That Which We Have Heard & Known

Occasional thoughts of an Anglican Episcopal priest

Category: Eucharist (Page 35 of 35)

Carb Loading on Jesus – From the Daily Office – August 5, 2012

August 5, 2012 / / 0 Comments

From the Book of Judges:

Gideon went into his house and prepared a kid, and unleavened cakes from an ephah of flour; the meat he put in a basket, and the broth he put in a pot, and brought them to him under the oak and presented them. The angel of God said to him, “Take the meat and the unleavened cakes, and put them on this rock, and pour out the broth.” And he did so. Then the angel of the Lord reached out the tip of the staff that was in his hand, and touched the meat and the unleavened cakes; and fire sprang up from the rock and consumed the meat and the unleavened cakes; and the angel of the Lord vanished from his sight. Then Gideon perceived that it was the angel of the Lord; and Gideon said, “Help me, Lord God! For I have seen the angel of the Lord face to face.” But the Lord said to him, “Peace be to you; do not fear, you shall not die.” Then Gideon built an altar there to the Lord, and called it, The Lord is peace. To this day it still stands at Ophrah, which belongs to the Abiezrites.

(From the Daily Office Lectionary – Judges 6:19-24 – August 5, 2012)

It is intriguing how often in stories of Holy Scripture food plays a role. From the “apple” in the Garden, to Abraham offering a meal of cakes and meat to the three men (who turn out to God) at the Oaks of Mamre, to this story of Gideon, to David and his men eating the Bread of the Presence, to all the food items listed as items of sacrifice in Leviticus, the Old Testament (indeed, the whole Bible) is food focused. The People of God define themselves through the annual reenactment of a ritual meal celebrating the Passover; the new People of God define themselves (in my tradition and others) by the weekly reenactment of a ritual meal celebrating the death and Resurrection of Christ and anticipating his return. It’s intriguing but not surprising. The Jewish and Christian faiths are not, in the long run, about following rules of ritual or moral conduct; they are about being in an intimate relationship with that which is the source of being, that which we call “God” and address as “Father” or brother or redeemer. And, other than sex, there is probably no more intimate activity two or more people can share than eating together.

Today the gospel lesson for the Eucharist is from John’s lengthy “treatise on bread” section in which Jesus describes himself as the “bread of life,” an image which continues this focus on food. (John 6:24-35) My son Patrick was our guest preacher this morning; he extemporized a sermon around bread as a carbohydrate food. He called to mind the practice of long-distance competitive runners, the folks who run marathons and compete in triathlons, to “carb load”, involves greatly increasing the amount of carbohydrates you eat several days before a high-intensity endurance athletic event. The purpose is to increase the level of glycogen stored in one’s muscles. Usually, only enough glycogen to sustain 60-90 minutes of physical activity is stored, but through carbohydrate loading an athlete, particularly male athletes, can often double the glycogen in their systems.

Noting that the church is in a dynamic period of change, figuring out how it will minister in a new century in a radically different social context, Patrick suggested the period ahead of us is going to be like running a marathon. In the past, the church has been like a sprinter, dashing along quickly with this new program and then dashing again with another new program. But now, the long, hard sustained work of reimagining and restructuring for a new ministry paradigm requires that we “carb load” on the bread of life, Jesus our Lord. Only he can provide the life energy the church needs at this time in its existence.

As I listened to him preach, I thought of this Daily Office lesson and how Gideon’s altar is said to stand “to this day.” I firmly believe that the church will stand, in one way or another, through the years to come. It may not be very much like the church of my youth, or the church in which I currently minister. The era of the parish church, of the congregation with a dedicated single-purpose building, of the local church with a full-time paid priest may be coming to an end, but in some form or another the church will stand. It will endure. It will “run the race that set before us, looking to Jesus the pioneer and perfecter of our faith,” (Heb. 12:1-1) the bread of life which sustains us.

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

Infinite Abundance – Sermon for Pentecost 9, Proper 12B – July 29, 2012

July 29, 2012 / / 0 Comments

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This sermon was preached on Sunday, July 29, 2012, at St. Paul’s Episcopal Church, Medina, Ohio, where Fr. Funston is rector.

(Revised Common Lectionary, Proper 12B: 2 Kings 4:42-44; Psalm 145:10-19; Ephesians 3:14-21; and John 6:1-21)

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How many of you have ever attended a potluck supper or potluck luncheon in this parish? Let’s have show of hands. OK – hands down. Those of you who have done so . . . have you ever known there to be an insufficiency of food at any such event? Ever? Keep that in mind, please, as we take a look at these lessons today.

First of all, a story about the prophet Elisha from the Second Book of Kings. This the fourth in a series of miracles which are set out in Chapter 4 to prove that Elisha is a spokesman for God. In the first story, one of Elisha’s disciples dies leaving a widow with two children to raise by herself; her only possession, we are told, is a jar of oil. Elisha instructs her to borrow as many vessels from her neighbors as she can and to pour the oil from her jar into the borrowed vessels. She and her children fill vessel after vessel with the oil from her jar. When all the borrowed vessels are filled, the miraculous supply of oil stops. Elisha then instructs her to sell the oil, pay her debts, and live off the remaining money. It is a story of over-flowing abundance.

In the second story, Elisha promises a barren woman who has provided him hospitality that she will conceive and bear a son, which she does. Sometime later, however, the son becomes ill and dies. The woman, after placing the body in the room of her house where Elisha had stayed, finds Elisha and tells him what has happened; he offers to send his servant Gehazi but she insists that the prophet himself must come. He does so and raises the son from the dead. Again, it is a story of over-flowing grace.

The third and fourth stories are tales about food. In the third, we learn that on his return from raising the boy a time of famine has come upon his land of Gilgal, but Elisha nontheless orders his disciples to make a big pot of stew. One of the students goes into the field to gather herbs. Along with other ingredients he brings some gourds from a wild vine. As they eat the stew, apparently some fall ill and die as the men cry out, “O man of God, there is death in the pot!” Elisha, by the simple expedient of throwing some flour in the pot, “cures” the stew. Once again, the prophet brings life out of death. Perhaps more importantly, when his disciples were without food, God through Elisha’s ministry was able to provide them with what they needed.

And then we come to our reading for today at the end of the chapter. In this fourth story, twenty loaves of barley bread and some undefined but clearly small amount of grain feed a hundred people with plenty left over. This story differs from the first three in that it specifically mentions the commandment of God. The instruction to give the loaves and grain to the people and to eat and have some left over are not Elisha’s, they are the Lord’s.

This series of miracles accomplished through Elisha proves his legitimacy as a prophet of God, but beyond that in each of these events God meets and satisfies a significant human need. Saving orphaned children and their widowed mother from poverty and possibly slavery, providing a son to a barren woman and then raising that child from the dead, and feeding the hungry with more than enough are accomplished in these miracles. These are not demonstrations of power for the sake of impressing an audience; these are acts of abundant compassion and love flowing from God.

These stories, especially the one chosen by the Lectionary this morning, form a backdrop to the story of Jesus feeding the 5,000. This story was so important to and had made such an impression upon the first Christians that we find it in all four of the Gospels – each of the the Evangelists puts a different “spin” on the story, but there it is in every Gospel. In fact, it is the only miracle of Jesus that is reported in all four Gospels. John, whose version we heard today, uses it to introduce a lengthy discourse on the “bread of life” from which we will hear pieces read over the next five weeks, but for now let’s just concentrate on story itself.

As John tells the story, Jesus had gone off to be by himself after a particularly intense period of ministry. However, the crowds followed him: “Jesus,” writes John, “went up the mountain and sat down there with his disciples. . . . . [Then] he looked up and saw a large crowd coming toward him.” This isn’t the sermon on the mount; it’s not a teaching event; he hadn’t encouraged this group of people to come to this place. In fact, as John tells it, there is almost a suggestion that Jesus didn’t want these people around, but there they are! There they are in a wilderness area at the end of the day, tired, hungry, and apparently without food.

“How are we going to buy food to feed these people?” he asks Phillip. Notice that there is no doubt or hesitation about whether or not he and his disciples have any responsibility to do so; it’s not even a question worth asking or thinking about. These people are here; they need to eat; what are we going to do about it? And Phillip’s immediate response is, “We don’t have enough money.” Meanwhile, Andrew pops up with the fact that there is a boy present with five loaves fish and two loaves, but then immediately observes (like Elisha’s servant in the story from Second Kings) that that clearly isn’t enough food for the number of people to be fed.

Elisha’s servant could not see how twenty loaves could feed a hundred men; Philip and Andrew could not see past the probably out-of-reach cost of sufficient supplies or the meagerness of the boy’s five loaves and two fish. And we, even though we regularly experience episodes of improbable and exorbitant abundance (remember those potluck meals I asked you to keep in mind), are much like them. We base many of our decisions on an assumption of scarcity and on our fear of insufficiency; we hoard and save and worry and end up living our lives, personally and corporately, in small and safe (but largely boring and ineffective) activities. We pull back when we should push forward. We give in to our fear of a shortfall rather than exercising faith in God’s profligate generosity. Elisha and Jesus, out of God’s overflowing abundance, gave the people what they needed.

These miracles, Elisha’s feeding of his 100 disciples and Jesus’ feeding of the 5,000, demand that we as the church face squarely this question: “Do we believe that God will provide what we need to do the ministry God wants done?” Note the essential qualifiers – what we need, not necessarily what we want, and the ministry God wants, not necessarily the ministry we’ve planned. Another way to ask the question: Do we operate according to a mind-set of abundance or of scarcity? The former engenders generosity, joy, and hope; the latter brings anxiety, fear, and decline. These stories encourage us to rely about God’s infinite abundance, to live in God’s world of generosity and hope, in God’s world of infinite possibility.

These stories demonstrate that will of God for God’s people, throughout both the Old and the New Testaments, is profligate generosity; God’s will for God’s people is the same today. God wants to meet our human needs. We face no problems that are any different from those faced by God’s people in the past; the problems we face can and will be resolved when we rely upon God’s generous abundance without fear of scarcity or insufficiency. Our problems are not our problem! Our problem is really believing that God is still able and willing to enter into our lives to meet our needs.Our problem is in really internalizing what we are saying when we repeat the words of the Psalm: “You open wide your hand and satisfy the needs of every living creature.”

And yet we have our own experiences of that abundant provision. Elisha told his servant to feed the 100 men with the twenty loaves of bread: “He set it before them, they ate, and had some left, according to the word of the Lord.” Jesus had the people sit down; he took five loaves and two fish from the boy, gave thanks to God, and distributed the food. After everyone had eaten, “he told his disciples, ‘Gather up the fragments left over, so that nothing may be lost.’ So they gathered them up, and . . . filled twelve baskets.”

That’s exactly what happens when we have those potlucks I asked you to keep in mind! When we have shared suppers in this parish, no one has ever gone away hungry. There are always plenty of leftovers. They don’t always go home with the people who brought them either – they are sent home with our seniors who live alone, with struggling young families with children to feed, or with the family whose breadwinner has recently lost his job. At our potlucks we personally experience of the very stories we read in the Bible. God not only meets our needs, God overfills them with profligate generosity.

With that experience, we really should have no trouble believing that God is able and willing to enter every area of our lives to meet our needs, not just at our potluck suppers but in every thing we do as individuals and together as the church. We should have no trouble comprehending, with all the saints, the breadth and length and height and depth of the love of Christ and the fullness of God whose power, working in us, can do infinitely more than we can ask or imagine. Amen.

A Prophetic General Convention – Sermon for Pentecost 7, Proper 10B – July 15, 2012

July 15, 2012 / / 3 Comments

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This sermon was preached on Sunday, July 15, 2012, at St. Paul’s Episcopal Church, Medina, Ohio, where Fr. Funston is rector.

(Revised Common Lectionary, Proper 10B: Amos 7:7-15; Psalm 85:8-13; Ephesians 1:3-14; and Mark 6:14-29)

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In our lessons today, we have two stories about silencing the prophetic voice. First, a snippet of the not-very-familiar story of the Prophet Amos which is, frankly, cut from its context so badly that some explanation really is necessary. Second, the almost-too-familiar story of the beheading of John the Baptizer.

Amos, as he is at pains to say to the priest Amaziah, is not a professional prophet: “I am no prophet, nor a prophet’s son; but I am a herdsman, and a dresser of sycamore trees.” Nonetheless, Amos was commissioned by God in the middle of the 8th Century before Christ to leave his home in the southern kingdom of Judah, travel to the northern kingdom of Israel, and deliver there a condemnation of Israel, its monarch and its people. In this portion of his story, he tells of God showing him four quick visions, of which the plumb line is the third. First, he is shown a swarm of locusts, illustrating that God will wipe out Israel just as locusts wipe out a crop. Second, he is shown a shower of fire that would “eat up the land.” After each of these, Amos speaks up in defense of Isreal and God relents. Third is the vision we heard in the lesson, the plumb line; Amos, however, does not defend Israel after this vision. Instead, the series of visions is interrupted by the tale of the priest Amaziah and his attempt to silence this prophet.

Amos has delivered his message to Amaziah, a message to the whole of the country, but Amaziah, who is high priest at the king’s shrine at Bethel, has edited it before delivering it to the king. Instead of a message to the whole of society, he has made it sound like nothing more than a personal threat against the king and now, certain of the king’s reaction, he warns Amos to flee, to return to the south to make his living as a prophet there, but never to prophecy again in Israel. This is where Amos protests that he is not a professional prophet, but earns his living in agriculture; and this is where the lectionary reading ends. But it is not where the story ends.

Because of his attempt to silence the prophecy, Amos speaks a word from God for Amaziah, predicting that his family will fall in ruin and dishonor and that he himself will die “in an unclean land.” Amos then tells of the fourth of his visions, a bowl of fresh fruit which God explains illustrates that God’s patience with Israel is at an end. It’s a pun in Hebrew, the word for fruit being qay’its and that for end being qets. In English, I suppose, we would say that God is calling it quits with these people. The story ends with God’s final word to Amaziah, to the all of Israel, and to anyone who would muzzle his prophets: “Be silent!” Those who would interfere with God’s word to God’s people are themselves to shut up or face consequences like those promised Amaziah!

Which brings us to the gospel lesson and the beheading of John the Baptizer. It’s so familiar it hardly needs rehearsing, but let’s just refresh our memories, anyway.

Herod imprisoned John in an attempt to appease his wife Herodias because John had been raling against her and her marriage to Herod, who was her brother-in-law before he was her spouse and, therefore, John considered the marriage adulterous. (Some suggest that Herod did so to prevent Herodias from killing John herself.) At a birthday party he threw for himself, Herod witnessed a dance by his step-daughter and was so taken that he made a rash promise to give her anything she might ask for, up to half his kingdom. Consulting her mother, the girl asks for John’s head on a platter. Hoist on the petard of his public promise, Herod has no choice but to give her what she asks, even though he was quite fearful that John was, indeed, a prophet of God. Not recorded in the Bible is the fact that not too long after the events portrayed in the Gospels, Herod was deprived of his kingdom and all his property, and died in squalid poverty exiled to Gaul. Silencing God’s prophets, again, is obviously a really bad idea!

While I would be the last to suggest that the Episcopal Church or any of its leaders are equivalent to Amos or John the Baptist, I do believe that from time to the Church does speak with a prophetic voice. I believe that, in part, because of Christ’s promise that “where two or three are gathered in my name, I am there among them” (Matt. 18:20) and because it has been the tradition and belief of the church since the very first Ecumenical Counsel that (as some Lutheran bishops recently put it) “we trust that God’s Spirit will form the wisdom of God’s faithful people gathered in deliberative assembly.” (ELCA Conference of Bishops, March 10, 2009)

Over 1,000 Episcopalians on Thursday concluded the bicameral deliberative assembly known as The General Convention of the Episcopal Church: 165 bishops participated as voting members of the junior house; 844 lay and clergy deputies, as voting members of the senior house. They were presented with over 440 pieces of business ranging from courtesy resolutions commending the host hotel’s staff to the adoption of a budget for the next three years to the approval of new liturgies to the election of new leadership. Much of that was done quickly, with little fan-fare and hardly any notice. Much of it was done with the boring, long-drawn-out tedium that careful legislative work often seems to entail, but again with little notice. Some of it has received and will receive the attention of a secular press itching for scandal and sensationalism, eager to sell its advertising by selling the world a picture of a church gone (as Bishop Michael Curry of North Carolina, in fact, urged it in his keynote sermon) crazy! (Of course, Bishop Curry was encouraging the church to go “crazy for Christ,” something the secular press will overlook.) Some of what the church did at the 77th General Convention will, I believe, be seen in years to come to be truly prophetic, in the best sense of that word, speaking God’s Truth to a world in need of hearing it, and I suspect that there will be those who try to silence the Convention’s message or stop its actions as Amaziah and Herodias did those of Amos and John the Baptist.

Of all the work done by the Convention, there were three areas in which I believe its actions are the most important. First, it acted in regard to marriage and the promises couples make to one another when forming life-long, loving, and committed relationships. Second, it affirmed the church’s traditional understanding of the dominical sacraments of Baptism and Eucharist. Third, it committed the church to structural and organic reform.

With regard to life-long interpersonal commitments, the Convention called for an in-depth study and proclamation of the church’s contemporary theology of marriage. This, in my opinion, has been needed for many years. Holy Matrimony is one of the five sacramental rites of the church which our Articles of Religion tell us arise from “states of life allowed in the Scriptures” but which have neither “visible sign [n]or ceremony ordained of God.” (Art. XXV, BCP page 872) Marriage is one of those “Traditions and Ceremonies” that it “is not necessary . . . be in all places one, or utterly like.” (Art. XXXIV, BCP page 874) Since it was first identified as a sacrament in about the 10th Century, marriage practices “have been divers,” and the Articles of Religion assure us “may be changed according to the diversity of countries, times, and men’s manners.” (Ibid.) After a thousand years of monkeying about with marriage willy-nilly, and believe me we have done just that throughout the church’s history, taking a good, hard, methodical look at our theology and practice is a great idea!

In the same area, the Convention approved a provisional rite for the blessing of the committed, life-long relationships of same-sex couples. This is the one action that I am sure will be most discussed and most mischaracterized in the secular press. The Standing Liturgical Commission, which developed this rite, and the deputies and bishops who adopted it, have been quite clear that this is not marriage liturgy; it does not confer the sacrament of Holy Matrimony. Furthermore, it is a provisional rite, which means it may only be used provided certain conditions are met. I confess that I have not read the enabling legislation, but it is my understanding that this liturgy may only be used in those States or foreign jurisdictions where the civil authorities have either made the legal state of marriage open to same-sex couples or have created some other form of legally recognized civil union for such couples. Furthermore, it may only be used with the permission of the local bishop.

The second area of important action was in regard to the Sacraments of Baptism and Holy Communion. There was a motion put forward by the Diocese of Eastern Oregon to change the canons of the church so as to permit, as a regular matter, those who are not yet baptized to receive the Sacrament of the Altar. This would have changed what has been the practice and tradition of the church since its very beginning; there has never been a time when it was not considered necessary that a person be baptized before being invited to partake of the Body and Blood of Christ. While we do not check ID’s at the altar rail or communion station, and while we do now open our communion to all who are baptized in any Christian tradition (no longer restricting the Eucharist to those confirmed in the Episcopal Church), the General Convention was not willing to make that change. Instead, in a substitute resolution, the bishops and deputies affirmed that it is the normative practice and expectation of this church that Baptism precede reception of Holy Communion, and affirming that the Episcopal Church invites everyone to be baptized into the saving death and resurrection of Christ Jesus.

The third and, I believe, most important of what I have called the prophetic actions of the General Convention is to take the first step toward reorganization and restructuring of the Episcopal Church. We have a national, provincial, and diocesan structure which is often top-heavy, unwieldy, and counter-productive. One of the buzz-words of recent Convention was “nimble” – that is not a word that in any way, shape, or form describes the Episcopal Church! It doesn’t even describe one of our parishes let alone the entire national organization! All too often we find ourselves standing in our own way, tripping over our own feet. In passing the resolution to re-imagine and restructure the church and calling for a task force made up of new and younger leaders to do so, the General Convention has said that we will get out of the way; we will get out of the Spirit’s way; we will get out of our own way!

There is much work to be done, but it seems to me that the hardest work will be the letting-go and stepping-aside . . . letting go of old ways of doing and being church, letting go of expectations of how things have always been done and how we think they ought to be done, letting go of office and power by those who have governed the church for generations, letting go of the hurt and pain of change . . . stepping aside to allow those newer, younger leaders to come forward, stepping aside to let the Holy Spirit come in, stepping aside to free the center so that it may be filled with something new and different. I hope that the hard work of letting-go and stepping-aside will get done, although I’m not convinced that it will.

Shortly after adopting that resolution, the House of Deputies was given an opportunity to elect newer and younger leadership. It chose instead to elect as its president someone who has been a General Convention deputy eight times and who has had a seat in the highest councils of the church for years. It elected as its vice-president someone who has been a deputy at every General Convention since 1973. I know both of these individuals and I know that they are faithful, dedicated, and capable, but I have to be honest – these folks are part of the well-entrenched, long-experienced cadre of church governors; this is leadership that is anything but new or young (and it pains me to say that since the new president and I are essentially the same age). Still, I live in hope that they can and will, in fact, facilitate and accomplish the change that is needed, because (as I said earlier) I trust that God’s Spirit forms the wisdom of God’s faithful people gathered in deliberative assembly.

So let me bring us back to our lessons for today. What might they be teaching us about how to respond to the actions of our recently-concluded General Convention?

Well . . . first, I suggest that the story of Amos and Amaziah, and the story of the Baptizer and Herodias, these stories in which someone sought to silence the prophetic word encourage us to be aware of the distortions we may hear from both the religious and the secular media. Just as Amaziah misrepresented and tried to silence Amos’s prophecy when relaying it to King Jeroboam, so too may we find the reports distorting the actual words and actions of the Convention in an attempt to undermine and stop them. Just as Herodias sought to behead John, so too we may find the detractors of our church trying to assassinate the character of our leaders.

Secondly, the defense of prophecy in the Book of Amos with its pronouncement of judgment against Amaziah or the end to which Herod and Herodias came might stand as cautionary tales against our own tendency to silence whatever it is that we find unpalatable in the prophetic voices of our church’s Spirit-led Convention, voices calling us to change in those areas in which we as a church and as individuals may be in the greatest need of reformation.

Finally, we might find encouragement that we, like Amos and John, despite the dangers in doing so, might heed God’s call to exercise our own prophetic voices in our communities, in our workplaces, or among our circles of friends speaking on behalf of our church which welcomes all and proclaims the Good News that God loves everyone, no exceptions.

God Is in the Business of Healing & Life – Sermon for Proper 8B – July 1, 2012

July 1, 2012 / / 0 Comments

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This sermon was preached on Sunday, July 1, 2012, at St. Paul’s Episcopal Church, Medina, Ohio, where Fr. Funston is rector. (Revised Common Lectionary, Proper 8B: Wisdom of Solomon 1:13-15;2:23-24; Lamentations 3:21-33; 2 Corinthians 8:7-15; and Mark 5:21-43.)

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The Resurrection of Jairus' Daughter, Emmanuel Benner, 1902Our first reading this morning is from a little book from the Apocrypha called The Book of Wisdom. At one time church tradition ascribed authorship to King Solomon, but it is now believed to have been written sometime in the first or second century before Christ by a Greek-speaking Jew of the Diaspora. It is found in the Greek-language version of Jewish scriptures, not in the Hebrew version, and is therefore not considered as canonical scripture by Jews or by Protestants. Roman Catholics and the Eastern Orthodox do accept it, and we Anglicans take a middle course, saying that we read them “for example of life and instruction of manners; but yet [we do] not apply them to establish any doctrine.” (Articles of Religion, Art. VI, BCP 1979, pg. 868). Well, here’s an example of life, then:

God did not make death,
And he does not delight in the death of the living.
For he created all things so that they might exist;
the generative forces of the world are wholesome….

God, says this odd little book, created human beings for immortality.

So here’s some “instruction of manners”: when something bad happens to someone, particularly if someone’s loved one dies, if someone has a miscarriage, if someone is diagnosed with a serious illness (like, say, terminal cancer), do not say, “Well, it’s God’s will. We may not understand it, but it’s part of God’s plan.” And if anyone says that to you or to a loved one or to a friend or even to a stranger, tell them they’re wrong. In fact, if it will make you feel better, you tell them to stick it in their ear! Death is not God’s will; it never was and it never will be! “God,” as the Book of Wisdom says clearly, “did not make death.”

But, of course, someone will say to me, “Wait! You’re making a doctrinal statement based on an apocryphal text and we Anglicans are not supposed to do that.”

OK, yes, that’s what I’m doing, but my “doctrinal statement” is not based only on this small portion of Wisdom. We also have Lamentations in the Lectionary texts this morning: “The Lord will not reject forever. Although he causes grief, he will have compassion according to the abundance of his steadfast love; for he does not willingly afflict or grieve anyone.” God is not in the business of causing grief and suffering; the Prophet Ezekiel, as well, assures us God takes no “pleasure in [even] the death of the wicked, [but would] rather that they should turn from their ways and live?” (Ezek. 18:23) In other words, God is not in the business of causing death! God is in the business of healing and life.

In addition, elsewhere in Scripture, we have the promise of God through the Prophet Isaiah that “he will swallow up death forever,” (Isaiah 25:8) , that the “dead shall live, their corpses shall rise . . . . and the earth will give birth to those long dead,” (26:19), that God is “about to create new heavens and a new earth.” (65:17) In that new reality, “no more shall there be in it an infant that lives but a few days, or an old person who does not live out a lifetime; for one who dies at a hundred years will be considered a youth, and one who falls short of a hundred will be considered accursed . . . . The wolf and the lamb shall feed together, the lion shall eat straw like the ox . . . . They shall not hurt or destroy on all [God’s] holy mountain [meaning everywhere].” (65:20,25) In other words, God is not in the business of causing death! God is in the business of healing and life.

This is what our Gospel reading today assures us in these two stories of Christ healing two women: the daughter of the synagogue ruler Jairus and the unnamed women who touched him in the market place. Jairus had faith that God’s will for his daughter was healing and so he came to Jesus; the woman with the hemorrhage had faith that God’s will for her was healing and so she thought, “If I could just touch the hem of his garment . . . .” God’s will for us is healing; we just have to have faith in that promise.

Faith, however, does not mean believing the unbelievable; it means holding on to God’s promise, despite whatever present realities call it into question. To the writer of Lamentations, which was written in the 6th Century before Christ at time when the Temple (indeed the whole of Jerusalem) had been destroyed and it seemed all hope was lost, such faith meant holding to the credal and communal memory of what God had done for God’s people in ages past. It meant calling God’s mighty works of healing and strength into the present through prayer and proclamation.

For Jairus and the women in the market place, it meant holding fast to God’s promise that he would bring “recovery and healing” to God’s people, that he would “heal them and reveal to them abundance of prosperity and security” (Jer. 33:6), and believing that that promise was made manifest in Jesus of Nazarth. It means the same for us today. It means laying claim to Jesus’ works of healing and strength, and bringing them into the present through prayer and proclamation in the context and community of fellow Christians who support and restore our faith, who recite it with us in the creed, who proclaim it to us in the sermon, who sing it with us in the liturgy and hymns. Even in times when it appears that all is lost, the community of faith helps us to hear the voice of faith saying, “The Lord is good to those who wait for him [God] does not willingly afflict or grieve anyone.” God is not in the business of causing death! “God created all things so that they might exist; the generative forces of the world are wholesome.” God is in the business of healing and life.

This, of course, just raises a question: what if we have faith and pray for someone who is ill, but the sick person does not get better? What if we pray and pray and despite all of our prayer, the person die? Does that mean that we did not have faith or did not have enough faith?

Well, as another preacher has remarked

. . . that depends. Is God obligated to His creatures to answer all prayers with Yes? Is God no more than a cosmic Coke machine, who must dispense what we want when we put in the proper amount? Or does our God have His own will, His own plan, and His own wisdom, which may transcend ours? Personally, I am more comfortable with the idea that God would override any requests I make, if He deems them not in my best interest. What if I ask for something that will cause me great damage, mistakenly believing, in faith, that I need it? Would it not attribute great cruelty and maliciousness to God if we supposed that He were obligated by some scriptural contract to give me what I ask for, no matter what? (Ken Collins, Faith Healing)

If there is healing in response to prayer, we know that it was God’s will to heal, but if there was no healing in response to prayer, the answer isn’t so simple. Perhaps healing at a later date would do more good. Perhaps the illness, if prolonged, might lead to fruitful introspection and a new spiritual awareness. Perhaps the person’s earthly life, if prolonged, might be a source of pain and misery for that person or another. Sometimes the answer to prayer is “No” and we cannot know why. “We have to give God credit for being smarter and wiser than we are, and we must acknowledge that we cannot always immediately apprehend [God’s] designs.” (Ken Collins, Faith Healing) But we can know this: God is not in the business of causing death! God is in the business of healing and life.

As the Book of Wisdom poetically reminds us, “God did not make death . . . but through the devil’s envy death entered the world.” One of the great illusions of our time, some would say that is one of Satan’s great lies, is that through our own effort, through our own science, through our own better medicine, we can live forever. It makes us feel that death is wrong. It comes as a surprise, even when we say that we expect it. We are always surprised by death! But in our Gospel story this morning, we learn that Jesus views death differently; Jesus treats death as if it were simply like falling asleep. Last night (assuming your neighbor was not shooting off fireworks prematurely) you went to sleep. This morning you woke up to a new day. “Death,” says Jesus, is like that.” You fall asleep . . . you wake up. In this Gospel story the young girl wakes up. Jesus shows us that death, the devil’s creation, Satan’s great illusion, is not fatal. Death is merely another form of sleep, because God did not make death; God is not in the business of causing death! God created all things so that they might live. God created human beings for immortality. God is in the business of healing and life.

Let us pray:

O merciful Father, you have taught us in the Holy Scriptures that you do not willingly afflict or grieve anyone: Look with compassion upon all who are in pain or sorrow, all who are troubled by illness, all who tend any who are dying; remember them, O Lord, in mercy, nourish their souls with patience, and comfort them with a sense of your goodness; empower us, O Lord, to minister to their needs and to offer support for their faith; that all may be strengthened in times of weakness and have confidence in your loving care; through Jesus Christ our Lord. Amen.

Hey! Look at the Ostrich! – Sermon for Pentecost 4 (Proper 7, Year B) – June 24, 2012

June 24, 2012 / / 0 Comments

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This sermon was preached on Sunday, June 24, 2012, at St. Paul’s Episcopal Church, Medina, Ohio, where Fr. Funston is rector. (Revised Common Lectionary for the Fourth Sunday after Pentecost, Proper 7: Job 38:1-11; Psalm 107:1-3, 23-32; 2 Corinthians 6:1-13; and Mark 4:35-41.)

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Job by Marc ChagallOur first reading this morning is from the Book of Job, which in the Jewish organization of Scripture is part of the Ketuvim or “Writings” and is considered one of the Sifrei Emet or “Books of Truth”, which is really quite interesting since it is generally acknowledged to be a work of fiction. It tells the story of Iyyobh (“Job”), who is described as a righteous man and who becomes the subject of a wager between a character called “Satan” and another character called “God”. I put it that way to underscore that this text is not relating to us any historical facts about God, or Satan, or a man named Job; it is, rather, telling a story in which characters representing God, Satan, and human beings in general help us to understand something about reality.

So here’s the story. God and Satan make a wager that Satan can do nothing to the righteous man, Job, that will sway his faith in God. Satan then arranges to deprive Job of everything that seems to give value and meaning to his life – his family, his wealth, his social position, his health – so that he is left with nothing. Instead of cursing God (even though encouraged to do so by his wife), Job shaves his head, tears his clothes, and says, “Naked I came from my mother’s womb, and naked shall I return there; the Lord gave, and the Lord has taken away; blessed be the name of the Lord.” (Job 1:21)

Job is then visited by three of his friends who try to comfort him based on their individual ways of understanding religion and God. Each of these men bases his appeal on a particular religious premise:

First, Eliphaz comes with a faith that says the innocent never suffer permanently. He believes that Job is essentially innocent, but even the most innocent of humans must expect some suffering, even if only temporary. Therefore, he assures Job that things will get better soon.

Second is Bildad who is convinced of the doctrine of retribution. Given the demise of Job’s family, they must have been very wicked, but since Job is still alive and there must be some hope for him. He just needs to repent of whatever evil he must surely have done.

The third friend, Zophar, believes that Job is guilty of some dread sin because he is suffering and even worse, Job refuses to acknowledge it, therefore he is a far worse sinner than anyone could have imagined. Zophar offers no hope whatsoever.

Then a fourth character, Elihu, comes along. Elihu is angered by everything the first three men say, as well as by Job’s protestations of innocence; he seeks to persuade Job to focus on God and to realize that no one is ever able to understand God. True wisdom, he says, is found in the reverence of God.

But in nothing that any of these four men say does Job find much comfort; in nothing they say does he find an answer to what is his basic question: Why does a righteous person suffer? And why do the wicked seem to escape punishment?

Throughout the speeches of his friends, Job protests his innocence and demands, again and again, the right to present his case to God, to go to court with God and get an answer to his question: “Why is this happening to me?” When that appears to impossible, Job’s response is what one commentator has called “a powerful, evocative, authentic expression of man’s essential egotism.” Having seen and felt too much suffering, all Job wants is to see nothing at all; if he cannot present his case to God, he wants only to be enveloped in the blackness of the tomb, to be enclosed by dark doors that will remain shut forever.

And this, finally, is when God shows up. Not with an answer to Job’s self-centered, legal question, but in response to his withdrawal inward and turning out of the lights. “Who is this that darkens counsel by words without knowledge?” God demands of Job, “Gird up your loins like a man, [and] I will question you.” (Job 38:2-3) Stop being a self-centered little worm; stop wallowing in self-pity; stop whining “Why me?” Look at the bigger picture!

This is not the answer Job expected; it is not the hearing in a court that Job had envisioned, where God would hear him and vindicate his cause. This is not the solution to his wanting to know why bad things happen to good people. God takes the focus away from the “up close and personal” issues of Job’s life and suffering, and instead presents the bigger picture of the whole of creation where God’s unfathomable being undergirds everything.

Job wants answers about justice but God goes into a rant about the creation: the sea, the stars, the sky, the earth, the whole shebang! As the speech goes on for several chapters, God will talk about all the wild animals, even the ostrich, who is incredibly foolishness but very very speedy. What are we to make of this? Job wants fairness; he wants what’s right! And God’s answer is, “Hey! Look at that ostrich I made! It’s stupid but, wow, is it fast!” What’s the point?

Well, the point is this – that Job is not the center of the universe . . . and neither are we. That’s why the Jews call this poetic work of fiction a “Book of Truth”. What Job learns, we learn – that we are not center stage in the drama of creation. The world is not ours; it’s God’s.

In the place of Job’s egotistical death wish, God offers the splendor and vastness of life. In place of an inward focus toward darkness, God offers a grand sweeping view that carries us over the length and breadth of the created world, from sea to sky to the whole created cosmos, to the lonely wastes and craggy heights where only the grass or the wildest of animals live, where the ostrich runs swiftly, where God ” bring[s] rain on a land where no one lives, on the desert, which is empty of human life.” (Job 38:26)

Job and his friends were completely wrong about God. God is simply not in the business of rewarding and punishing individual human beings. God’s revelation to Job and to us is that the universe is far bigger, far stranger, and far more mysterious than we can imagine, and that God’s providential care is at the heart of all creation. The comfort for Job and for us is found in being reminded that we are one of God’s creatures in this web of creation.

Obviously, this is not the comfort Job had hoped for, but it is the comfort God offers. And it is the comfort Jesus demonstrates in today’s Gospel lesson. Asleep in the stern of a boat tossed in a wild and stormy sea, Jesus seems unconcerned about the comfort of the disciples who are with him. They wake him and, echoing the God of the story of Job saying to the sea, “Thus far shall you come, and no farther; here shall your proud waves be stopped,” he commands the waves, “Peace! Be still!” And turning to the disciples he asks, “Why are you afraid? Have you still no faith?” We can almost hear him say, “Haven’t you read the Book of Job?”

Back in 1735, the Anglican priest and founder of Methodism John Wesley sailed from England to Savannah, Georgia, with his brother Charles, also an Anglican priest. Their goal was to preach to the Indians and lead them to Christ. On the crossing, which took four months, there was also a group of Moravians. At one point, a storm came up suddenly and broke the main mast. John Wesley reported in his journal that while the Englishmen on board were terrified, the Moravians calmly sang hymns and prayed. Wesley was impressed by their faith in the face of a dangerous, life-threatening storm. He felt that they possessed an inner strength that he did not. He later wrote in his journal, “It was then that I realized that mine was a dry-land, fair-weather faith.”

The Book of Job and today’s gospel lesson encourage us to have more than a “dry-land, fair-weather faith.” They commend a faith in the God of creation who “know[s] the ordinances of the heavens . . . [and] establish[es] their rule on the earth.” (Job 38:33) The Book of Job encourages us to look beyond our own self-centered concerns, to see the broad panorama of God’s power, to find comfort in God’s creating and sustaining the splendor and vastness of life.

Little wonder that the Jews call this work of fiction, the Book of Job, a “book of truth!”

Let us pray:

Heavenly Father, you have created the world and filled it with beauty: Open our eyes to behold your gracious hand in all your works; that, rejoicing in the whole of your creation, we may learn to serve you with gladness; for the sake of the One through whom all things were made, the One whom even the wind and the sea obey, your Son Jesus Christ our Lord. Amen.

That’s What It’s All About – Sermon for Trinity Sunday (Year B) – June 3, 2012

June 3, 2012 / / 0 Comments

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This sermon was preached on Sunday, June 3, 2012, at St. Paul’s Episcopal Church, Medina, Ohio, where Fr. Funston is rector. (Revised Common Lectionary Readings for Trinity Sunday, Year B: Isaiah 6:1-8; Canticle 13 [BCP 1979, Page 90]; Romans 8:12-17; and John 3:1-17.)

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Did you listen carefully or perhaps even follow along in the Prayer Book when I offered our opening prayer today, the Collect for Trinity Sunday? Listen to it again:

Almighty and everlasting God, you have given to us your servants grace, by the confession of a true faith, to acknowledge the glory of the eternal Trinity, and in the power of your divine Majesty to worship the Unity….

Did that make any sense to you? If not, don’t feel bad. It doesn’t make sense to a lot of people and, frankly, I don’t think it’s supposed to make sense.

Today is different from all other days in the liturgical calendar. Nearly all of our other special feast days commemorate events in the life of Jesus or events in the early history of the church or the lives of special saints, but this day, this one peculiar day, we celebrate a doctrine: the Doctrine of the Trinity. It is a day which, after many years in ordained ministry, many years preaching through the liturgical lectionary, I’ve come to realize strikes terror in the hearts of many clergy. Every year we face the same dilemma: how do we make the Doctrine of the Trinity understandable?

You know that in my sermon preparation one of the things I do is consult with other clergy. I talk with my local colleagues in bible study; I “chat” with clergy friends on the internet; I read commentaries, articles, and essays by other clergy and theologians. On one of the blogs I read pretty regularly, a Lutheran pastor summarized the Doctrine of the Trinity this way:

So let’s get right down to it, shall we? Here we go: God is 3 persons and one being. God is one and yet three. The father is not the son or the Spirit, the son is not the father or the Spirit, the spirit is not the Father or the Son. But the Father Son and Spirit all are God and God is one. …so to review. 1+1+1=1. That’s simple enough. (The Rev. Nadia Bolz Weber)

That’s really about as good a summary as I’ve read: 1+1+1=1 Wrap your head around that!

One of the folks I share things with is a priest known to many of you, Vickie H., who served in this parish a few years back. She sent me a poem that she thought she might use in her sermon entitled Dancing with the Trinity by Raymond A. Foss:

Multiple partners and yet one
all of them ready
for me to let them take the lead
to guide my steps
on the floor, on the journey
when I submit
and let them lead

Dancing with the Trinity
each of them important
all in love
in relationship
needing all
to begin to understand
the mystery that is God

That’s a lovely little bit of verse, but if I had written it the penultimate line would have been different. I wouldn’t have written “to begin to understand the mystery that is God.” One doesn’t actually understand a mystery. One experiences God; one appreciates God; one enters into relationship with God, but finite beings such as ourselves are incapable of understanding in infinite. We cannot wrap our finite heads around an infinite God! With particular regard to the Doctrine of the Trinity, the combative 17th Century Anglican preacher Robert South (who was four times offered episcopal orders and each time turned them down!) wrote, “As he that denies it may lose his soul; so he that too much strives to understand it may lose his wits.” So in Mr. Foss’s poem, I think I would have written that we begin to experience the mystery that is God. I believe that is what the Doctrine of the Trinity is all about.

Those dissidents who object to this doctrine, such as the Unitarians or the Mormons, point out that you can’t find the word “trinity” in the Bible, and they are correct. It’s not there. About the closest one can get to finding it spelled out in Scripture is in Christ’s admonition known as “The Great Commission”:

Go therefore and make disciples of all nations, baptizing them in the name of the Father and of the Son and of the Holy Spirit. (Matt. 28:19)

The revelation of God as Three-in-One and One-in-Three was understood by the church as it struggled during the first three or four centuries of its existence to grapple with questions like “Who was [or, rather, who is] Jesus?” and “What was the meaning of Jesus’ life, death, resurrection, and ascension?” and “What was it that happened to the apostles on the Feast of Pentecost?” and “Who is this Holy Spirit?” and “How does all this relate to the God of the Hebrews revealed in the Old Testament?” As theologians like Basil of Caesarea, his brother Gregory of Nyssa, their sister Macrina, and their friend Gregory of Nazianzan worked out this revelation and sought to understand it, they looked at the Hebrew Scriptures and they noticed that in creation God refers to Godself in the plural: “Let us make man in our image.” They saw that the Hebrew words for God, Elohim and Adonai, are plural nouns. They noticed things like the song of the Seraphim in our lesson from Isaiah today; they saw that the angels sang “Holy” not once but three times. They looked at Genesis and saw that when God visited Abraham and Sarah at the Oaks of Mamre God appeared in the guise of three men. They began to see God as Trinity and how God is One but also Three, how the Three Persons interrelate in a Triune community.

Ever since, theologians have been trying to make this comprehensible. I did a lot of reading in preparation for today’s sermon and I wrote down some quotations from theological articles that I thought I might be able to include in this sermon. Here’s one by a contemporary theologian named Thomas J. Scirghi. His article is entitled The Trinity: A Model for Belonging in Contemporary Society:

In the mutual relationship of the three persons of the Godhead we find the model for a human community. This relationship is characterized by kenosis and “inclusion”. Kenosis connotes the emptying, or total abandonment of oneself for a higher good, as with Jesus emptying himself for the glory of God and for the salvation of humanity (Phil. 2:5-11). “Inclusion” refers to the acceptance of others, joining them with oneself while honouring the diversity among the many, in a unity that does not seek uniformity.

Well . . . OK. But I’m not sure I understand the Trinity any better.

Another article I read was entitled Three Is Not Enough: Jewish Reflections On Trinitarian Thinking by a rabbinic scholar named David Blumenthal. Jews, of course, reject the notion that God is anything other than One. As a critique of the Trinitarian Doctrine, Blumenthal suggested, on the basis of the Jewish mystical writings, the Zohar and the Kabala, which have identified ten attributes of God that, if we’re going to do this One-in-Many Many-in-One thing, why not a “Ten-ity”? (That’s my word, not his.) But there’s a difference between Judaism and Christianity.

For rabbinic Jews, the goal and focus of religion is intellectual understanding of God, knowing God’s Laws and following them as best one can, which requires comprehension of the nature of God and God’s requirements of humankind. There’s nothing wrong with that, but for Christians the goal and focus of religion is something else; it is a personal relationship with God, not necessarily intellectual understanding. Many of us enjoy employing our intellect in that relationship and that’s not to be discouraged, but in the end relationship is not about intellectual understanding. St. Anselm once famously wrote, ” I do not seek to understand that I may believe, but I believe in order to understand.” It is belief, trust, relationship, which is primary in the Christian faith. This is why the Swiss Catholic theologian Hans Urs von Balthasar writes, “In the trinitarian dogma God is one, good, true, and beautiful because he is essentially Love, and Love supposes the one, the other, and their unity.” This is much more helpful that talk of “kenosis” or inclusion; we can begin to experience God as Trinity when we recognize that God is love and that love means relationship.

As the church was working all this out, the Latin speaking theologians settled on the word circuminsessio, which means “abiding or fixed within”, to described the way in which the all three Persons are at work in every action of God; it’s a rather static term. The Greek speaking theologians, on the other hand, chose a word you’ve heard me mention before: perichoresis. This is a much more dynamic concept. Derived from the same root as our English word “choreography”, it means “dancing around.” Isn’t that a lovely image? It’s what that poet, Raymond Foss, was picking up on. In all actions of God the Persons of the Trinity dance about together; in creation, in salvation, in sanctification, in comfort, in love . . . every action of God, every presence of God is a step in a divine dance!

As the church worked out this revelation theologically, it also began to incorporate it liturgically into its worship. In the east, particularly in the oriental orthodox churches they incorporated dance into the liturgy and they sought to act out or embody an understanding of our invitation to join in the perichoresis or heavenly dance of the Trinity. I’d like to teach you a dance still used in some of those ancient churches today.

Let’s everybody get up (those who are able to do so) and move into the aisles since we can’t dance when we’re restrained by pews. OK . . . everybody ready? First step forward with your right foot . . . now bring it back . . . step forward again . . . raise your foot . . . wiggle it about . . . now raise your hands and turn around. Now step forward with your left foot . . . now bring it back . . . step forward again . . . raise your foot . . . wiggle it about . . . now raise your hands and turn around. (The congregation begins to recognize the Hokey Pokey.)

OK . . . you get the idea. I’m having a bit of fun with you; the Hokey Pokey was not invented by the ancient oriental churches. (In fact, nobody really knows its origins.) But it makes a really good theological point. You know how it continues: you put your right arm in, then your left arm, and then various other body parts. How does it end? “You put your whole self in! . . . That’s what it’s all about!”

A few years ago there was a bumper sticker which asked this question: “What if the Hokey Pokey IS what it’s all about?” I want to suggest to you today that that is exactly the message of Trinity Sunday! That is precisely what the Doctrine of the Trinity, what the concept of perichoresis, is saying to us. Putting our whole selves into the divine dance, into which we are invited by God, IS what it’s all about!

Some of you will recall Christopher W. who was our organist here a few years back. Chris was a great fan of the music of the French composer Olivier Messiaen. Suffice to say that Chris and I parted company on that score. Messiaen’s music has never much appealed to me; it’s all very non-rhythmic and a-tonal and, frankly weird. One does not walk out of a Messiaen concert whistling the melodies! But his music is haunting and one piece in particular is amazing. It is entitled Quartet for the End of Time. Messiaen wrote it while a prisoner of the Nazis during World War II. He discovered that there were other musicians in the prison camp and they somehow rounded up a B-flat clarinet, a violin, a cello, and a piano, so he composed for those instruments. It’s a long piece of eight movements lasting about an hour. The interesting thing about it is the way he wrote instructions to the musicians. Usually, composers write things like “play slowly” or “play rapidly” (allegro or adagio in the traditional Italian). Not Messiaen! In the Quartet for the End of Time his tempo markings read “Play tenderly” or “Play with ecstasy” or “Play with love.”

In the end, that is what the Doctrine of the Trinity is all about. It’s not whether we understand it or not. It’s not how fast or how slowly we do things that church teaching may require of us. It’s whether we join the heavenly dance and move with God and the angelic chorus tenderly, ecstatically, and with love. In the end it’s not about understanding; it’s about accepting God’s invitation into the dance, into relationship, and putting our whole selves into it.

Let me shift gears here because I want to offer you something else this morning, as well. Our first lesson today is one of my favorite passages from the Old Testament. It is one of the selections of Scripture that our ordinal offers to those becoming priests for use at their ordinations; I selected it for mine. I can almost recite it from memory, this wonderful vision that Isaiah has of the heavenly throne room filled with awe and majesty, the Seraphim singing God’s praise. This scene was the inspiration for a poem by a Lutheran clergyman from Texas, a pastor named Michael Coffey. I want to leave you today with Coffey’s vision of God, an image of the God who invites us into relationship that is just a little different from those you might be used to. Pastor Coffey’s poem is entitled God’s Bathrobe:

God sat Sunday in her Adirondack deck chair
reading the New York Times and sipping strawberry lemonade
her pink robe flowing down to the ground

the garment hem was fluff and frill
and it spilled holiness down into the sanctuary
into the cup and the nostrils of the singing people

one thread trickled loveliness into a funeral rite
as the mourners looked in the face of death
and heard the story of a life truer than goodness

a torn piece of the robe’s edge flopped onto
a war in southern Sudan and caused heartbeats
to skip and soldiers looked into themselves deeply

one threadbare strand of the divine belt
almost knocked over a polar bear floating
on a loose berg in the warming sea

one silky string wove its way through Jesus’ cross
and tied itself to desert-parched immigrants with swollen tongues
and a woman with ovarian cancer and two young sons

you won’t believe this, but a single hair-thin fiber
floated onto the yacht of a rich man and he gasped
when he saw everything as it really was

the hem fell to and fro across the universe
filling space and time and gaps between the sub-atomic world
with the effervescent presence of the one who is the is

and even in the slight space between lovers in bed
the holiness flows and wakes up the body
to feel beyond the feeling and know beyond the knowing

and even as we monotheize and trinitize
and speculate and doubt even our doubting
the threads of holiness trickle into our lives

and the seraphim keep singing “holy, holy, holy”
and flapping their wings like baby birds
and God says: give it a rest a while

and God takes another sip of her summertime drink
and smiles at the way you are reading this filament now
and hums: It’s a good day to be God

Happy Birthday, Church! You Were Dry Bones…. – Sermon for Pentecost (Year B) – May 27, 2012

May 27, 2012 / / 0 Comments

Revised Common Lectionary for Pentecost Sunday (Year B): Ezekiel 37:1-14; Psalm 104: 25-35,37; Acts 2:1-21; and John 15:26-27;16:4b-15

What happened one thousand nine hundred and seventy-nine years ago?

If we can believe the calculations of an early medieval monk named Dennis the Short, one thousand nine hundred and seventy-nine years ago today (or thereabouts) the events described in the reading from the Book of Acts took place. On this day, in about the year 33 A.D. the Christian Church was born; the Holy Spirit came upon the disciples and they went out into the streets of Jerusalem proclaiming the gospel of salvation and baptizing thousands of people.

Happy Birthday, Church! Turn to someone near you and wish them “Happy Birthday!” Now turn to someone else near you and say, “O dry bones, hear the word of the Lord!” Say to them, “Thus says the Lord God: You are dried up! You are spiritually dehydrated!”

That’s not much of a birthday greeting is it? Doesn’t really seem like a very neighborly thing to say, does it?


But that is precisely the task that was given to the prophet Ezekiel. He was shown a series of visions that he was to communicate to the people of God, to his neighbors and fellow Israelites. In one of those visions, which we heard in our Old Testament reading today, he was taken to a valley and shown a pile of bones and told that these were his neighbors to whom he was to say to them, “You are nothing more than dried up on skeletons right now, and worse than that you are not even skeletons . . . you are disconnected bones. You are so spiritually dried up that even your connective tissues, your sinews, your ligaments and tendons have turned to dust.” So he was given the task to prophesy to the wind, that is to the Spirit, to the breath of God and call that breath to enter into the bones and return them to life.

In another vision, Ezekiel was shown a grand plan for a new temple – he goes on at length recording the measurements of the temple and its furnishings, its grounds and all the land surrounding it. He is shown a river flowing from the temple through all of the lands of the world; in places it is ankle-deep; in other places it is waist-deep; in still others it is deep enough to swim it. The river, he is told, is the river of life, “everything will live where the river goes” (Ezek. 47:9). On the banks of the river are trees, “all kinds of trees for food. Their leaves will not wither nor their fruit fail, but they will bear fresh fruit every month, because the water for them flows from the sanctuary. Their fruit will be for food, and their leaves for healing.” (Ezek. 47:12)

Quite a contrast . . . to call the people of God from parched desiccated bones with no life in them to a flood of living water, from spiritual dehydration to abundant life flowing from God’s temple.

Throughout the Old Testament, the prophets make use of water was a sign of God’s purifying Spirit: it was again through Ezekiel that God spoke saying, “I will sprinkle clean water upon you, and you shall be clean from all your uncleannesses, and from all your idols I will cleanse you.” (Ezek. 36:25) Speaking through the prophet Isaiah God promised: “I will pour water on the thirsty land, and streams on the dry ground; I will pour my spirit upon your descendants, and my blessing on your offspring. They shall spring up like a green tamarisk, like willows by flowing streams.” (Isa. 44:3-4). It was Zechariah who predicted that on the day of the Lord “living waters shall flow out from Jerusalem, half of them to the eastern sea and half of them to the western sea; it shall continue in summer as in winter.” (Zech. 14:8). There are so many examples it is not necessary to list them all. The people of First Century Israel knew all this well; their tradition was rich with it. Remember the conversation when Jesus said to Nicodemus: “Very truly, I tell you, no one can enter the kingdom of God without being born of water and Spirit.” (John 3:5). Water was and always is the symbol of God who purifies, who gives birth, who gives life, who heals, and who refreshes.

And so on that day in Jerusalem one thousand nine hundred and seventy-nine years ago, when the people in the streets thought the disciples were drunk, Peter spoke up and said, “No. It is not wine! It is the Spirit of God which, like water, has been poured out upon them so that they prophesy and tell you of Jesus.” And, the Book of Acts tells us, Peter and the others told them the story of Jesus, each in their own languages; Parthians, Medes, Elamites, Mesopotamian, Judeans, Cappadocians, Pontans, Asian, Phrygians, Pamphylians, Egyptians, Libyans, Romans, Cretans, and Arabs all heard the gospel in their own tongues. And the church was born.

Those who heard Peter and the other apostles asked them, “Brothers, what should we do?”

Peter said to them, “Repent, and be baptized every one of you in the name of Jesus Christ so that your sins may be forgiven; and you will receive the gift of the Holy Spirit. For the promise is for you, for your children, and for all who are far away, everyone whom the Lord our God calls to him.” . . . So those who welcomed his message were baptized, and that day about three thousand persons were added. (Acts 2:37-39,40)

That was the task set for the disciples, the same task that was set for Ezekiel – and it is the task set for us. Each and every person in this church today who has been baptized has accepted this same task. Some may have been baptized under the rite of the 1928 Book of Common Prayer in which they (or someone on their behalf) promised to “obediently keep God’s holy will and commandments, and walk in the same all the days of [their] life” and for them the community prayed that they would “not be ashamed to confess the faith of Christ crucified.” Some may have been baptized under the rite of the 1979 prayer book, in which all who participate, both those to be baptized and those who are already members of the church, promise to “proclaim by word and example the Good News of God in Christ.” Some may have been baptized under the rites of other Christian traditions that include similar prayers and promises. In any event, the import is the same: the task set before the baptized is that which was set for Ezekiel, that which was set for the disciples in Jerusalem one thousand nine hundred and seventy-nine years ago today.

But is it possible that we are more like the people in the streets of Jerusalem than like the disciples who went out to them? More like the Israelites of Ezekiel’s time than like Ezekiel himself? Is it possible that it is we who are desiccated, dehydrated, dried-up, and dispirited? Are we in need of God’s life-giving, life-renewing, healing water?

If so, then receive it. [Each congregant was given a bottle of water when they entered the church.] I want you to give your bottle of water to someone whom you think might need some spiritual refreshment; and I want you to accept a bottle of water from someone who thinks you might need some spiritual refreshment. Let these bottles of water remind you that you are a source of refreshment to others, and that through others God provides you with spiritual renewal.

Take your bottle of water as a reminder of the prophets’ promise to God’s people, of Jesus’ promise to you: “Let anyone who is thirsty come to me, and let the one who believes in me drink.” Jesus also reminded us that as we slake our thirst on the living water he gives us, so we then become sources of living water to others. He went on to say, “As the scripture has said, ‘Out of the believer’s heart shall flow rivers of living water.'” (John 7:37-38) Let this bottle of water be a reminder that you are baptized, that you have received the gift of the Holy Spirit, that you promised to “proclaim by word and example the Good News of God in Christ,” that you are a prophet of the Most High God and a minister of the Gospel, and let your faith be refreshed, restored, and reinvigorated so that you may be a source of spiritual refreshment to others.

No longer are you dried-up bones! No longer are you spiritually dehydrated! No longer is your breath taken away! No longer are you but dust! God has sent forth his Spirit and you are renewed! Sing to the Lord as long as you live; praise your God while you have your being! Declare God’s glory among the peoples!

Happy Birthday, Church! Happy One Thousand Nine Hundred and Seventy-Ninth Birthday!

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