of salvation.”

I once worked with a man who blew, as the saying goes, hot and cold. If you asked him, “How’s it going?” you’d get one of two responses. If things were OK, he’d say, “God’s in his heaven and all’s right with the world.” But on another day he’d answer, “The world’s going to Hell in a hand-basket!” There was no in-between with him, no shades of gray, no shades of anything! Either everything was great, or everything was awful. Isaiah’s message in our Gradual today is a message that even when everything is awful, even if the world is going to Hell in a hand-basket, God’s still in his heaven, God’s still in charge and eventually all will be right with the world.

“You shall draw water with rejoicing from the springs of salvation.”

One of the things we preachers do is look back to see if we said anything about a Biblical text the last time it came up on the lectionary rotation, so that is what I did. The last time we had the First Song of Isaiah as part of our Sunday worship, it was the Sunday following the Sandy Hook School shooting in Newtown, Connecticut. I didn’t preach on this particular text that Sunday, but it would have been a fitting text; it is a message of reassurance for the worst of times.

“You shall draw water with rejoicing from the springs of salvation.”

So . . . there are three themes or images in this one verse that I’d like to explore with you today: drawing water, rejoicing, and the springs of salvation. And I want to begin with the middle one because that is the way Isaiah begins.

Chapter 12 is only six verses long but, for some reason, when it is used liturgically as a canticle, the first verse is dropped off: we begin with Verse 2, “Surely, it is God who saves me . . . . ” But Isaiah began his song this way: “You will say in that day: I will give thanks to you, O Lord, for though you were angry with me, your anger turned away, and you comforted me.” (v 1) “I will give thanks to you, O Lord . . . .”

This is more than a polite “Thank You” note. This is a song of praise that describes, that would accompany a physical expression of gratitude. The Hebrew word here is yadah, which signifies the stretching out of one’s hands in thanks while singing.

It’s like . . . do you know the 1964 movie Zorba the Greek? It’s based on a novel of the same name by Nikos Kazantzakis. It is the story of Basil, a young English-Greek intellectual played by Alan Bates, and his encounter with a vibrant Greek peasant, Alexis Zorba, the title character; it is a story full of betrayal, death, and failure. But, at the end, as Basil is preparing to leave Crete (where the story is set) and return to Oxford, he asks Zorba to teach him to dance. What follows is this wonderful scene in which Anthony Quinn, who plays Zorba, lifts his hands and begins slowly to demonstrate the sirtaki. The music, by Mikis Theodorakis, builds as Quinn and Bates dance, with their hands raised, faster and faster, laughing, and overcoming all the darkness and tragedy that has gone before. That is yadah!

That theme is continued in this pivotal verse: “You shall draw water with rejoicing from the springs of salvation.” The word yadah is not repeated; here we have another word sawsone, which means “joyfulness,” or “mirth,” or even “giddiness,” translated in our Prayer Book text as “rejoicing.” Nonetheless, the meaning is the same: an exultant joy which requires physical expression.

“You shall draw water with rejoicing” — with dancing and singing and laughter and giddiness — “from the springs of salvation.”

The next image to consider is the drawing of water from a well. That’s not something many of us are familiar with, even if we live on farm properties with wells those wells are equipped with electric pumps and we get our water from a tap at the sink; we just turn a handle and the water comes out. Not so in Isaiah’s day or in Jesus’ time, nor even for some of our grandparents. In those days you took your bucket to the well and you lowered down, filled it, drew it up (not with a turn crank, by the way, but by brute strength), and then you carried it into the home, however far away that might be.

That day to day reality would most certainly have been in the minds of Isaiah’s first audience, but perhaps for them it would have been overshadowed by memories of an annual ritual. An important part of the celebration called Sukkoth or the Feast of Tabernacles was the “Festival of Water-drawing.” In this ritual, on each morning of the seven days of Sukkoth, a young priest would take a golden pitcher to the Pool of Siloam and fill it with water. He would then carry the water in a procession with lighted torches up to the Temple where the water was poured upon the altar, and the people broke out into jubilant song and dance.

The ritual of water-drawing was a reminder that God’s Presence is as fundamental and basic to human life as the water that falls from the sky or springs up from the earth. Life-giving water symbolizes God’s power. The image here is of water flowing with abundance, spilling over, and flowing out to the whole earth. In Isaiah’s song, the ritual of water-drawing leads directly to the proclamation of good news to all nations. The good news of God’s salvation cannot be contained; it must reach out to all the world.

Now something lost in the English translation is Isaiah’s use of singular and plural “yous,” his address is first to individuals and then to the community as a whole. In the ritual of water-drawing, it was the priest who drew the water as representative of the community, but in Isaiah’s song the “you” in this verse is addressed to each individual. “You shall draw water . . . .” — not the priest on your behalf — not the community of which you are a part — but you individually, you personally, you shall draw from the well of living water. Each of us goes to the well-spring individually . . . but what a mess it would be if we all showed up and tried to do that at the same time without any coordination!

As I thought about that, I remembered an old Chinese proverb I learned in Asian folklore course in college: Qi shang ba xia, literally, “seven up, eight down.” The full saying is, “My heart has fifteen buckets, seven up, eight down.” The image is from a folktale of fifteen people at a community well, all trying to draw water; seven with their buckets going up and eight going down, all clanging and banging against one another, spilling the water and achieving nothing. It refers to a person or a community faced with a time of uncertainty, fear, or turmoil. The English equivalent is “to be all sixes and sevens,” to be in a general state of confusion and disarray, possibly even a condition of irreconcilable conflict.

That certainly cannot be what Isaiah had in mind with his image of each of drawing out water individually! Surely there is here a lesson about working together in community! Remember that though each of us draws from the well we do so together, with yadah and sawsone, with that thankfulness and joy that expresses itself in dancing. Like Zorba and Basil dancing the sirtaki together, we work together so that our buckets are not “seven up, eight down,” not banging against one another and spilling their water uselessly, but all filled, drawn up, and poured out in proclamation of God’s good news. We never go to the well alone; we go together, and together we fill and draw out our buckets in a purposeful and concerted dance of joyful abundance.

“You” — each of you individually, but all of you together — “shall draw water with rejoicing” — with dancing and singing and laughter and giddiness — “from the springs of salvation.”

Which brings us to the last image of this verse: the springs of salvation.

While reviewing the commentaries and study guides about this text, I came across an alternative translation: “With great joy, you people will get water from the well of victory.” (CEV) At first blush, “well of victory” and “springs of salvation” seem like very different images! Salvation is something we receive, something that God gives us. Victory is something achieved, something that we do ourselves! But when I went to my Hebrew lexicon, I discovered that, indeed, the Hebrew word used here has been translated in other circumstances as “victory” (Psalm 20:5) and also as “prosperity” (e.g., Job 30:1) or as “deliverance” (e.g., Psalm 3:2). The well of God’s grace produces all of these things: deliverance, salvation, prosperity, victory.

In John’s Gospel we are told a story of Jesus meeting a Samaritan woman at the communal well in the city of Sychar. He asked her to draw him a drink from the well, and when she expressed surprise that a Jewish man would ask that of a Samaritan woman . . .

Jesus answered her, “If you knew the gift of God, and who it is that is saying to you, “Give me a drink,’ you would have asked him, and he would have given you living water.” The woman said to him, “Sir, you have no bucket, and the well is deep. Where do you get that living water? Are you greater than our ancestor Jacob, who gave us the well, and with his sons and his flocks drank from it?” Jesus said to her, “Everyone who drinks of this water will be thirsty again, but those who drink of the water that I will give them will never be thirsty. The water that I will give will become in them a spring of water gushing up to eternal life.” The woman said to him, “Sir, give me this water, so that I may never be thirsty or have to keep coming here to draw water.” (John 4:10-15)

The word used by the Prophet Isaiah, the word translated as “salvation,” as “victory,” as “prosperity,” as “deliverance,” is also a Name. The word is yeshu’ah; the name we translate as “Jesus.”

Even when the enemy (whoever or whatever that may be) has invaded and all seems to be desolation and loss . . . even when nations rise against nations and kingdoms against kingdoms . . . even when the world seems to be going to hell in a hand-basket . . . even in a time of unfathomable tragedy and grief, Isaiah’s words comfort and reassure us. They are a promise of “buoyant and determined hope that refuses to give in to debilitating present circumstances.” (Walter Brueggemann)

“You” — each of you, each of us individually, but all of us together —

“shall draw water” — living water —

“with rejoicing” — with dancing and singing and laughter and giddiness —

“from the springs of salvation” — from the wellspring who is Jesus.

Let us pray:

Lord Jesus, you promised that you would give to any who asked living water gushing up to eternal life: Make us thirsty for that living water that we may love God with our whole heart and soul and mind, that we may rejoice in your victory and salvation with dancing and singing and laughter, that we may fill our buckets with your abundant prosperity and may pour out your good news for all the world, that we may love our neighbor as ourselves; in your Holy Name we pray. Amen.

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Father Funston is the rector of St. Paul’s Episcopal Church, Medina, Ohio.

Cleaning the Windshield — Sermon for All Saints Sunday, RCL Year C – November 3, 2013

November 3, 2013 / eric / 0 Comments

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This sermon was preached on All Saints Sunday, November 3, 2013, at St. Paul’s Episcopal Church, Medina, Ohio, where Fr. Funston is rector.

(The Revised Common Lectionary, All Saints: Daniel 7:1-3,15-18; Psalm 149; Ephesians 1:11-23; and Luke 6:20-31. These lessons can be read at The Lectionary Page.)

[Note: The Revised Common Lectionary Old Testament reading for All Saints in Year C is an edited pericope; I had the reader at Mass read the entire thing, verses 1 through 18.]

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Windshield with Bugs Today is the first Sunday in November which means that instead of the normal sequence of lessons for Ordinary Time, we are given the option of reading the lessons for All Saints Day, which falls every year on November 1. So today we heard a very strange reading from the Book of Daniel, a to-my-ear very troubling gradual psalm (in which we sing of wreaking vengeance on the nations and punishment on the peoples, of binding king in chains, and of inflicting judgment on the nobles bound in iron), a bit of Paul’s letter to the Church in Ephesus extolling the riches of the inheritance of the saints, and to Luke’s version of the Beatitudes in which Jesus not only blesses the poor, the hungry, and the weeping, he sighs woefully over the future plight people like ourselves – the comparatively wealthy, those whose bellies are full, and those in relatively good state of mind.

I asked our Old Testament reader this morning to read a somewhat longer lesson from Daniel than you find in your bulletin insert because the edited (or, more accurately, gutted) version there (which are the verses required for the day by the Revised Common Lectionary) includes only the introduction of a dream or vision experienced by Daniel and then skips immediately to the interpretation. We would have heard none of the apocalyptic imagery of the dream, but I think it important that we listen to and consider Daniel’s troubling vision of four strange beasts and the coming of one “like a son of man,” else how are we to understand the interpretation given by the “attendant.”

Early in my meditations and study for preaching today, I thought I would explore with you the meaning of the beasts and so on, but the more I thought about that, and especially as I began actually organizing my thoughts and writing out my sermon, I decided against doing so. It would I think be a distraction from the focus of the day. I was thinking that the reading as edited in the Lectionary presents us with a passage that makes little sense, but after reading and hearing again the full Daniel’s story of seeing a winged lion, a tusked bear, a four-headed leopard, and a ten-horned and iron-toothed monster, I guess that’s what we have in the longer reading, too! A lesson that distracts us, as so much in the Bible can do; so many people focus on these arcane details that they miss the bigger picture the Bible tries to show. As result, we get such non-Biblical nonsense as the various forms of “tribulationism” and the story of “the Rapture;” we get “one-issue Christians” who refuse to recognize as members of the same faith Christians who disagree with them. We get exactly the opposite of what the Feast of All the Saints is supposed to underscore.

So, instead of dealing with this troubling bit of the Bible right now, what I’d like you to do is come with me for a drive. Let’s just set the Bible aside and go get in our car and head off down the road. It’s a country road, a hard-pack dirt country road out in the farm country. We’re taking a country drive on a fine, beautiful spring day. It’s been raining, but it’s not raining now. Now the sun is shining and the birds are singing and insects of all sorts are buzzing and humming and chirping. In fact, there are loads of insects. It’s one of those days when the damsel flies are swarming, doing their brief romantic aerial ballets to attract mates and perpetuate their species. It’s one of those days when the grasshoppers are doing their best to eat everything in sight. It’s one of those days with yellow swallow-tails and monarchs and viceroys and white cabbage butterflies are flittering all over the place.

As we drive along, we’re traveling at a pretty good clip and, as you might expect with all those bugs around, the windshield is getting pretty messy. And since it just stopped raining and the dirt road is still a bit muddy, a lot of that has splashed up onto the windows and the windshield, as well. In fact, we can barely see through the windshield! We put the wipers on and twist the knob so the washer fluid sprays onto the glass, but the bug juice is sticky and there’s a lot of mud, so the washers only clear a little of the muck away, and the windshield is now not only covered with dead bugs and muck, it’s streaky, too!

Still, we peer through the streaks of bug blood and mud, and keep our eyes on the road ahead. Eventually we come to a filling station and we pull in. In a bygone era, a man in coveralls with a greasy rag tucked in his pocket would have run out and begun filling our tank with gas, and he would have checked under the hood, and he would have carried out a bucket of soapy water with a large sponge and a squee-gee, and he would have washed our bug-be-splattered, mud-streaked windshield and cleaned away all that distracting muck that was keeping us from seeing our way ahead.

A few days ago, I was reviewing a Vacation Bible School curriculum based on the story of Jonah and in the sales literature the publisher had written these words: “The Bible is a window that shows us God’s heart. In the stories, in the writings, and in the Gospels we see what God is like. The Bible reveals God to us, just like the windows in a car or in a building reveal what is going on outside.”

Isn’t that a great image for Holy Scripture: “The Bible is a window that shows us God’s heart.” Now I don’t know about you, but when I am driving in a car on a day like I described to you, a day when the windshield gets are splattered and messy with dead bugs and mud, I have a hard time looking beyond that cloudy window in front of me. I get distracted by the details on the window; I focus on them and not on the road out in front of me.

But so long as I focus on the window, the window is not serving its purpose. The window is not there to be the object of my attention; it is there to let me see what is happening on the other side. So it is with the Bible.

The Education for Ministry group that I have the privilege to mentor in this parish is made up of all first year students, so everyone in the group is working through study of the Old Testament. We are about six weeks into reading Genesis and Exodus now, and one of the things we’ve noticed is that the stories of the Patriarchs and the first Hebrews are not very pretty: Abraham is a liar; Jacob is a cheat; Joseph’s brothers are petulant bullies who nearly kill him; Moses whines a lot; and Aaron (Moses’ brother), although he is the first high priest, is the one who turns the people away from God and fashions the golden calf for them to worship! We are all, I think, finding it difficult to look past the peccadillos of the Patriarchs in order to see the God who is behind the stories; just like its difficult to look past the bugs and the mud on the windscreen!

And then today, along comes Daniel with his weird vision, the Palmist with his bloodthirsty delight in vengeance and revenge, and Jesus telling us that those of us who are fairly well off are destined to be hungry and in mourning! It’s hard to look past all of that understand where God is. As one commentator on Daniel noted, we who read this story in the Bible are “in the midst of bewildering events that affright and confuse.”

We find this all hard to accept and difficult to look through because we want the Bible to be clear! We want the Bible to be the answer book, to lay it all out for us in simple and easy-to-follow instructions; we want to be able to say, as our Sunday School children sang last week, “The B-I-B-L-E, that’s the book for me! I stand alone on the word of God, the B-I-B-L-E!” We just want it to be clear! But the Bible doesn’t exist to be the object of our devotion; the Bible doesn’t exist to be regarded on its own and for itself. The Bible is a window through which God is reveals Godself to us and, like any window, its got some distracting stuff we have to look past.

It does so because it is book (several books, actually) full of human stories, and human stories are messy. So we end up with stories of people who are sometimes liars and cheaters; people who can sometimes whine and be unfaithful. We end up with stories of weird hallucinations and frightful dreams. We end up with poetry by someone who’s been hurt so badly that vengeance and revenge can look like a gift of God. We end up with troubling warnings that we might, probably will, face hunger and grief. How do we look past that to see, as Paul encouraged the Ephesians, with the eyes of our hearts enlightened, so that we may know what is the hope to which God has called us?

Well, when we were on our drive through the countryside with our windshield spatted with bug goo and mud, we pulled into a gas station, and a mechanic came out and washed all of that away. Remember? Today is the day that we remember those who help clean away all of the distractions, the filling station attendants of the faith. Today we remember the saints who help to clear our vision of God. Broadly speaking, of course, the saints are all those who are baptized, who follow Jesus Christ, and who live their lives according to his teaching, which would include all of us here today. Church tradition, however, also uses the term more narrowly to refer to especially holy women and holy men who are heroes of the faith, who through lives of extraordinary virtue reveal the Presence of God to us, who clean that window through which we all look.

Cleaning a Windshield The saints whom we celebrate on this day (and the many who are given special days of individual recognition) were people who tried to live according to the Bible as they understood its teachings. Like us, they read it and encountered those troubling visions, those petulant patriarchs, those bloodthirsty psalms, and somehow looked past them and through them to see the God of faith, the God who Incarnate in Jesus said, “Love your enemies, do good to those who hate you, bless those who curse you, pray for those who abuse you.” We extoll the virtues of those saint and we celebrate their lives and their witness because they help us to do the same. By their lives and their examples, they clean the windshield for us; they clean away the bug blood and the mud, so that we no longer focus on the window, but on the God the window shows us.

This is not to suggest that we should not study nor seek to understand the murkiness and cloudiness that we find on the window, the questionable and troublesome visions of Daniel, the lying and cheating of the Patriarchs, the bloodthirstiness of the Psalmist, or the petulant pettiness of the Prophets. Certainly, we should for we can learn thereby of the graciousness of the God who overlooked and overcame those faults, who regarded and redeemed those men and women! But following the example of the saints before us, we should not let ourselves be distracted by them so that we fail to see and appreciate that same God.

Today we give thanks for the saints, the filling station attendants of the faith, who help us clean our windshields.

O God, the King of saints, we praise and glorify your holy Name for all your servants who have finished their course in your faith and fear: for the blessed Virgin Mary; for the holy patriarchs, prophets, apostles, and martyrs; and for all your other righteous servants, known to us and unknown; and we pray that, encouraged by their examples, aided by their prayers, and strengthened by their fellowship, we also may be partakers of the inheritance of the saints in light; through the merits of your Son Jesus Christ our Lord. Amen. (BCP 1979, Burial of the Dead, page 504)

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Father Funston is the rector of St. Paul’s Episcopal Church, Medina, Ohio.

Category: Eucharist (Page 28 of 35)

A Theology of Gift Giving – Sermon for the Second Sunday of Christmas – January 5, 2014

The Logos Became Meat – Sermon for the First Sunday of Christmas – December 29, 2013

Four Christmas Poems – Meditation for Christmas Day – December 25, 2013

What’s the Point? – Sermon for Midnight Mass, Christmas Eve – December 24, 2013

Like Jesus – From the Daily Office – December 24, 2013

Stir Up – From the Daily Office – December 17, 2013

The Highway of Salvation – Sermon for Advent 3, RCL Year A – December 15, 2013

The Advent Question – Sermon for Advent 1, RCL Year A – December 1, 2013

Drawing Water from the Springs of Salvation – Sermon for Pentecost 26, Proper 28C – November 17, 2013

Cleaning the Windshield — Sermon for All Saints Sunday, RCL Year C – November 3, 2013

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