Feb. 14, 2010 - Last Sunday after Epiphany, Year C, RCL

Exodus 34:29-35 2 Corinthians 3:12-4:2 Luke 9:28-36 (37-43)

God be in my words and in my speaking; God be in our hearts and in our understanding. Amen.

The readings assigned for the Last Sunday after the Epiphany always include an account of Jesus’ Transfiguration. The story is very familiar: Jesus, taking some of his most trusted disciples, goes up the mountain to pray, and while he prays, he undergoes a miraculous transformation: his face changes and his clothes become dazzlingly white. It is reminiscent of what happened to Moses, in the lesson from the Hebrew Scriptures, when he talked with God; and it leads us to reflect that close association with God changes people. Of course, in the story of the Transfiguration, it isn’t just Jesus’ appearance that is affected. In addition, Moses and Elijah — two of the powerful spiritual forbears of the Hebrew people — appear in glory, and talk with Jesus about “his departure, which he was about to accomplish at Jerusalem.” This gives us another hint that part of the message of the Transfiguration event was to Jesus: an opportunity for God to affirm the path Jesus had chosen, to validate his determination to go to Jerusalem, even though he and his disciples must have known how dangerous such a course would be. Peter, perhaps predictably, seems to have missed the point entirely; and when he starts talking about building shelters — physical spaces to commemorate the event, instead of simply accepting the message and moving on — the voice speaks out of the cloud to set him (and us) straight, once and for all. “This is my Son, my Chosen; listen to him!”

In many ways, we are like Peter: we want to control our experiences of God; we, like Peter, would rather commemorate an event than assimilate a message or a calling and move forward with it. We want our faith to be safe: a comfort, not a challenge. We want God to be available to us like an ace in the hole, or perhaps, an over-protective elder brother, who will take on the people and things that threaten us. We want God to be king and judge (of other people, of course), the power that holds the world in balance and makes everything safe for us. “The Lord is king!” our Psalm asserts, this morning. “Let the peoples tremble. He sits enthroned upon the cherubim; let the earth quake! The LORD is great in Zion; he is exalted over all the peoples.” And while there is ample imagery to support this kind of God in the Hebrew Scriptures, the Gospels tell a very different story; the Gospels show us, in Jesus the Christ, a very different aspect of God.

When Jesus and the disciples go to Jerusalem, the mission isn’t to conquer the city; it’s not to become the king enthroned over Israel, or to vanquish the Roman conquerors. Instead, Jesus teaches and heals, embracing the marginalized and the outcast, and challenging the powerful. And when the powerful strike back — as the powerful, throughout history, have been wont to do — Jesus, in response, demonstrates such a profound vulnerability that it transformed our very understanding of the Divine.

It may be significant to note that, in Luke’s Gospel, the story of the Transfiguration — which emphasizes God’s glory and majesty, and echoes the kind of theology apparent in this morning’s Psalm — is followed immediately by the story of a healing. The next day, when they had come down from the mountain, they are met by a great crowd, which contains a man whose son needs healing. The man calls out to Jesus, explaining the situation, and the fact that the disciples have been unable to affect a cure for the boy. After voicing exasperation, Jesus (as the Gospel has it) “rebuked the unclean spirit, healed the boy, and gave him back to his father. And all we astounded at the greatness of God.”

This story demonstrates a different greatness than the kind of power and majesty the Transfiguration expresses, or Psalm 99 extols. In the account of the healing, we see God’s transformative power exercised in a small (but vital) matter: a child rescued from a debilitating disorder, restored to health and wholeness — another example of a close association with God changing a person. We needn’t get distracted into details; it doesn’t matter whether what the boy suffered was demonic possession or a seizure disorder. What is significant is the transformation, the change from broken to whole; and — if we look — we can see that kind of transformation in our own lives, in the lives of our friends, family, and neighbors, in the life of our community of faith. Association with God changes people; it transforms us; it heals us, strengthens us, challenges us, affirms us; and it does it spiritually, emotionally, intellectually, physically, as we grow in faith and deepen our association with God. We mustn’t dismiss small changes as irrelevant; we mustn’t fall into the trap of only recognizing God’s hand at work in big, dramatic, obvious things. God is present in the incremental, subtle things, as well as in the vast, obvious ones. It’s we who have to learn to see, to discern, God among us.

It won’t be simple. The glowing faces of Scripture, whether Moses’ or Jesus’, are metaphor; we will never know what Peter, James, and John — or the children of Israel — really saw when they looked at the transfigured face of their spiritual leader. But we do know, because the stories were important enough to tell and retell and write down, that they discerned something of God’s power, something of God’s presence. These stories encourage us to look for God in unforeseen places — in unexpected people, in unpredictable circumstances — because that’s where God is. In Scripture, we’re given stories of extraordinary events or circumstances; but Scripture is metaphor and folktale, deep truths and powerful insights — not fact, evidence, and objective history. We must never forget that God is present in the ordinary, day-to-day reality of our lives, and not confined to a magical world of burning bushes, valleys of dry bones, and astounding, miraculous healings. Just because God has never spoken to you out of the clouds doesn’t mean that God isn’t speaking to you — to all of us — in other, less dramatic ways. Instead of waiting for God to manifest in the ways Scripture recounts, perhaps we should be learning to listen and look for God differently.

In his second letter to the Christians at Corinth, Paul writes: “Since, then, we have such a hope, we act with great boldness … Now the Lord is the Spirit, and where the Spirit of the Lord is, there is freedom. And all of us, with unveiled faces, seeing the glory of the Lord as though reflected in a mirror, are being transformed into the same image from one degree of glory to another; for this comes from the Lord, the Spirit. Therefore, since it is by God’s mercy that we are engaged in this ministry, we do not lose heart.” The Spirit is present, and the transformational power of our relationship with God is already engaged, at work in us and among us. Perhaps the veils we must remove are our limiting assumptions, that cover our faces and make it impossible for us to look beyond what we expect to see. Paul talks about our seeing “the glory of the Lord as though reflected in a mirror…” — a distorted image, backwards, imperfect; even without veils, we still have to learn to recognize, discern, and interpret what we see of God. But in order for a mirror to hold a reflection, the original must be present; Paul’s imagery assures us of God’s presence, for if the Lord were not here, we could not hope to see even the reflection of the Divine glory.

So let us open our eyes, and trust in our hearts that God is present — even here — with us, in us, and among us. God is waiting, patiently, for us to recognize the Divine presence, to listen for the Divine voice, and to discern the mission and ministry to which we are, each and all, called.

In the name of Christ, AMEN.

Sermon preached by Beth Hilgartner
at St. Barnabas’, Norwich

Jan. 31, 2009 - Epiphany 4, Year C, RCL

Jeremiah 1:4-10
1 Corinthians 13:1-13
Luke 4: 21-32

God be in my words and in my speaking; God be in our hearts and in our understanding. Amen.

The three lessons appointed for this Sunday, the Fourth after the Epiphany, give us an interesting mixture of themes for the Sunday of our Annual Meeting. Both the lesson from the Hebrew Scriptures and the Gospel lesson touch on prophecy and its interpretation; and the lesson from the Christian Letters describes the importance of love, in our speaking and in the ways we treat our fellow human beings. The passage from Jeremiah tells the story of the calling of the prophet. It’s a wonderful, poetic passage, in which God affirms Jeremiah and his calling: “Before I formed you in the womb I knew you, and before you were born I consecrated you; I appointed you a prophet to the nations.” When Jeremiah protests that he is neither fit nor prepared for such a ministry, God reassures him and promises to be with him. The passage ends with a description of the power of the prophet, the responsibility of the one chosen to speak God’s word to the people: “Now I have put my words in your mouth. See, today I appoint you over nations and over kingdoms, to pluck up and to pull down, to destroy and to overthrow, to build and to plant.” The role of the prophet, then, is to speak God’s word to the world. Sometimes it will be a word of transformation, sometimes a word of judgment, sometimes a word of renewal — but always God’s word and always unexpected. In the context of our Annual Meeting, today, during which we will engage in important discussions about our ministry here, it may be significant to note that, although Jeremiah is assured that God will be with him, he isn’t given an outline of the specifics of what God is calling him toward. Being appointed “to pluck up and to pull down, to destroy and to overthrow, to build and to plant” doesn’t provide much in the way of goals, targets, or plans. It’s as though God is appointing Jeremiah to be an agent of change, an agent of transformation, without first telling him what the changes will look like, or how the transformations will play out. Often, in our own lives, we may feel ourselves drawn toward something new, something different, long before we can articulate what, exactly, it is that God is drawing — or leading, or coaxing, or luring — us into. In those instances, it is often our challenge to relinquish old expectations, to stop trying to second-guess, while we wait for the new thing to unfold and make itself clear.

In the passage from Luke’s Gospel appointed for this morning, we have a story in which Jesus challenges the people’s expectations by offering a new interpretation of the words of the prophet. On a visit home, Jesus has been asked to read and offer instruction — interpretation — in the synagogue. It’s easy for us to relate to the situation: here’s Mary and Joseph’s eldest son, all grown up; the people gathered for worship are pleased and proud of this local son; he reads the passage from the Prophet Isaiah well, and ends by saying: “Today this scripture has been fulfilled in your hearing.” The townsfolk smile and murmur, and wait confidently for words of comfort, words of justification. Jesus’ people in Nazareth are an oppressed religious minority, the subjects of the hated Roman Empire; and they unwaveringly expect Jesus to interpret the words of the prophet Isaiah as a message of hope and expectation for them. But Jesus doesn’t do that. Instead, he reminds them of other times in their history as a nation, other times of trouble and danger — and he points out that in those situations, God didn’t act solely on their behalf. “ But the truth is,” Jesus tells them, “there were many widows in Israel in the time of Elijah, when the heaven was shut up three years and six months, and there was a severe famine over all the land; yet Elijah was sent to none of them except to a widow at Zarephath in Sidon.” Although there was hunger and despair among the Israelites — among the very people who understood themselves to be God’s Chosen — when God took action in that situation, it was to help a foreigner, a stranger, a woman who was not of their tribe, race or religion.

Jesus goes on with another example: “There were also many lepers in Israel in the time of the prophet Elisha, and none of them was cleansed except Naaman the Syrian.” This is even worse: Naaman was a general in an enemy army. Why would God send a prophet to help an enemy instead of cleansing a good Israelite? To the people of Nazareth, who understood themselves to be the chosen remnant among a much more powerful dominant culture, this was neither the message they expected, nor what they wanted to hear. Instead of justifying them, instead of telling them to have faith and persevere until God acts on their behalf, Jesus tells them that God’s loving action is not limited and restricted to them alone. Understandably, perhaps, it makes them angry. Jesus is challenging the deepest assumptions of their faith. In some way, their ability to endure the oppression they suffer at the hands of the Romans was rooted in their belief that they were really God’s people, and eventually, in God’s own time, the Lord would destroy their enemies and restore their fortunes. Jesus’ prophetic insight, Jesus’ radical teaching, undermined that fundamental and sustaining assumption. No wonder that they were filled with rage.

It’s easy, at this point in the story, to focus on the anger of the people of Nazareth; we’re all too familiar with the way we humans often react with anger, even violence, to challenges to our fundamental assumptions. But I want us to look as something else in this story. Jesus was offering a new interpretation — a challenge to the way his people had always thought of themselves. The people hear his words as rejection — even condemnation; but what he’s really articulating, while different from their assumptions, isn’t necessarily a negative thing. That God acted on behalf of a widow in Sidon, instead of on behalf of a widow in Israel, could indicate that God’s care and love are extended more widely, not that God had removed the Divine care and love from the Israelites and given it away to others. If God is not the private God of the Israelites, but instead cares about the whole human family, that’s not necessarily a negative reality. But the people of Nazareth reacted badly, didn’t take the time to explore all the ramifications of what Jesus was saying; they weren’t ready or able to let this new, transformative insight unfold for them. Instead, they let their fears close their minds and drive their actions.

We can see all of this, as we examine this story, because we have the benefit of hindsight. We know who Jesus is; we know what he was doing. But in our own lives and in our life together as a community of faith, we’re often not clear about how God is working in and through our context and reality. Like Jeremiah, we can’t see the entirety of what we are being called toward; and we’re never certain it’s really a good thing, and not just one more example of loss and diminishment. We often want things to go on as they are, not because whatever we’re used to is perfect, but because it is known; the degree of comfort (or discomfort) is familiar, and we’re skeptical of our own ability unerringly to effect a change for the better. It’s very hard for us — as it was hard for the people of Nazareth — to face change without fear; but fear is destructive. Fear closes us down to the possible; fear encourages us to reject and resist new things — even when the new things may be of God.

Think about that, for a moment. It is — as individuals and as a community — very hard for us to face change without fear. Even though we know, intellectually, that God loves us and guides us, and is with us, it is difficult for us to embrace change fearlessly. But it’s vitally important that we try to do just that: to approach inevitable changes in our lives or in the life of our community of faith as opportunities, rather than as disasters. There are two things that happened this week to underscore this insight. The first came out of a conversation, during which my friend reminded me that when we start from a negative place, our fears are always willing to meet us more than halfway; that is, if we start out by looking for the downside, we’ll find it: our fears will help us generate desperate and upsetting eventualities, and we’ll run the risk of getting so caught up in looking at the things we don’t want to happen that we will get in the way of whatever unexpected, transformative new thing toward which God is urging us. The second thing was a phrase of Scripture that came up in our Thursday noon Eucharist; it’s from Paul’s second letter to Timothy. “For God did not give us a spirit of cowardice, but rather a spirit of power and of love and of self-discipline.” As Christians, we are called away from fear and negativity; God did not give us a spirit of cowardice. God does not encourage us — as individuals, or as a faith community — to draw in and protect ourselves, but rather to reach out; the spirit of power and love and self-discipline which is our gift from God isn’t something to hoard, but it is rather something to share, to channel outward, to set free to work in our lives, in the lives of our families and neighbors, and in the wider world.

There were widows and lepers beyond the boundaries of Israel, to whom the prophets were sent with messages of hope and healing. There are people in the Upper Valley, in our workplaces, among our friends, who need the messages of hope and healing the God empowers us to share. We can focus on our fears and get diverted into trying to protect the status quo, or we can open our eyes, and hands, and hearts to the transformations God envisions for us; and we can do all of this because we have God’s love. And, as Paul reminds us: “[Love] bears all things, believes all things, hopes all things, endures all things.”

In the Name of Christ, AMEN.

Sermon preached by Beth Hilgartner at St. Barnabas’, Norwich

Jan. 24, 2010 - Epiphany 3, Year C, RCL

Nehemiah 8:1-3, 5-6, 8-10
1 Corinthians 12:12-31a
Luke 4:14-21

God be in my words and in my speaking; God be in our hearts and in our understanding. Amen.

As I pondered the lessons appointed for this Sunday, I found my thoughts drawn again and again to the question of what it means for us to be the Church — the Body of Christ. I’m sure that the familiar lesson from the first letter to the Christians at Corinth, which contains the Apostle Paul’s wonderful physical analogy, started my thoughts in that direction. Paul’s metaphor is so apt when we think about our church family. We are all part of St. Barnabas’ and important — even vital — to our common life, but we also very different in personality, talents, strengths and weaknesses. The point Paul was making to the church in Corinth was that all parts are necessary — the flashy parts like the eyes and hands, and the less glamorous parts like the feet and the internal organs. It isn’t important what part of the body you think you are; the point is that all members of the Body — all members of the congregation — have a role in our shared ministry that is their especial task and responsibility. We need one another — and not only to pay our pledges and share the work of ministry; we need one another because when we come together, week after week, to worship and share the Eucharistic meal, our community of faith is enriched, strengthened and nourished by the diversity of our fellowship. And like a family, which we are, or a body — as in Paul’s vision — we need to look out for one another.

This sense of community, the inclusive and welcoming nature of the Christian enterprise at its best, has its roots deep in our tradition. It’s possible to get a sense of it in the passage from the Hebrew Scriptures, which we heard this morning.. The historical background for this account of Ezra opening the book of the Law and reading from it is that these events happened sometime around 445 BC — after the fall of Israel and Judah, and the people’s exile to Babylon. Ezra and Nehemiah were leaders of a group of people who were attempting to restore both the Temple and the city of Jerusalem, and to reestablish religious practices that were in accordance with their understanding of the Mosaic Law. In short, they were trying to reestablish Judaism by rebuilding the city, Temple and practices at its very heart. Their efforts (and the efforts of others called to a similar mission, over the centuries) bore fruit; if they had not read the book of the Law “facing the square before the Water Gate,” perhaps there would have been no Temple for Jesus to preach in, some 450 years later. The point that struck me in all of this is that it wasn’t enough for Nehemiah and Ezra to be people of faith — they had to include and inspire others if they were going to broaden and strengthen Judaism enough to survive in the face of all the other cultural pressures. Simply belonging — by virtue of one’s heredity — to the tribes of the Israelites wasn’t enough; it was also necessary for the people to be committed to a right relationship with God and converted to the way of life that identified them as the chosen people of God.

The body has many members, and the members have to work together to preserve the health and vitality of the body. A community is more than a collection of people thrown together in some kind of proximity. There needs to be a shared sense of mission or purpose, of identity and connectedness, in order for a gathering to be transformed into the Body of Christ. But we know this — and in large measure, I think we at St. Barnabas’ live this out. So, beyond caring for one another, and welcoming the stranger, beyond praying and sharing the Eucharist together, what does it really mean to be the Body of Christ?

In the lesson from the Gospel of Luke, we have an account of a dramatic and formative moment in Jesus’ ministry. This occurs early in his ministry; after his Baptism and testing in the wilderness, he returns — “filled with the power of the Spirit” — to the region of Galilee. And as he travels through the countryside, teaching in the synagogues, he is, we are told, “praised by everyone.” But then, he goes to Nazareth, his hometown; he entered the synagogue on the Sabbath day, and stood up to read. And he read a passage from the Prophet Isaiah’s writings, something everyone in that synagogue would have understood as a reference to the Messiah — the Anointed One of God — who was, they believed, coming to set all things to rights and to cast out forever the hated Roman oppressors. And Jesus, after reading this familiar, comforting passage, takes his seat and tells them all: “Today this scripture has been fulfilled in your hearing.”

It isn’t what people expected to hear. And frankly, it wasn’t a completely welcome message to them. In their minds, the fulfillment of that passage of Scripture would be accomplished with dramatic displays of God’s power: the Romans driven out, the kingdoms of Israel and Judah restored to glory, the Gentiles — the non-Israelites — removed from the soil of the Promised Land. And here was Jesus — whom they had known through all the undignified, awkward, and embarrassing stages of his childhood and adolescence — saying to them: “Today this scripture has been fulfilled in your hearing.”

The part of the story the lectionary selection for this week leaves out is how Jesus expands on his new vision; how he explains to the gathered people that God’s favor is not limited to them and their kin; and it leaves out the crowd’s reaction, their angry attempt drive him out of the synagogue and to hurl him off the cliff. But maybe that part of the story wasn’t included this week because we are being encouraged to focus on Jesus’ insight and vision, instead of allowing ourselves to be distracted by the Nazarenes’ inability to accept it. “Today this scripture has been fulfilled in your hearing.”

“The Spirit of the Lord is upon me, because he has anointed me to bring good news to the poor. He has sent me to proclaim release to the captives and recovery of sight to the blind, to let the oppressed go free, to proclaim the year of the Lord’s favor.” We have no trouble, really, in seeing how Jesus was and remains the fulfillment of that prophetic utterance. For myself, I know that, in the deepest poverty of my flawed and broken soul, I have received the good news that Jesus brings: that despite my sins and failings, I am loved — as you are loved — by God. Jesus has released me (and you) from the captivity of fear and sin; he has opened our eyes to new vision and insight, he has freed us all from oppression and has made us aware of the Lord’s favor. It’s why we come here, week after week, to worship, and to be strengthened for the various tasks and ministries to which we are called. That part isn’t hard. The hard part comes when we read this passage and recognized that we are the Body of Christ, and as the body of Christ, this passage applies to us, too — to us as individuals, and to our corporate community of faith. We have, each and all, been anointed to bring good news to the poor, to proclaim release to the captives, and recovery of sight to the blind. We have been anointed and empowered to let the oppressed go free, and to proclaim the year of the Lord’s favor — not as something that happened long ago, in the birth, ministry, and resurrection of Christ, but as something that continues to happen now, today, this instant. Today, my brothers and sisters, we have heard this scripture fulfilled in our hearing.

So what does that mean to us? In the light of that scripture passage, what does it mean for us to be the Church, the Body of Christ? Or to phrase the question slightly differently, what would we — the faith community of St. Barnabas’ — look like, how would we change if we all behaved as if we believed that that prophecy was true of us? It is something for us to ponder as individuals, and it is something for us to discuss as a parish, and even as a diocese. In some ways, I think the institutional Church stands at a crossroads — and I don’t just mean the Episcopal denomination, I mean the wider Christian enterprise. The “way we’ve always done things” doesn’t seem to work as well as it used to; more and more people grow to adulthood with little or no understanding — beyond what they gather from the secular culture’s oddly slanted perspective — of what Christianity, and Christian people, are all about. If all you ever saw of Christianity was the coverage of scandals and schisms the media portrays, you might be forgiven for imagining that the church is about rules, hypocrisy, and arguments about the nature of orthodoxy. But the Body of Christ is anointed to bring good news to the poor, to proclaim release to captives and recovery of sight to the blind, to let the oppressed go free and to proclaim the year of the Lord’s favor. The Body of Christ is called to feed the hungry, to clothe the naked, to comfort the widows and orphans, to welcome the stranger, and tirelessly, to work for justice. That’s a long way from getting mired in arguments about doctrine, orthodoxy and church polity. And it is also a long way from getting consumed by the practical concerns of paying for heating oil and maintaining our buildings. Somehow, I think all of us — the whole of Christendom, not just we at St. Barnabas’ — have to dream, and pray, and imagine our way into a new vision of how to be the Church, a new paradigm that allows us to be the Body of Christ, and doesn’t confine us within a limiting institutional framework. It’s not our buildings (beloved as they are) that are the Church; it’s the people, the members of the Body, who do the work of Christ in the world.

It is my prayer that we will find new ways to be Christ’s hands and feet, to be His suffering heart of love, His compassionate eyes, so that we all — together — may do the work in the world that He would have us do.

In the Name of Christ, AMEN.

Sermon preached by Beth Hilgartner
at St. Barnabas’, Norwich

Jan. 10, 2010 - 1 Epiphany, RCL

Isaiah 43:1-7
Acts 8:14-17
Luke 3:15-17, 21-22

God be in my words and in my speaking; God be in our hearts and in our understanding. Amen.

This Sunday, the First Sunday after the Epiphany, we celebrate the Baptism of our Lord. As we read the various Gospel accounts of Jesus’ Baptism, one thing that strikes me is the way that all the Gospel writers seemed to feel a need to deal with John the Baptist and his relationship with Jesus. In each of the three Synoptic accounts (Mark, Matthew, and Luke), John says something about “the one who is more powerful than I is coming…” — a reference intended to dispel the idea that John, himself, might be the Messiah; and to drive the point home even more clearly, John goes on to talk about the more powerful Baptism the more powerful one will offer. In Mark’s Gospel, it is that the one who is to come will baptize with the Holy Spirit; in Matthew’s and Luke’s, this is amplified to include fire, and some very apocalyptic imagery about winnowing forks, wheat, chaff, and unquenchable fire. By the time the Gospel of John is written, the scene is expanded still further. John the Baptist is asked, directly, by the priests and Levites sent to check him out, whether or not he is the Messiah; and he responds that he is not. Further, while he also talks about the one who is coming after, in the Fourth Gospel, John the Baptist makes no bones about who Jesus is. He calls Jesus “the Lamb of God who takes away the sin of the world,” and he describes the purpose of his own ministry of preparation in these words: “…I came baptizing with water for this reason, that he [Jesus] might be revealed to Israel. The Fourth Gospel’s account ends with John the Baptist declaring: “I myself have seen and have testified that this is the Son of God.”

This morning’s account, from Luke’s Gospel, doesn’t go this far; but even the Synoptic Gospel writers felt the need to emphasize the power of the event, itself. The author of Luke’s Gospel writes: “Now when all the people were baptized, and when Jesus also had been baptized and was praying, the heaven was opened, and the Holy Spirit descended upon him in bodily form like a dove. And a voice came from heaven, ‘You are my Son, the Beloved; with you I am well pleased.’” In Mark’s account, it’s only Jesus who sees the heavens opened: “And just as he was coming up from the water, he saw the heavens torn apart and the Spirit descending like of dove. And a voice came from heaven…” It’s also interesting to note that in Mark’s account, the spirit is “like a dove,” while in Luke’s, it is “in bodily form like a dove.” In Matthew’s Gospel, there is an interchange between Jesus and John, before the Baptism, in which John tries to prevent Jesus from being baptized by saying: “I need to be baptized by you, and do you come to me?” But Jesus answered him, “Let it be so now, for it is proper for us in this way to fulfill all righteousness.” The revelation following the Baptism in Matthew’s Gospel also seems to be for Jesus alone: “…just as he came up from the water, suddenly the heavens were opened to him and he saw the Spirit of God descending like a dove and alighting on him.” It’s curious to notice that, while Mark and Luke both have the voice from heaven addressing Jesus directly: “You are my Son, the Beloved…”, Matthew makes this a more general pronouncement: “This is my Son, the Beloved, with whom I am well pleased.”

Obviously, we can’t know what really happened at the actual Baptism event. We can see, and trace — at least to some degree — the evolution of the theological significance of the Baptism, and of Jesus’ relationship to John the Baptist. The progression from private revelation to public testimony is interesting; by the time of the Fourth Gospel’s writing, the roles of John and Jesus are well established: John, the forerunner; the one who prepares the way; the voice crying in the wilderness — and Jesus, the Messiah. When Jesus was baptized, the people were unsure who was what. John had a large following, and preached the kind of message they expected of a prophet — or of the Messiah. When Jesus came along, too, they were confused. As Luke puts it: “the people were filled with expectation, and all were questioning in their hearts concerning John, whether he might be the Messiah…” Clearly, momentous things were happening, but in the midst of events, it was difficult (perhaps impossible) to predict how history would unfold. Remember, all the Gospel accounts were written after things had come to a conclusion; after the Crucifixion and Resurrection, after the missionary journeys of Paul and the other disciples. Modern scholarship dates the writing of the three Synoptic Gospels between 66 and 85 AD, with Mark and Matthew being the earliest, probably no later than 70 AD; the Fourth Gospel, the Gospel of John, was written around 90 AD. By contrast, the earliest of the Christian letters (I Thessalonians) was written around 50 AD. All this historical information is important because it reminds us that, despite the fact the Gospels are written as direct, immediate accounts of events, they were not written down by eye-witnesses. They reflect the histories, theologies, prejudices, and even conflicts, of the communities for which they were written; they are not objective “newspaper-type” recitals of the events. The way the story is told — what’s included and what’s left out — provides us with layers of meaning beyond the simple exterior of the tale. If we look more deeply into Scripture, we can sometimes reach beyond the shadowy sense of the community for which the stories were written, into a place where we can encounter God. All of Scripture is the story of people of faith encountering God; and though the window that Scripture provides, sometimes we can find new insights, new revelations, new depths to our own relationship to the Divine.

So what do we make, this year, of the Baptism of Christ? In contemplating this question in the light of the readings, I found myself drawn to the short passage from the Acts of the Apostles. Peter and John went to Samaria, to strengthen the faith of the Samaritans who had accepted the message of Christ. Don’t forget that Samaria and Samaritans were not highly regarded by the children of Israel; the fact that the apostles at Jerusalem were willing to send Peter and John to them makes the point that this new community, forming around the Lord Jesus Christ, exhibits an inclusivity and willingness to extend itself toward people who might previously have been excluded. We’re told that the people of Samaria, who had been baptized in the name of the Lord Jesus, had not yet received the Holy Spirit; and that it was through the intervention of Peter and John — through their touch, as they laid hands upon them — that the gift of the Holy Spirit was conferred. It sounds a little like an early form of Confirmation; the nascent faith of the Samaritans was confirmed and strengthened by the touch of two of the apostles. From this tiny scrap of story, it’s not clear whether this was a private revelation for each of the Samaritan Christians, or a public demonstration of the Holy Spirit’s power. But perhaps it doesn’t matter. In the wider context of the 8th chapter of Acts, this piece serves as background for the story of a man (named Simon) who tries to buy the power of God with silver, but for us, hearing this in the context of our celebration today, the implications are much different.

One of the disadvantages of our practice of infant baptism is that most of us don’t remember being baptized. We’ve seen and participated in many baptisms; but we probably don’t remember what we felt and experienced at our own. We may not even recall the particulars of our Confirmation, which has often been treated as a kind of rite of passage, done at the point when a child transitions from attending Sunday School classes to being in “real church” with the adults. But if we are fortunate enough to have vivid recollections of one of these moments — or any other powerful sacramental experience, like marriage, reconciliation, anointing for healing, ordination, or the Eucharist in certain instances — we have grounds for comparison with both the story from Acts and the account of Jesus’ Baptism at the Jordan.

To flesh this out, I need to talk a bit, not about my baptism, which I don’t remember, but about my ordination. Before I was ordained, I had been present at a few ordinations; and since, I have participated in many. There’s something very wonderful and compelling about the spectacle: the sight of the Bishop and a crowd of priests laying hands on the ordinand is powerful; it’s a visible expression of the Apostolic succession; it is an outward, obvious, concrete action that signifies a profound — but usually invisible, or at least subtle — change in the person ordained. To the gathered community, it is a powerful public spectacle; but for myself (and for colleagues to whom I’ve spoken about this), being ordained is a very different experience from the one the congregation or the participants witness. I vividly recall the moment the Bishop and the gathered clergy laid their hands on me. There was a feeling of such profound weight; it wasn’t painful or overwhelming, but it felt so real, as though responsibilities really had weight — or as though the Spirit had a bodily form and it was…heavy enough to feel. And then, when the hands were removed, I felt such incredible lightness; at that moment, I felt like I could fly; I felt utterly transformed, completely changed, and yet, entirely myself. I didn’t hear a voice from heaven, but God was there. I felt God’s presence as unequivocally as one can feel sunshine on one’s face. It’s hard to put such experiences into words, because language seems inadequate for the task. How do we talk about joy, or wonder, or awe, except with those small, inadequate words? How do we explain the really transformative moments of our lives, if we aren’t to resort to extravagant similes or exaggerated metaphors?

Maybe the message in Christ’s Baptism for us, this morning, is that we need to be alert to the transformative moments in our lives; perhaps we shouldn’t be waiting for burning bushes, or bird-shaped visitations from the Holy Spirit, to tell us what to do and how to live out our lives of faith; perhaps our miracles, our moments of revelation, are subtler, harder to express in words, less flamboyant than the things recounted in Scripture — but they are no less powerful, no less important, no less urgent.

We are the Body of Christ, brothers and sisters. We might rather imagine that tasks requiring courage and involving risk will fall to others and not to us — to those who receive visible signs and unambiguous affirmations from heaven — but if we’re honest with ourselves and true to the faith within us, if we hold ourselves open to the challenging call of the Spirit, then I think we may find ourselves drawn into efforts and projects that do, in fact, challenge us and force us to grow into this radical, overwhelming faith we profess. For we have been baptized with the Holy Spirit and with fire: not the fire of punishment, but the fire of enthusiasm, of transformation, of warmth and light and power. What remains is for us each to figure out how, in our own lives and circumstances, we are called to nourish the fire within us so that it transforms us into living beacons of the love of Christ in the world.

Let it be so, in the name of Christ, Amen.

Sermon preached by Beth Hilgartner
at St. Barnabas’, Norwich

Dec. 24, 2009 - Christmas Eve, RCL

Isaiah 9:2-7
Titus 2:11-14
Luke 2:1-14(15-20)

God be in my words and in my speaking; God be in our hearts and in our understanding. Amen.

According to the Book of Common Prayer, there are three principal feasts of the church year. Christmas — the Feast of the Incarnation — is one of them; Easter — the Feast of the Resurrection— is, of course, the second; and Pentecost — the Feast of the Coming of the Holy Spirit — is the third. There’s a lot of lovely, Trinitarian symbolism to the three feasts, being as they are essentially dedicated to God — Creator and Progenitor; God — Redeemer and Christ; and God — Sanctifier and Spirit. Sometimes, I think, in our Christmas celebrations we get so involved with the baby in the manger, that we fail to notice the enormously significant action of the First Person of the Trinity, in deciding to become human and to be born among us. There was and could be nothing external that forced God to make this momentous and unprecedented choice. This was not a mere policy change; it was not a course correction, or a new spin on an old problem. It was a fundamental, radical decision that would utterly transform the relationship of humanity and the Divine. It was a huge risk, an amazing and overwhelming gift. When God decided to enflesh the Divine love in the person of Jesus, God decided to make the Divine love and mercy real enough for people to touch, human enough for people to love, vulnerable enough for people to kill. And God did this not because we earned it, not because it seemed like a good or a safe plan, but because the love God felt for us and for Creation was vast enough to make this closeness, this incarnation, something God desired. In the imagery of the lesson from the prophet Isaiah, “The people who walked in darkness have seen a great light; those who live in a land of deep darkness on them light has shined.” The love of God, made concrete in the Incarnation, is like a light that shines where no light has ever shined before. It is as new a thing, this enfleshment of God in a human being, as the first light that God called out of darkness in the very beginning of Creation. “For a child has been born for us, a son given to us; authority rests upon his shoulders; and he is named Wonderful Counselor, Mighty God, Everlasting Father, Prince of Peace. His authority shall grow continually, and there shall be endless peace for the throne of David and his kingdom. … The zeal of the Lord of hosts will do this.”

God became incarnate because God chose to do so; because God longed to be loved in return, God became human — a baby in the manger — something small enough and understandable enough for us to love. Babies and young children often bring out the best in people. I’m sure you’ve seen it at work: the crusty, grumpy old gentleman who melts into smiles when an infant grabs his finger; the harried clerk at the Co-op, who has to coo and make funny faces at the baby in the shopping cart; the teenager who finds himself steadying the wobbly toddler, or even picking him up so he can see what all the big people are seeing. Love is transformative; and that’s what God wanted from us — not just the “Awww-cute” response we give to infants, but also the opportunity to change our relationship to the Divine from one of awe, wonder, and even fear into one based on love.

God wanted to change human lives, change human hearts. The Epistle lesson sums this up: “For the grace of God has appeared, bringing salvation to all…
that he might redeem us from all iniquity and purify for himself a people of his own who are zealous for good deeds.”

In the Gospel account from Luke, we hear the story of that birth, with all the familiar and beloved elements: why the young couple was in Bethlehem instead of Nazareth, how there was no room for them in the inn, the vision of angels granted to the poor shepherds in the region, and the shepherds’ wondering response to this thing that has been revealed to them. “And they went with haste, and found Mary and Joseph, and the babe lying in a manger.” It’s a wonder and a mystery, that God would choose that kind of birth, choose those parents — faithful, yes, but also poor, without access to wealth and power — choose an occupied country and an oppressed people. It flies in the face of everything our secular culture considers common sense; and yet, God chose to be poor, chose to live among the powerless, chose to minister on the margins instead of in the centers of power. What message does that have for us, today? Do the familiar Scripture lessons invite us to find a new insight, this year, as we celebrate the birth of our Savior?

The choices God made when deciding to be made flesh are peculiar choices, if we insist on viewing them through the lens of our secular culture’s understanding. Our culture teaches us that it is only the powerful people who can effect change; and our culture holds up the accumulation of wealth as both the road to and result of power. But in the Incarnation, God shows us something different; in that shivering babe in the manger, God shows us that the ability to effect change needn’t be associated with wealth, or military might, or any of the things that generally spring to mind when we consider the word ‘power.’ The power Jesus displays — in his utter helplessness as a newborn infant — is the transformative power of love. God chose to be born a tiny, fragile child of poverty, not as the heir to some worldly kingdom or fortune, because we didn’t need another leader or ruler — we needed to be shown the depth of God’s love for us, and to be given a way to love God in return.

In order to effect change, brothers and sisters, what’s really important isn’t power, or access to the media, or a good image. What’s important is relationship: friendship, trust, sharing, love — those are the sorts of powers that transform us, and enable us to touch and transform others’ lives. In Jesus, God was born to show us that the outward trappings don’t matter; the helpless child of poverty can grow up to become the Savior of the world — and each and every single one of us has the potential to live transformed and transforming lives.

My point, here, is that because of God’s choices, because of the child in the manger, because Jesus the Light of the world came among us, everything is different. The work that God began in the Incarnation is ongoing, and we each have a role in that work, a part to play in the establishment of the Kingdom of God. Christmas, this light-filled and joyous celebration in a dark and fear-filled world, has something to teach us about our role and our task. At least, it does as long as we cling to our sense of Christ as the center of our celebration, and resist the temptation to slip into our culture’s materialistic interpretation of the holiday as an important factor in the cash-flow of various retailers, or an indicator of the strength (or weakness) of our national economy.

In a sermon, Archbishop Rowan Williams spoke about the mystery of Christ at the center of things. It wasn’t a Christmas sermon, but what he had to say connects to the kinds of things I thought and felt, as I was working on this sermon; so I’ve decided to share it with you.

Archbishop Williams writes: About twelve years ago, I was visiting an Orthodox monastery, and was taken to see one of the smaller and older chapels. It was a place intensely full of the memory and reality of prayer. The monk showing me around pulled the curtain from in front of the sanctuary, and there inside was a plain altar and one simple picture of Jesus, darkened and rather undistinguished. But for some reason at that moment it was as if the veil of the temple was torn in two: I saw as I had never seen the simple fact of Jesus at the heart of all our words and worship, behind the curtain of our anxieties and our theories, our struggles and our suspicion. Simply there; nothing anyone can do about it, there he is as he has promised to be till the world’s end. And nothing of value happens in the Church that does not start from seeing him simply there in our midst, suffering and transforming our human disaster.

And he says to us, ‘If you don’t know why this matters, look for someone who does — the child, the poor, the forgotten. Learn from them, and you will learn from me. You will find a life’s work; and you will find rest for your souls; you will come home; you will sit and eat.’

“Nothing of value happens in the Church” — perhaps, even, in our lives — “that does not start from seeing [Jesus] simply there in our midst…” As Christians, we need to attune our senses to perceive Christ’s presence, to notice Christ’s need in the needs of others, to recognize Christ’s face in the face of a stranger or an enemy. Christ’s presence is the beating heart that enlivens all the pageantry and traditions of this holiday, and helps us to keep the generous impulses, the responsiveness to others which we sometimes call the “Christmas spirit” alive and vibrant beyond the traditional twelve days of the season. In the same way that the work of the Incarnation is ongoing, the spirit of Christmas needs to be expanded, strengthened, so that it can guide and inspire our actions long after the Christmas decorations and bright, holiday lights have been put away for another year.

In closing, I’d like to share with you a simple poem by Howard Thurman, which expresses, perhaps more eloquently than I have been able to, what I’ve been trying to say about our understanding of Christmas, and our place in the Kingdom of God.

Howard Thurman writes:

When the star in the sky is gone,
When the Kings and Princes are home,
When the shepherds are back with their flocks,
The work of Christmas begins —

To find the lost
To heal the broken
To feed the hungry
To release the prisoner
To teach the nations
To bring Christ to all
To make music in the heart.

So this Christmas, let us remember that we don’t have to be rich or powerful or a celebrity of some sort in order to make a difference: Jesus wasn’t. We don’t need a special visitation from angels, or a dramatic burning bush in order to have a mission from God: we already have our charge — to follow Christ; to be, as the Epistle puts it “zealous for good deeds.” What we need to do is to strive to perceive Christ in our midst, and to remember that God loves us — each and every one of us — enough to choose to be born among us. If we want utterly to transform the world, all we need do, is to demonstrate this love, by our words and actions, to all with whom we come in contact.

In the Name of Christ, Amen.

Sermon preached by Beth Hilgartner
at St. Barnabas, Norwich

Dec. 20, 2009 - Advent 4, Year C, RCL

Micah 5:2-5a
Hebrews 10:5-10
Luke 1:39-55

God be in my words and in my speaking; God be in our hearts and in our understanding. AMEN.

There’s a lot going on, theologically, in the lessons appointed for this morning. In the passage from the Hebrew Scriptures, the prophet Micah make a prediction that has been interpreted as pertaining to the coming of the Messiah. Bethlehem figures in the familiar Christmas stories in the Gospels; it was commonly understood to be the place from which the Messiah would originate — and this passage from Micah is one of the reasons for that understanding: “…from you shall come forth for me one who is to rule in Israel, whose origin is from of old, from ancient days…” As Christians, this passage speaks to us of the Incarnation of Christ; but our Jewish brothers and sisters, who are still waiting for the Messiah, hear this differently. Micah’s words hold, for the Jewish people, the promise of what will be; it is a vision of — a hope for — the changes the Messiah’s coming will finally bring: “He shall stand and feed his flock in the strength of the Lord…And they shall live secure, for now he shall be great to the ends of the earth; and he shall be the one of peace…” But, beautiful as this passage is, it poses a bit of a problem for us Christians, since our Messiah’s coming — Jesus’ coming — did not in fact usher in a time of prosperity, peace, and security — or at least, it hasn’t yet.

In the passage from the Christian letters appointed for today, the author of the letter to the Hebrews is trying to make sense of the coming of Christ by interpreting the Incarnation within the context of the Hebrew tradition of offerings and sacrifices. Some of the prophets’ writings express the idea that God doesn’t really want all the rituals that have grown up. “Sacrifices and offerings you have not desired…in burnt offerings and sin offerings you have taken no pleasure.” Within this framework, the Incarnation provides the ultimate sacrificial animal — God’s anointed one — who can, by his willing sacrifice, atone not just for some sins, but for all sin. “And it is by God’s will that we have been sanctified through the offering of the body of Jesus Christ once for all.”

And in the lesson from Luke’s Gospel, we have the story of the meeting of Mary and Elizabeth: two pregnant women, bearing children of promise, who experience, in each other’s company, moments of profound revelation. “Blessed are you among women,” Elizabeth cries out, “and blessed is the fruit of your womb. And why has this happened to me, that the mother of my Lord comes to me?” And Mary responds with the Magnificat: one of the most powerful — and subversive — expressions of God’s love and compassion for the poor and the oppressed. “My soul magnifies the Lord, and my spirit rejoices in God my Savior, for he has looked with favor on the lowliness of his servant. … His mercy is for those who fear him from generation to generation. He has shown strength with his arm; he has scattered the proud in the thoughts of their hearts. He has brought down the powerful from their thrones, and lifted up the lowly; he has filled the hungry with good things, and sent the rich away empty.”

This is powerful and beautiful poetry; it’s unexpected and amazing theology; it’s subversive and revolutionary politics; and — like the passage from Micah — it isn’t an accurate description of the world, either during Mary’s lifetime, or today. As I was pondering all this, I happened to ask Ernie what he made of Mary’s song in Luke’s Gospel. He shrugged and said, “Her reality-testing skills are weak.” It was actually a very helpful comment, because it helped me to crystallize an insight with which I’ve been struggling all Advent. You see, there’s such a lot of tension, during the Advent and Christmas seasons, between the beautiful, poetic predictions of the coming of the Messiah, and the rather gritty reality that, in spite of Jesus’ Incarnation, still surrounds us. If, in the words of Mary’s song, God “has filled the hungry with good things and sent the rich away empty,” then why are there still so many who suffer hunger, and so many who have far more than they need? If God “has brought down the powerful … and lifted up the lowly,” then why are there still such huge divisions between the strong and the weak, the powerful and the powerless, the rich and the poor? If the coming of the Messiah will (as Micah predicts) usher in a time of security and peace, then why is the world still torn by war, and threatened by violence, terror, and disaster?

Micah predicts that the Messiah “shall stand and feed his flock in the strength of the Lord … and they shall live secure, for now he shall be great to the ends of the earth; and he shall be the one of peace.” And Mary proclaims: “[God] has brought down the powerful from their thrones and lifted up the lowly.” But unlike Micah’s vision, Mary’s proclamation is set in the past tense, not the future tense: “He has brought down the powerful…” not “He will bring down the powerful.” Mary’s words sound like a description of something that had actually happened before (maybe just before) her words were uttered: neither a hope, nor a vision of the future, but something already realized. I’m not enough of a linguist to make a scholarly case for this, but I’ve always had the feeling that Mary was putting into words an insight, a conviction about what God was doing through her, and in the child she carried. Ernie’s rather flippant comment helped me to recognize that in the Magnificat, Mary wasn’t talking about an observable reality; she wasn’t describing events that had (already) occurred; instead, she was trying to express a revelation about something happening: something immediate, current, constantly in process; something in the now. Mary was attempting to articulate her discernment of a process, of God at work; she was not rejoicing over a finished product of God’s creative energy. Listen to what happens if we recast the passage in the present tense, to capture the sense that Mary is talking about what God is doing, not what God has already done: “In this holy child that I carry, God is showing strength…; God is scattering the proud… Through this child, God is filling the hungry with good things, and sending the rich away empty…”

In her song, Mary recognized and celebrated God at work in and through her and her unborn son; and the work Mary celebrated wasn’t over when the babe in the manger drew his first breath. The new thing God began in the Incarnation continued throughout Jesus’ earthly ministry; there were important choice points and transformational experiences along the way, but the work wasn’t over with Jesus’ Baptism, or the temptations in the wilderness; it wasn’t over on Good Friday, when Jesus on the Cross gave up his spirit. It wasn’t over with the Resurrection, either. In fact, what we need to recognize is that that work is still going on; the Incarnation is an ongoing process and its ramifications are still being worked out, in the world, in the life of the Church, and in each of our lives as Christians. In the Incarnation, God chose to be born a human being in order to touch and transform human lives — and not simply the lives of the Disciples and the people of the time in which Jesus of Nazareth lived, but all lives, all times. When God became a human being, that transformative moment touched and changed everything; like a stone cast into a still pool, the forces of that event are still rippling outward, moving things, changing things, stirring things in unpredictable and unexpected ways. Because Mary bore her son, because Jesus accepted his mission and ministry, because the disciples spread his teachings, people’s lives changed; the shape of the world and the course of history were changed; and some two thousand years down the timeline, through the people who have been transformed by Christ, God is still filling the hungry with good things, challenging the proud and the powerful, and lifting up the lowly. We are all a part of this; we are all caught up in the transformative work of the Incarnation. It’s sometimes hard to talk (or even think) about it; God’s work takes place at a very, very, very slow speed. It happens so incrementally that, often, we can’t begin to perceive it. But we are part of it; like the cells that make up our bodies, or the atoms that make up all matter, we are miniscule — but integral — pieces of God’s creative, transformative work: each unique, each necessary. We can’t know, at any given point, how it will all turn out; we can’t tell, about any given action, whether it will yield positive or negative results in the wider plan. We can’t even define or comprehend precisely what the wider plan is; we only perceive faint reflections of it in the words of the prophets, in the visions of the mystics, in the inspirations of artists and musicians, in the sacraments, and even (occasionally) in the teachings and traditions of the church.

In this season of Advent, it is my prayer that we will take courage from the knowledge that we have (each and all) a role in the transformative work of the Incarnation; and that, strengthened by that courage and inspired by the Spirit, we will discern new and unexpected ways to open ourselves up to God’s creative energy and power, so that through our work and witness, our brothers and sisters may experience the Divine Love that chose to be born, to live, to die, and to rise, for our redemption.

In the Name of Christ, AMEN.

Sermon preached by Beth Hilgartner
at St. Barnabas’, Norwich, Vt.

Dec. 13, 2009 - Advent 3, Year C, RCL

Zeph 3:14-20
Ph 4:4-7
Luke 3:7-18

The Desire Beyond Desire

John said to the crowds …. “You brood of vipers! Who warned you to flee from the wrath to come? ….. One is coming who is more powerful than I … His winnowing fork is in his hand to clear the threshing floor And to gather the wheat into his granary; But the chaff (!) he will burn with unquenchable fire.” So John proclaimed the good news to the people.

So this is John’s version of the good news. Some good news! Some glad tidings! In fairness, it would be more accurate to say that this is the gospel writer labeling John’s words as good news. John himself seems to be thinking that he is bringing not glad tidings but tidings of doom. “You brood of vipers, who warned you to flee from the wrath to come.” So how are we to think of the coming kingdom: as good news or as the wrath to come? Of course we can have it both ways. Good news for the good people, for the believers, for the repentant: they will be like the wheat safely stored in the granary; bad news for the others, they are the enemy, the evil doers, they do not believe the truth as we believe the truth, and are unrepentant about it: they will be like the chaff burning with unquenchable fire. This good news/bad news message is found, sporadically, here and there in the gospels: in the parable of the maidens whose lamps run out of oil and who find the doors shut to them, in the wedding guest with the wrong garments who is thrown into outer darkness, in the saying that “the gate is narrow and the way is hard,” in Mark’s image of the last days as one of great “suffering, such as has not been from the beginning of the creation,” and of course in the Book of Revelation which pictures the kingdom coming with a battle of horrific destruction where the forces of darkness are utterly annihilated. But there is another voice that we hear in the gospel, a considerably more gentle and generous voice, the voice of Jesus saying, come unto me all you who are heavy laden, a voice that tells the story of a Samaritan who provides aid to a severely beaten stranger, without asking any questions or demanding any conditions; or the story of a wastrel son who had abandoned family and home, splurged his inheritance, and yet is welcomed back unconditionally by his father; or Jesus telling us to forgive not seven times but seventy times seven and to not only love our neighbor but to love our enemy.

So, how are we to sort thru these alternative voices, these conflicting views of the good news, these contrary visions of the kingdom of God, these incongruities in the words of scripture?

The philosopher Nietzsche is famous, or perhaps I should say infamous, for interpreting Christianity as a vengeful religion of the poor and the subjugated against the rich and the powerful who are cast into utter darkness in the world to come. Nietzsche sees resentment as the basis of Christian morality, which he labels a slave morality, for it is like the resentment of the slave, whose life is narrow and meager, towards the master whose life is wide and brimming with vitality. And finally N sees all that religious talk about the enemy as the evil one to be punished and destroyed as nothing more than a pathetic attempt to view oneself as the good one destined for salvation and eternal bliss.

Well, N may have a point but it’s a very overdone point. There are, indeed, biblical texts and events in the life of the church that have too easily declared the believers’ historical adversaries to be, also, God’s enemies. And it may well be that when those adversaries are rich or powerful or highly educated an element of resentment feeds that negative religious judgment. But there are an overwhelming number of other biblical passages and events in the life of the church and of believers which witness to God’s mercy, compassion, love, forgiveness, justice, reconciliation, peace, concern for the other in need no matter who that other is. Still, we need not simply ignore N’s argument as useless to our understanding of faith. For his criticisms point to the dark side of religion: a temptation amongst believers to brand those who are other, whether in beliefs or values or race or group or even sexual preference, (to brand those who are Other) as enemies of God destined to damnation —- and therefore justifiably discriminated against, ghettoized or even killed. This dark side of religion can be found in the Bible, for the Bible tells it as it is, and in the history of the church —- need I provide examples: the long history of anti-semitism, the inquisition, the crusades, the religious wars of the 16th and 17th centuries, the subordination of women, the criminalizing of gay sex —- and of course this dark side of religion is only too visible today … in all the religions.

What shall we call this dark side of religion? Nietzsche would call this darkness the very heart of religion, that religion is rooted in the darkness of resentment and revenge, and that it leads inevitably to the desire to destroy the Other. The modern atheistic critics of religion, Sam Harris, Richard Dawkins, Christopher Hitchens, agree with him. They see religion as primarily a force for destruction, doing more evil than good. On the other hand, Obama, in his Nobel Peace Prize speech, calls this dark side of religious faith “warped religion.” Shall I mention its old name: sin, sin taking the form of spiritual pride: (meaning) my faith gives me certain knowledge of God’s will, I know what God wants; my faith means that I am amongst the good ones, the chosen ones of God; my faith calls me to act in God’s name, justifying the subjugation and even killing of unbelievers. Whatever happened to humility? John Calvin, the great Protestant reformer, who in the popular mind is imaged as the embodiment of predestinarian pride, wrongly imaged I need to add, (Calvin) used to say that the three precepts of religious faith are these: first humility; second, humility; third, humility. Those who have been caught up in the dark side of religion, in warped religion, seem to have forgotten that faith calls us to humility.
It’s time to return to John the Baptist and his “unquenchable fire.”

What lies behind this vision of chaff burning in unquenchable fire. Is it Nietzsche’s darkness of resentment and revenge burning in John? Perhaps. Perhaps not. How can we ever know what lies in the depths of another’s consciousness. All we have are interpretations from the outside. Let me suggest a less dark interpretation.
John has inherited from the thousand-year history of ancient Israel, especially from the prophetic tradition, the belief that God is the God of justice, demanding as high or even higher standards of justice from the community of believers than from those outside that community. John also inherits from the very same tradition the belief that the almighty God can do whatever the almighty God pleases to do. These two notions lying together in the believer’s head produce first puzzlement and then mental havoc. The great prophet Isaiah, as long ago as seven hundred years before John, cried out to God, “How long O Lord, how long,” meaning, how long O Lord are you going to tolerate these rampant injustices in the world, these cruelties, horrors, exploitations, killings. Why are you, a God demanding justice, not acting to stop these evils? One of the psalmists shouts out to God, “Wake up, wake up!” assuming that the only way to account for the flourishing of evil in the world is that God must be asleep. By the time of John, the notion that a just God is also an almighty God is playing havoc with the religious imagination, creating, amongst some, apocalyptic visions of Armageddon, a final, cosmic battle where the army of God and the angels defeats the army of Satan and all the forces of darkness sending all evil-doers into eternal hell-fire. Simultaneously the kingdom of God is ushered in, a kingdom of peace and justice for those who have been saved from destruction, and where God’s will is writ on every heart and where love prevails eternally.

There is no evidence that John believed in Armageddon, and there is certainly no evidence that John believed that believers should take up the sword in God’s name —- which is of course one of the characteristics of warped religion. Still, it is clear enough that John believed in a final day of judgment, coming soon, when God will burst into our lives armed with destructive power, wrathful against those who violated the norms of justice. So we need not think of John as burning with resentment and revenge, but as burning with a sense of God’s justice, of God’s moral indignation. John desired justice. He burned for it. Surely we have all known people like that. Perhaps in John’s case the burning went too far, so that he got burnt by it, and saw only divine wrath, only divine retribution, thereby missing the real meaning of the good news, the gospel. There are, after all, very good reasons why John was never declared the messiah. That was left for another, whose coming we celebrate in this season of advent.

So what is the real meaning of the gospel that John misses? What is the good news that the gospels witness to? You’d think by now that I’d grown old enough to know better than to ask such a mouth-filling question as what is the real meaning of the gospel. Actually I do know better. Let me rephrase the question. What is it that we find in the voice of Jesus, the one who has been declared the messiah, that we do not find in the voice of John? I ask the question this way to remind us of what I spoke about earlier as conflicting voices in the gospels, the voice that says the way is narrow, that shuts the door in the face of the foolish maidens, that sends into eternal torment the rich man who ignored the beggar Lazarus that sat every day by his door, and, on the other hand, the voice that forgives seventy times seven, the voice that forgives the woman caught in adultery, the voice that says love your enemies. The first voice is the voice of justice, the voice that insists that everyone be given their due, that everyone be treated fairly, and that those who violate, abuse or exploit others must also receive their due, which is condemnation and punishment. The second voice is the voice that forgives the violator, showing mercy to those who do not deserve mercy; it is the voice of compassion and love.

We tend to think of these conflicting voices, which we all hear inside ourselves, as voices belonging to the ethical dimension of our lives. When is it appropriate to show justice to another, when compassion? These are not academic questions as was made all too tragically evident in last week’s killing of four police officers by an ex-convict with a murderous record who had been paroled from prison, that is, shown compassion, by Governor Huckabee. But these two voices do not simply point to conflicts and dilemmas in our ethical lives, they point to conflicts in our theological understanding, in our understanding of who God is. These conflicts, both ethical and theological have bedeviled ethicists and theologians for two thousand years, so please do not think that I am going to resolve them in the five minutes remaining to me. Still I have something to say that perhaps will be helpful. I am going to talk about the notion that creates both dilemmas and havoc in the religious imagination, the notion that God can do whatever it pleases God to do —- a notion which generates endless discussions of why there is so much evil in the world and fuels the religious imagination with fantastic images of an end time when God will appear as the savior of the good and the destroyer of the evil. Behind this notion of God lies the assumption that the very godness of God lies in having absolute power, the power to cause things to happen. If you and I can cut down a tree or blow up a train, surely God cannot have less power than we have. Quite the opposite we say. Our powers are limited, God’s power is unlimited. If God chose to blow up a train, or blow up anything else, including the universe, God has the power to do so. The fact that God does not blow up trains or the universe is because God is not simply power, God is also love and justice. Therefore God will use power only for good, constructive purposes, never for evil, destructive purposes. When we think this way, we are thinking of God’s power as the causal engine of God, and of love and justice as the moral dimension of God qualifying God’s use of power. It is as if we are thinking of God after the image of a king with absolute power who is also good, just and loving. It is not accidental that the image of God as king, even Christ as king, is found not only in scripture but in the theological and liturgical traditions of the church. This is a hoary image and a hoary notion, it lies deep in the consciousness of all of us, but hoary as this notion of God’s power is, I would like to suggest an alternative to it. The alternative is this: to think of love and justice not so much as the moral qualifier of God’s power but to think of love and justice as God’s power. God’s power is the power of love and justice. It is not by might but by love and justice that God rules the world. Love and justice rule by drawing us towards them. We do not create ourselves as beings who desire love and justice, we find ourselves desiring love and justice. We hardly know how to define those terms, and we cettainly don’t know how to achieve a society of perfect love and justice. But we do know what it is like to be unloved and we do know when we experience an injustice —- and if only we are able, we run from both. And what are we running towards. We are running towards what doesn’t have material existence, and yet it is real. We know it is real because it has drawing power. It lures us forward. It is the lure of possibility. It lures us towards new possibilities, towards greater love and greater justice. What shall we call this lure towards ever greater possibilities of love and justice. We shall call it God.

Sisters and brothers in Christ, in this advent season when we look towards the coming of Christ, we are looking towards the one who embodies the spirit of love and justice. When we say that God is incarnate in Jesus Christ or that God’s Word is here made flesh, we are saying that God binds “himself” to us, that God’s power of love and justice, a power which gives us purpose and meaning and dynamism, nevertheless that power of God, to be fully exercised, has need of our decisions, our active response. Christ is the incarnation of God’s lure towards us, a lure which can never be finally achieved and yet everlastingly draws us forward. For Christ is the desire beyond all our desires. I hardly know what I am saying anymore. I had best stop.

Praise Christ.
Praise God.
Amen.

Sermon preached by Burton Cooper
at St. Barnabas’, Norwich, Vt.

Dec. 6, 2009 - Advent 2, Year C, RCL

Malachi 3:1-4
Philippians 1:3-11
Luke 3:1-6

God be in my words and in my speaking; God be in our hearts and in our understanding. AMEN.

John the Baptist is one of the principal figures of Advent. In this morning’s Gospel lesson, we are told: “In the fifteenth year of the reign of Emperor Tiberius, when Pilate was governor of Judea, and Herod was ruler of Galilee…the word of God came to John son of Zechariah in the wilderness. He went into all the region around the Jordan, proclaiming a baptism of repentance for the forgiveness of sins…” Because we always hear about John the Baptist during the Advent season, when we are busily preparing for the coming of the Christ child on Christmas morning, it becomes easy for us to connect John, in our minds, with the baby that will be born in the manger in just a few short weeks; but, as the historical references at the beginning of this passage should remind us, John wasn’t the forerunner of the infant Christ, but rather the herald proclaiming the beginning of Jesus’ adult ministry. If you think back to the story of Mary’s visitation to her kinswoman, Elizabeth (John’s mother), we see that John was only about 6 months older than his cousin, Jesus. It isn’t the infant King he’s proclaiming, but the coming of the Messiah.

John’s message to the people of his time was not entirely one of sweetness and light, either. He proclaimed a “baptism of repentance for the forgiveness of sins” but there was a definite, apocalyptic edge to John’s preaching, with an energy and style that was far from conciliatory. We get a sample of that preaching in next week’s Gospel: “You brood of vipers!” John accuses. “Who told you to flee from the wrath to come?” For John, the word “prepare” isn’t about quietly getting ready for a nice, cozy family holiday by wrapping presents, writing cards, and baking cookies. It’s very much “Prepare — or suffer the consequences. Repent — or else!”

The writer of Luke’s Gospel identifies John as the one foretold by Isaiah: “The voice of one crying out in the wilderness:
‘Prepare the way of the Lord, make his paths straight.
Every valley shall be filled, and every mountain and hill shall be made low,
and the crooked shall be made straight, and the rough ways made smooth;
and all flesh shall see the salvation of God.’”

This passage is such a staple of the Advent and Christmas tradition that it is hard for me to read or hear it without starting to sing (or at least hum) the beautiful aria from Handel’s Messiah — but if we look beneath the beautiful language, beyond the familiar music, this passage actually evokes an enormous amount of upheaval. Filling every valley and leveling every hill, in reality, is more like an out of control mining operation, or a spectacularly huge earthquake; it is not a small change. “Every valley shall be raised up and every mountain and hill made low,” Isaiah promises — and we hear these words as a promise of peace and security. But we shouldn’t. John’s call to prepare offers us an opportunity to shift our perspective; though we may be tempted to imagine that the Advent message is that all good things come to those who wait (passively) for them, in reality, the preparation John preaches is more active. Prepare — with upheaval and effort — for the coming of God; change your heart, change your ways, change everything, because everything is about to change. Though we wait, in Advent, we must not wait passively; we must not neglect to do the preparatory work of prayer and action, repentance and change of heart.

In the passage from Hebrew Scripture, the prophet Malachi also talks about messengers preparing the way: “See, I am sending my messenger to prepare the way before me, and the Lord whom you seek will suddenly come to his temple.” But even this promise comes with a warning: “But who can endure the day of his coming, and who can stand when he appears? For he is like a refiner’s fire and like fuller’ soap; he will sit as a refiner and purifier of silver, and he will purify the descendants of Levi and refine them like gold and silver, until they present offerings to the Lord in righteousness.”

Some years ago, I became friends with a blacksmith — not a farrier (who shoes horses), though (as an equestrian) I also number farriers among my friends. The main difference is that a blacksmith works a forge. I used to watch my blacksmith friend, Luke, work with metal; sometimes, he even let me help — which usually involved tongs, very heavy fireproof gloves, and singeing hair, or scorching the skin on my cheeks and forehead. Refining metal and working it is neither an easy nor a comfortable process. The metal must be heated to the point where its impurities burn away. The image of the descendants of Levi being refined like metal is not a comfortable one. Again, it speaks of upheaval, of heat and fire and ash, of processes that are strenuous for the refiner and transformative (but not comfortable) for the material being refined. At the end of the process, you may have a thing of beauty — or a useful and necessary tool — but the end result is never achieved without sweat and effort.

It’s often our temptation, I think, to imagine that the central purpose of Jesus’ ministry was to comfort us, and to affirm us exactly as we are. This assumption makes us feel safe and loved, warm and fuzzy; but it’s not an accurate (or complete) understanding of Jesus’ message — then or now. I think possibly that John was closer to the truth: that there would be tremendous upheaval and disruption in people’s lives and in the social structure. Preparing for the coming of the Lord doesn’t involve shining the good silver and hanging up the banners; it means examining all the parts of ourselves and our lives and our social order that we would — by far — rather not examine; and, having done the examination and brought into light all the aspects we would rather ignore, it becomes our task to work to change them. Preparing for the coming of the Lord means taking responsibility for things we’d rather relegate to someone else, or ignore; it means repenting of comfortable, wasteful attitudes and habits, and thinking hard about the needs of others, and our common weal. Every valley shall be raised up and every mountain and hill made low.

With these powerful images of geologic and metallurgic transformation, I am rather uncomfortably aware that it takes a massive amount of fill to raise up a valley. It’s the tops of the mountains and hills that go into the valley to make everything level. And it takes a lot of energy, a lot of heat and fuel, to burn away the impurities in metal. We’re talking about a lot of upheaval, a lot of change, a lot of effort and energy dedicated to preparing the way of the Lord. Perhaps the message for us, this Advent, is a reminder that doing the ministry Christ’s Incarnation demands of us is a huge commitment. It’s not a matter of simply filling out a pledge card (though that is certainly a good and necessary place to start!), or of coming to church once in a while — or even every week. The warning John the Baptist brings reminds us we’re called to a major undertaking, which will challenge us all to grow and change both as individuals, and as the community of St. Barnabas’.

But it is still good news. As Zechariah (John’s father) prophesied at John’s birth: “And you, child, will be called the prophet of the Most High; for you will go before the Lord to prepare his ways, to give knowledge of salvation to his people by the forgiveness of their sins. By the tender mercy of our God, the dawn from on high will to give light to those who sit in darkness and in the shadow of death, to guide our feet into the way of peace.” The Lord is coming; the Kingdom of God is at hand — and that is good news, holy news, life-giving news. That it also means we’ll have challenges and change, and many, many opportunities to expend our faithful and creative energy is not a bad thing. We are called into ministry with Christ, and John the Baptist reminds us that there’s more to responding than simply opening our eyes and looking expectant. There will be upheaval and change, and the peace and quiet that may be only one step away from dormancy will be broken; and we will emerge energized and filled with enthusiasm, even if we have smudges of mud on our faces and dirt under our fingernails.

So don’t get tricked into thinking that Advent — or the life of faith, itself — is a spectator sport! It’s not. We all have the opportunity to respond — actively and energetically — to God’s love and Christ’s call to us. And the more actively we respond, the more powerfully others will be drawn to us, to our community, and indeed to Christ. As the Apostle Paul says to the Christians at Philippi: “And this is my prayer, that your love may overflow more and more with knowledge and full insight to help you to determine what is best, so that in the day of Christ you may be pure and blameless, having produced the harvest of righteousness that comes through Jesus Christ for the glory and praise of God.”

In the Name of Christ, AMEN.

Sermon preached by Beth Hilgartner
at St. Barnabas’, Norwich, Vt.

Nov. 29, 2009 - Advent 1, Year C

Jeremiah 33:14-16
1 Thessalonians 3:9-13
Luke 21:25-36

God be in my words and in my speaking; God be in our hearts and in our understanding. AMEN.

This Sunday is the First Sunday in Advent. It’s also the first Sunday of the new Church year, and we mark the change in liturgical season with such things as the purple hangings and vestments, the Advent wreath, and the use of the Great Litany. We know that the intention of the Advent season is that it should be a time of prayerful waiting and preparation for the celebration of the Incarnation at Christmas; but in our hectic and busy lives, it’s very easy for Advent to devolve into the more frazzled secular mindset of however-many shopping days left until Christmas.

Perhaps that’s why there are apocalyptic themes in the lessons appointed for this celebration: to take us far, far away from the tinsel and glitter, the bright holiday lights, and the plastic lighted reindeer and Santa Clauses that have begun to appear in people’s yards. “The days are surely coming, says the Lord, when I will fulfill the promise I made to the house of Israel and the house of Judah” (as we hear in the lesson from Hebrew Scripture) is certainly a long way from “Santa Claus is coming to town.”

As I meditated, this week, on these apocalyptic themes and our Advent prayerful waiting, I found myself considering a conversation I had had with someone, recently, in which we talked about whether or not we really believed in the Second Coming as described by Jesus, by the book of Revelation, and by other apocalyptic writers. For both of us, the sense was that, while we could intellectually accept the idea of the end of life as we know it, here on this “fragile earth, our island home” — even stars like our Sun have a lifespan, after all — it was much harder to believe that there will be a time when (as Paul would have it) we need to be “blameless before our God and Father at the coming of our Lord Jesus with all his saints.” It’s clear that the Hebrew Scriptures, the Christian letters, and the words of Jesus as recorded in the Gospels all express a belief in a time when God acts to change the shape of the known world, when God — or the appointed Messiah — appears “’in a cloud’ with power and great glory,” and establishes a perfect world, a Kingdom where justice prevails and the ancient wrongs are all made right. It’s also clear that Jesus and the early Church believed that those events were immanent. “Truly I tell you,” Jesus says in today’s passage from Luke’s Gospel, “this generation will not pass away until all things have taken place.”

Well, clearly, that prediction was never borne out in any expected or envisioned way. But the fact that the Apocalypse didn’t occur on schedule wasn’t enough to destroy people’s faith in the message of Jesus, or in the Resurrected Christ; and gradually, the Second Coming stopped being something people expected to experience in their own lifetimes, and became a vision of the distant future.

For me, personally, the descriptions of the Second Coming bear very little resemblance to my own experience (and expectation) of the workings of God in Creation. The imagery, the metaphor, of God — or Christ — coming as a warrior to impose a reign of justice upon all of us is not one that resonates in a good place, for me. But rather than simply reject the entire concept of the Second Coming, I find myself looking for the truths that underlie the distracting imagery and metaphor of the Scriptural version of events. In my thinking, the scriptural myth of the End Times belongs in the same place as the scriptural myth of the Creation: the events the stories recount express a truth about God, rather than a description of what has “really” happened, or will “really” happen. When the Sun, at the end of its unimaginably long stellar lifetime, goes supernova, and the Earth and other planets are consumed in radiation and fire, the truth the End Times myth expresses is the conviction that God has some new thing in mind for her mortal children. What it is, what it will be like, I have no idea; but I don’t really need an idea, either. We don’t know; we can’t accurately imagine the new thing God has in mind. It’s like Heaven: there’s lots of speculation, but no one living really knows what happens after we cross the threshold we call death. Nonetheless, we embrace the truth, the hope, the conviction that death is not the end, and that in some inexpressible way, we will continue in the sight and mind and heart of God.

Many of the apocalyptic writings express the idea that faithful people need to be on their guard and waiting — watching and alert — for the Second Coming. In the passage from Luke’s Gospel, Jesus says: “There will be signs in the sun, the moon, and the stars, and on the earth distress among nations confused by the roaring of the sea and the waves. People will faint with fear and foreboding of what is coming upon the world, for the powers of the heavens will be shaken… Now when these things begin to take place, stand up and raise your heads, because your redemption is drawing near.” He also says, “Be on guard so that your hearts are not weighed down with dissipation and drunkenness and the worries of this life, and that day catch you unexpectedly, like a trap. For it will come upon all who live on the face of the whole earth. Be alert at all times, praying that you may have the strength to escape all these things that will take place, and to stand before the Son of Man.” For me, this conjures up an image of someone watching so expectantly for some particular event that she or he is completely oblivious to whatever is really going on. It’s a closed kind of waiting, a closed sort of expectation: one “knows” what one is looking for, so one stops being open to anything else. But I don’t think that’s the stance we’re really called toward; I don’t think that is at all the point of our Advent prayerful waiting and preparation.

As I struggled with this insight, another piece of the passage from Luke came into my meditations: “Then he told them a parable: ‘Look at the fig tree and all the trees; as soon as they sprout leaves you can see for yourselves and know that summer is already near. So also, when you see these things taking place, you know that the kingdom of God is near.’” And it struck me that all the things Jesus mentioned as signs are not unique; celestial events like eclipses, comets, meteor showers — all kinds of things ancient peoples might not have been able to explain — occurred then and are still occurring; there is certainly (still) distress among nations — that one is pretty constant; and tsunamis, typhoons, and hurricanes are also fairly ubiquitous in history. Even in his parable, Jesus uses an example that is common and cyclical; every year, trees leaf out; every year, summer comes, the seasons change, and people know to expect that. “Now when these things begin to take place, stand up and raise your heads, because your redemption is drawing near.”

It’s one thing for Jesus, before the Resurrection, to say, “…your redemption is drawing near.” But after the Resurrection, redemption is already here. One of the problems for the early church was that there wasn’t some big, cataclysmic reorganization of life as people knew it. The Resurrection transformed people, but not on the scale of nations and governments and the entire fabric of social order and daily life. Basically, life in general went on pretty much as usual; an individual or their household might experience the transforming presence of God in Christ, but the Romans remained in power (at least for a while), and the kingdoms of Judah and Israel were not restored to their ancient glories. So they waited for the Apocalypse, the Second Coming. The early Christians figured out (eventually) that they couldn’t wait in idleness, but the idea that Jesus’ transforming work won’t be completely finished until Christ comes again to complete what was begun in the Incarnation persists in many Christians’ minds. Personally, I have more faith in the Incarnation than that. Through the Incarnation and the Resurrection, we are redeemed. In all our imperfections, in our weaknesses and foibles, in our strengths and gifts, we are — already! — an Easter people: loved, forgiven, redeemed, and empowered for ministry.

“Look at the fig tree and all the trees; as soon as they sprout leaves you can see for yourselves and know that summer is already near. So also, when you see these things taking place, you know that the kingdom of God is near.” If we read this passage with an Easter people’s mind instead of from an apocalyptic viewpoint, then the message is subtly different. An apocalyptic viewpoint would suggest that if the kingdom is near, we should tidy things up and get ready to have it imposed upon us. But as Easter people — empowered, transformed, loved, inspired — the message that the kingdom is near should act on us like an energizing breath: it’s near, it’s within reach; so let’s roll up our sleeves and get to work in ways that will draw the kingdom ever closer.

This Advent, it is my prayer that we will, each and all, expose ourselves to the nearness of the kingdom, and be listening for and open to the unexpected insights and unimagined actions the Spirit lures us toward; and that as we prepare to celebrate, again, the remarkable gift of love God gave us in the Incarnation, we will be moved and inspired toward new ways of making that Love real and present to all our sisters and brothers.

In Christ’s name, AMEN.

Sermon preached by Beth Hilgartner
at St. Barnabas’, Norwich, Vt.

Nov. 1, 2009, All Saints Day - Year B, RCL

Wisdom 3:1-9
Revelation 21:1-6a
John 11:32-44

God be in my words and in my speaking; God be in our hearts and in our understanding. Amen.

This Sunday, November 1st, is the feast of All Saints. All Saints is one of the four liturgical days specifically designated as most appropriate for Baptisms (the other three being the Baptism of Our Lord, in Epiphany, the Easter Vigil, and Pentecost). We do occasionally have Baptisms at other times during the church year, since there are often good reasons — the availability of extended family members being an important factor. Today [at our 10 o’clock service] we will Baptize Andrew Chapley Fraser, and welcome him into the family of the church, into the fellowship of people the early church describes as ‘the saints’ (with a small s). It is, I think, particularly powerful that, on Friday, we buried Andy’s great-grandfather, Dan Fraser; we gave thanks for Dan’s wonderful, long life with all of us, and we celebrated his entrance into that group the church sometimes describes as ‘the saints in light,’ by which we mean those who have entered into eternal life with God; and in the juxtaposition of Dan’s entrance into the saints in light, and Andy’s becoming one of the saints in the church, we have a powerful reminder of the reminder of the communion of saints — both the living and the dead, the official Saints (with a capital ‘s’) and the quieter, private ones — which is part of what we celebrate in this liturgical expression.

In his meditation on the feast of All Saints, author Sam Potaro makes the point that the three fall celebrations, All Hallows, All Saints, and All Souls, which occur each year on October 31, November 1, and November 2, need to be looked at as three interrelated liturgical and theological events. In his book Brightest and Best: a Companion to the Lesser Feasts and Fasts, he writes:

“All Saints’ Day is the centerpiece of an autumn triduum. In the carnival celebrations of All Hallows’ Eve our ancestors used the most powerful weapon in the human arsenal, the power of humor and ridicule, to confront the power of death. The following day, in the commemoration of All Saints, we gave witness to the victory of incarnate goodness embodied in remarkable deeds and doers triumphing over the misanthropy of darkness and devils. And in the commemoration of All Souls we proclaimed the hope of common mortality expressed in our aspirations and expectations of a shared eternity.”

We don’t observe this particular set of liturgical celebrations as carefully or faithfully as Sam Potaro would recommend; for us — certainly for our culture — Halloween has become the most visible holiday, with All Saints being essentially ignored by the culture, and transferred to the Sunday following by most churches. All Souls gets very little notice — even by the church. We tend to roll All Saints and All Souls together, with our liturgical expression. We use white vestments, triumphant hymns, and so forth to emphasize All Saints, and in our prayers, we make an opportunity to name those of our parish family and known to us who have crossed the threshold into eternal life, which provides a reminder of the feast of All Souls.

The readings assigned by the Revised Common Lectionary for the feast of All Saints make an interesting collection. The passage from the Wisdom of Solomon reminds us that “the souls of the righteous are in the hand of God, and no torment will ever touch them.” It reminds us of the assurances of our faith: that death is not the end; that we have the promise of eternal life with those who have gone before. And while the phrase, “the souls of the righteous” is often understood to refer to the dead, I found myself reflecting that all of our souls (living and dead) are in God’s hands, and God walks with us every step of our journey through this life, and beyond it.
The passage from the book of Revelation recounts the part of John’s mystical vision where he sees “a new heaven and a new earth … And I saw the holy city, the new Jerusalem, coming down out of heaven from God, prepared as a bride adorned for her husband.” The book of Revelation is problematic for many of us. It is — at least in some theological traditions — read as a prediction of what will happen during the end times; but I think it is a mistake to try to literalize John’s mystical, metaphorical vision, or to limit it (in our minds) to an expression of something in the future. There is wonderful poetry in the book — theological imagery which has formed and shaped liturgical expression, hymnody, and sacred art — but there is also a lot of stuff that is just plain weird. One of my Scripture professors in seminary once remarked, “Remember, the book of Revelation is a dream; do your dreams always make sense, or make easily understandable correlations with your daily experiences?” For me, the passage we read today makes a powerful, theological statement about the Incarnation, if we read it as an expression of what it means to have Christ among us, now. “See, the home of God is among mortals. He will dwell with them as their God; they will be his peoples, and God himself will be with them…” To me, this sounds like metaphors describing the kinds of healing and peace available to each one of us, when we make room for Christ in our lives, and pay attention to our relationship with God.

This brings us to the story of the raising of Lazarus, told in John’s Gospel. To me, this seems a strange choice for All Saints Day — true, the story deals with Resurrection, but most of us don’t imagine eternal life involves our loved ones (or us) emerging from our tombs wrapped in grave clothes. The dramatic and unsettling story of Lazarus seems more suited to Halloween than to this joyous celebration of the communion of saints. But perhaps, that is the point, after all. Lazarus’ story, in John’s Gospel, provides us with a tangible example of Jesus’ power over death; like much of John’s Gospel, the story of Lazarus is a theological statement, rather than an objective account of an historical event. This story expresses the transformative, unexpected power of Jesus; and it foreshadows Jesus’ own Resurrection. By relating this story, John makes the point that the powers that shape our existence are unimportant to Jesus. Mary laments, “Lord, if you had been here, my brother would not have died;” but by raising Lazarus, instead of healing him, Jesus demonstrates the power of God. And to make that point even more strongly, before Jesus calls Lazarus out of his tomb, he says that he is doing this “for the sake of the crowd…so that they may believe that you sent me.”

Our faith assures us that that death is not the all-powerful force it looks like; death is meaningless to God, and, ultimately, powerless over us. Christ calls us, again and again, out of our sins, out of the emotional and spiritual tombs we shut ourselves into, and invites us into freedom, into life, into relationship with him. Because Christ calls us, we are empowered to call others, to invite and welcome them into the family of the church — as we will shortly do with little Andrew. Through Baptism, in a concrete and public way, we accept on Andrew’s behalf, the invitation into relationship, which God constantly extends to everyone. Through Baptism, we welcome Andrew as the newest member of the parish family of St. Barnabas; and through Baptism, we celebrate his inclusion in the communion of saints — that great “cloud of witnesses” which incorporates all Saints and all souls.

It is my prayer for all of us, on this All Saints’ Day, that we will listen for the voice of Christ, which constantly calls us into life and freedom; and that as we hear and respond, we will find in ourselves the inspiration and will to invite others into relationship with the God who did create and does love each and every human being.

In the Name of Christ, AMEN.

Sermon preached by Beth Hilgartner
at St. Barnabas’, Norwich.