May 16, 2010 - Easter 7, Year C, RCL

Acts 16:16-34
Revelation 22:12-14,16-17,20-21
John 17:20-26

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

I must confess that I don’t always react terribly well to the stories from the Acts of the Apostles. Perhaps this is because the dramatic, overwhelming events, which overtake the apostles in this book, are so very different in character to what I experience in my own life of faith. I have never (ever) ordered (in Christ’s name) a spirit to remove itself from someone; divine intervention in the shape of an earthquake that shakes the foundations of a prison so that the doors open and chains unfasten is very, very far removed from the subtle and ambiguous ways in which I experience God’s leading and discern God’s presence and power. I suppose that, on some level, the stories in Acts make me wonder what I’m doing wrong, so that my faith experiences are rendered in understated half tones and shades of gray, instead of the bold strokes and brilliant colors of Paul and his cohorts. And there’s also the sense that Paul and his friends seem always to know exactly what to do — what God intends — even when it isn’t the obvious, sensible choice. For example, in this morning’s story, after the earthquake, which miraculously frees them from prison, they don’t do the obvious thing and thank God for their deliverance and make good their escape. They stick around — and in the process convert the guard and his household to Christ. And I’m left wondering, “How did they know to do that? How could they tell that they weren’t intended to go through the open doors and disappear into the night?”

Of course, as Biblical scholarship instructs us, the stories in Acts — and in other books of Scripture — are teaching stories; they were told (and have been gathered together and written down) to provide instruction, inspiration, metaphor; they are not necessarily intended to be understood as literal, objective historical accounts. With that in mind, it’s possible to find an underlying message (or several) in the story of Paul and Silas’ adventures in Philippi of Macedonia. It may be that for us, the salient point of the story isn’t found in the miraculous earthquake as much as in the message of inclusion inherent in Paul’s concern for the jailer. After the earthquake, “When the jailer woke up and saw the prison doors wide open, he drew his sword and was about to kill himself, since he supposed that the prisoners had escaped. But Paul shouted in a loud voice, ‘Do not harm yourself, for we are all here.’” In this incident, Paul is clearly concerned with the welfare of one of his “enemies.” The jailer was a party to the mistreatment Paul and Silas had received at the hands of the authorities, and yet, Paul acts to safeguard the man, and even goes so far as to evangelize him (and his family), and welcome him into fellowship with them.

From this, it is clear that in the mind of Paul, the world was not divided up into enemies and friends, into people worthy of the message with which he had been entrusted and those not worthy. Everyone deserved to hear the word of the Lord and to be given the opportunity to respond with joy to the message Paul and Silas brought. Perhaps it is this openness of mission, this blindness to the divisions of tribe, culture, politics, ethnicity, and class that we 21st century disciples ought to cultivate. It seems to me that we 21st century disciples need most urgently to reclaim the mission Jesus gave us: to love one another so deeply and so completely that the whole world will recognize the presence of God in our interactions.

The passage from John’s Gospel appointed for this morning alludes to this vision of love and unity. Jesus says, “The glory that you [God] have given me [Jesus] I have given them, so that they may be one, as we are one, I in them and you in me, that they may become completely one, so that the world may know that you have sent me and have loved them even as you have loved me.” And Jesus goes on: “Righteous Father, the world does not know you, but I know you; and these [disciples] know that you have sent me. I made your name known to them, and I will make it known, so that the love with which you have loved me may be in them, and I in them.” The salient points, here, are that Jesus recognized in his ministry the power to unify people, to draw them into a relationship with God that would make superficial differences among themselves irrelevant. And further, Jesus’ vision was not limited to the twelve disciples, but embraced the whole world; as long as the ones to whom Jesus had revealed himself continued to spread the loving revelation, the reconciling work Jesus began would continue. We need to keep from getting distracted by John’s complicated syntax, and to cling to the important point: that our work as disciples is to make the divine love real enough so that the presence of Christ in our midst is clear and obvious. The question for us may be, “How are we being called to do that, here, in this time and place?” The traditional answer is that we do this through the truly important, reconciling work of the church: feeding the hungry, clothing the naked, visiting the sick and imprisoned, comforting the lonely, welcoming the stranger, and working for peace and justice. But the question for us remains: How does that work take shape — now, today — at St. Barnabas’? Depending on what people hunger for, meeting their needs can take many, many forms. Here, today, we support the Haven food pantry, which helps to provide physical nourishment for those who do not have enough to eat. But spiritual hunger is real, as well; and emotional hunger. People hunger for connection with God, for fellowship and community, for beauty, art, and music, for intellectual stimulation; people long for a sense of balance and harmony with Creation, or hunger for fulfilling and stimulating work. The needs are vast and varied. No single person, no single faith community, can do it all; so it remains for us — individually and collectively — to discern the places and ways we can be of most service to others. And a huge part of that discernment involves, I believe, being open to recognize where the Spirit is at work, and being willing to join her in it. Sometimes, this discernment may lead us to acknowledge that there is no longer sufficient energy surrounding a traditional ministry to sustain it; and in those cases, to consider, faithfully and prayerfully, whether the Spirit is urging us to let go of it, and move on.

It seems to me that the work of discernment, the effort of finding the places where the Spirit’s energy is moving, is something we do — not once or twice, not periodically, but — constantly. The question of where the Spirit is at work is one which, each day, we should ask in our prayers. If we set out, each day, to find signs of God at work in the world, and wrestle, each day, with the question of how to join God in that work, then (by the grace and power of Christ) we will train ourselves (individually and collectively) to notice and respond to the challenges and opportunities God sets before us.

The passage from the Revelation to John also touches on themes of inclusion and immediacy. “See, I am coming soon…” The Spirit and the bride say, ‘Come.’ And let everyone who hears say, ‘Come.’ And let everyone who is thirsty come. Let anyone who wishes take the water of life as a gift…” The water of life is given as a gift to anyone who wishes to accept it; it’s not a reward for a life well lived; it’s not reserved for the few who earn or deserve it. If you are thirsty, come and drink; the water of life is available to any and all who wish to receive it. For us, perhaps this serves as a reminder that the message of Christ’s love, and the power of Christ’s Resurrection, is not something we hide or hoard, but something we proclaim and share. The apocalyptic vision insists that these things, these changes, are happening soon. But our Resurrection faith challenges us to recognize that these things are happening NOW. The Resurrected Christ is here, among us, inspiring us, working through us. The water of life, the energy of the Spirit, the compassion of Christ, the power of God is available — now, today! — to anyone who wishes to accept it. If we open our eyes, our hearts, and our hands, then we will become aware of God’s energy at work, and discover ways to allow God to employ our energies and efforts in new and marvelous ways.

I pray that we may, each and all, seek to discern the Spirit’s energy at work in our lives, our community, and our world; and that, discerning, Christ’s compassion may inspire us with the spiritual discipline of service, so that God’s power may work through us and our community of St. Barnabas’ to make the love and unity expressed in the Gospels evident to all.

In the Name of Christ, AMEN.

Sermon preached by Beth Hilgartner at St. Barnabas, Norwich

May 9, 2010 - Easter 6, Year C, RCL

Revelation 21:10, 22:1-25

Apocalyptic

In the Spirit the angel carried me away to a great high mountain and showed me

the holy city of Jerusalem coming down out of heaven from God…. Nothing accursed will be found there anymore. But the throne of God and of the Lamb will be in it, and his servants will worship him; they will see his face and his name will be on their foreheads. And there will be no more night; they will need no light of lamp or sun, for the Lord God will be their light, and they will reign forever and ever.

Today, when we think of our world, with its thousands of barrels of oil spilling daily into the Gulf of Mexico, threatening marine life and people’s livelihoods, when we think of the flooding in Nashville taking lives and washing away homes, when we think of the Taliban-inspired terrorist planting explosives in a parked car on Times Square, when we think of the seemingly never-ending, hatred-arousing conflict between Palestine and Israel, when we think of the continued killings in Iraq and Afghanistan, of the threat of a nuclear build up in Iran, of the way we continue to pour heat-trapping carbon dioxide into the atmosphere with its eventually disastrous temperature changing consequences, when we think of the Wall Street meltdown and the over-reaching greed of big banks and large investment firms which brought economic devastation to so many, when we think of these things, and the all too many more like them, can we not weep over a vision in which God will be our light, in which there will be no more night, in which we will live forever and ever, in which, finally, as this apocalyptic vision has earlier promised us, God “will wipe every tear from (our) eyes; and death will be no more; and mourning and crying and pain will be no more.”

When we find ourselves, if we find ourselves, weeping over this vision, is it not because we have such a strong inner yearning for peace and justice and social harmony? I remember back in the sixties and early seventies, during the days of civil rights marches and Vietnam War protests, how Blanche and I, sometimes with our children in tow, would march along the streets, carrying signs of “Peace Now” and singing the Beattles song, “All we are asking is give peace a chance.” But it is not simply a desire for peace that lies behind an apocalyptic vision but a desire for meaning and a search for truth; and, of course, here, I am not talking about ordinary meanings and ordinary truths, such as what does it mean for people’s lives that we are running such a high unemployment rate or what are the true causes of our current recession, important as these questions are. No, I am talking about ultimate meaning and ultimate truth: what is the meaning of life that bursts so explosively into being, particularly what is the meaning of human life and history, the rise and fall of peoples and nations and empires, with their great outpourings of creative genius in art and music and literature and architecture and a corresponding horrifying outpouring of death and destruction and unbearably evil cruelty to human life and other species. Is it all, as Shakespeare has Macbeth say, “a tale told by an idiot, full of sound and fury, signifying nothing” or is there finally a meaning to it all, a meaning that eludes us, but the truth for which we continually search? The search for ultimate meaning, for ultimate truth, does not of course, in itself, establish the truth of the meaning we yearn for or even that there are such realities as ultimate meaning and ultimate truth. There are some, actually many, who say that belief in an ultimate dimension to reality or belief in an ultimate truth is an illusion fostered by the wishes of the psyche or that it is an abuse or trick of language, so that the mere existence of the word ultimate falsely leads us to believe in the reality of an ultimate. On the other hand, there are those, very few, who think that we would not have this strong yearning for ultimate meaning and ultimate truth unless we already participate in an ultimate dimension of reality. I myself like this argument of participation but I have to admit that in my thirty five years of teaching I’ve never convinced anybody of it, so let’s move on to further analysis of the Book of Revelation’s apocalyptic vision and see if we cannot find firmer grounds for our faith in ultimate truth and ultimate meaning.

This morning’s vision of “the holy city Jerusalem coming down out of heaven from God,” a city lit by the light of God, and ruled by God and the lamb, that is, by God and Christ, where none are accursed and all the people have the name of Christ written on their foreheads, that is, where all the people live by the spirit of Christ, this picture of light and love and peace and healing comes as the climax to a vision of a dark and terrible time of judgment where God’s wrath finally shows itself against the wicked, the unjust, the oppressor, the demonic, the evil, the rich and the powerful, the rulers who “shed the blood of saints and prophets.” There are earthquakes, scorching heat, and great fires throughout the world, hundred pound hailstones fall from the skies, the waters of the rivers turn into blood, there are great battles against the armies of all the ruling nations, including the battle at a place called Armageddon where the demons assembled for battle “the kings of the whole world.” It is only at the end of this devastating time of judgment where all who are dark and wicked have been purged from the earth, that the holy city of Jerusalem comes down out of heaven from God —- and the “remnant,” to use a phrase from the prophet Isaiah, or, in the words of today’s lectionary reading, “those who are written in the Lamb’s book of life” (only then do the holy, those washed in the blood of the lamb) enter into it.

Of course, we are not dealing here simply with the visionary hopes of a past religious world. Apocalyptic religious hope —- with its belief in a day of judgment, where darkness and devastation precede light and love, where the holy are separated from the unholy —- ( this apocalyptic hope) is still with us today, though it takes many forms. We see one of those forms in those who believe in The Rapture, a day when the holy will immediately be taken up to heaven, and the remainder will have to decide, before the great battle, whose side they will be on, God’s or the ungodly. We see another in those who believe that the restoration of the state of Israel and the appearance of a red heifer in the holy land will be a sign of the second coming of Christ and the final day of judgment. We see another in some orthodox-believing Jews who look for the coming of the “true” messiah, and we see another, perhaps,in jihadist Muslims, and here I speak with fear and trembling, for I do not know enough about Islam to venture an authoritative word on it —- but perhaps the explosive-armed jihadist who gives his own life in order to destroy the lives of infidels, the unholy, faith-threatening westerner, and who believes he will be immediately lifted to heaven in the company of seven beautiful virgins, (perhaps this jihadist)is a cousin in spirit to apocalyptic believers. I know this is a terrible thing to say, and even if I add the caveat that in genuine apocalyptic belief it is God not the holy who do the destroying, it is still a terrible thing to say. But I say it to get more emphasis into my next point, which is that there is a great puzzle in apocalyptic belief, and the puzzle is this: how does a vision, such as the one we heard read to us this morning, a vision which knows so much of human anguish, a vision which contains some of the most beautiful lines in scripture —- I do not know words more lovely or heartfelt than the words: God will wipe every tear from our eyes; mourning and crying and pain will be no more —- how does this vision which makes so much of peace and goodness also generate such frightful inhumanities as great battles where whole armies and kingdoms are destroyed, where fires and killer hailstones and deadly scorching heat pour down from heaven, where earthquakes destroy cities, fields and homes, where mountains are leveled and rivers run with blood. How does the holy desire for love and peace open itself also to an affirmation of violence and bloodshed so overwhelming that it takes our breath away? There may be some who believe that question can be fully answered; I’m sorry to say that I am not one of them, but I can offer a way into the beginning of an answer —- and that is by going back to an old distinction between types of faith that the theologian Martin Buber famously made well over half a century ago. Buber distinguished the apocalyptic form of faith from the prophetic form. We’ve had this morning a good dose of the apocalyptic form of faith so I need only point out now that in this view humanity is divided into the holy and unholy, that history runs towards a catastrophic event brought about strictly by divine intervention and that, following the destruction of the anti-godly forces, God brings in a new age of unambiguously good life for the holy saved. The creation gets a fresh start; unlike the fresh start in the Noah and the flood story, which can be understood as an early form of apocalyptic, this time God’s will is written into the hearts and minds of the saved, or as the Book of Revelation has it, Christ’s name is written on their foreheads. In a turnaround of Saint Augustine’s words regarding sin, the saved now are “not free to sin.” The saved can only do the good. We can safely say then that the apocalyptic mind is driven by a desire for life under God in which only goodness is humanly possible. We need to look for something in this desire, perhaps some unconscious weakness, which opens up the floodgates of the violent imagination.

I have a friend, a retired professor, married to a Japanese woman, and so he has come to live half the year in Japan and the other half in the city of his birth and upbringing, Madison, Wisconsin. He recently returned to the US with mixed feelings: uncomfortable with the anger and hate entering into our political life, with the increasing power of corporate wealth in this country, with our aggressive, militaristic foreign policy, and so forth. He writes that perhaps he feels too comfortable in Japan, in part because Japan no longer seeks to exercise great national power so that its policies are not dangerous to the world. He feels that American policies, domestic and foreign, are dangerous to itself and the world. Without intending to, of course, my friend has given us a picture of what life and history looks like from the viewpoint of what Buber calls a prophetic faith. In a prophetic faith, we humans have power and we have the freedom to use and abuse that power. Though our motives may be good we inevitably overestimate their goodness, ignoring the excessive self interest that is in them. Also, we have a tendency to universalize our values, making absolute what may only be relative, and we underestimate the worth of the values of other nations and peoples. What’s true for the individual is even more so for the nation, especially a powerful nation. A powerful nation tends to overestimate the rightness of its own motives and to overestimate the capacity of its power to achieve its goals, seeking to master what may not be capable of being mastered. It’s no wonder that my friend feels uncomfortable when noting the power of this country. While a powerful country can do great good, it can also do great harm, particularly if it assumes its innocence and is unaware of the limits of what power can do or of its own mixed motives or of its ignorance of other cultures and histories. From the viewpoint of a prophetic faith, the whole drama of human history is under the scrutiny of a divine judge who notes our pretensions and vanities and willful and unwillful ignorance; condemns the injustices that flow from actions; all the while upholding that part of our motivation which aspires towards a wider good. To have faith in life under such a divine judge can prompt us into contrition for our vanities and lead us to abate our pretensions, thereby transmuting God’s judgment upon us into God’s mercy. This is a very different view of God’s role in history and of our role in history than the apocalyptic view, but it also provides the clue as to what it is in the apocalyptic mind that opens its vision to the imagination of violence. For while the prophetic view knows that none of us are as good as we think we are —- it takes to heart Jesus’ statement, “do you call me good; no one is good but God alone” so that the world does not so easily settle into a distinction between the good and the evil, the holy and the unholy —- (but) the apocalyptic view with its justified resentments against injustice and its holy/unholy distinctions can easily fall prey to harnessing that resentment into God’s violence against their oppressors, failing to recognize that though their oppressors may well be guilty of great evil, they themselves, the holy, are not as good as they esteem themselves. All of us need God’s mercy. All of us need a faith that prompts contrition. Humility in the judgment of ourselves and of others is the great Christian virtue. It is a weakness in faith not to recognize this.

Sisters and brothers in Christ, this sermon was set off by the dynamics of this morning’s apocalyptic lection encountering my friend writing me that he feels uncomfortable in America. That encounter has not lead this sermon into a clear gospel word —- unless it be this. Perhaps we should not run from being uncomfortable. Perhaps we should embrace it, for that is the human lot. Knowing that we are not as good as we think we are, not as innocent as we think we are, that we have weaknesses that we are not conscious of, that our pretensions are beyond our grasp, that our judgment of the other is often ill informed and lacking in empathy, is it any wonder that we should feel uncomfortable. But the comfort is this, and this is the gospel: that we have our life under a divine judge whose judgment, though real and powerful, is transmuted into mercy —- mercy for all. How it can be for all, I do not know. My faith here is running well beyond my understanding. But praise God for this mercy. Praise Christ for this mercy.

Amen.

May 2, 2010 - Easter 5, Year C, RCL

Acts 11:1-18
Revelation 21:1-6
John 13:31-35

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 Fifth Sunday of Easter present what I think of as good themes for the Easter season. In the lesson from the Acts of the Apostles, we have the account of an interaction between Peter and the religious authorities in Jerusalem, which culminates with a new understanding of the wideness and inclusiveness of God’s grace. In the section of the Revelation to John, the loud voice from the throne declares a new understanding of the relationship between God and human beings: “See, the home of God is among mortals. [God] will dwell with them; they will be [God’s] peoples, and God … will be with them…” The idea the mortals will be God’s peoples — in the plural, which recognizes the vast diversity of the human community. The vision isn’t that God’s presence among us homogenizes us into some kind of unity, but rather that, in spite of differences ethnic, cultural, regional, religious, tribal, economic, and political, the entire human community is God’s family.

These themes of inclusion harmonize well with the new commandment — the new insight; the new instructions — Jesus gives to his disciples in the selection from John’s Gospel appointed for this Sunday. Jesus said, “I give you a new commandment, that you love one another. Just as I have loved you, you also should love one another. By this everyone will know that you are my disciples, if you have love for one another.” There is nothing more important, I believe, in the Christian Gospel than this new commandment to love one another as Christ has loved us. It sounds simple, obvious: easy; it is the only thing we have to do to be recognized as Christ’s disciples.

But it isn’t that easy. It isn’t that simple. Love is complex; relationships — whether we’re talking about the forces that hold communities together (or split them apart), whether we’re talking about the intimate connections of marriages and families, whether we’re talking about interactions between political, economic or ethnic entities in the global community — relationships are built and maintained, strengthened and undermined by all kinds of issues, events, experiences, needs, and feelings. Even though the statement: “Love one another” sounds like a simple directive, it is ridiculous to imagine that actually carrying it out will be easy. If it were simple or easy, we would already have world peace and harmony. The tensions that afflict our communities, our families, our society, our world, are not very responsive to the simple solution. Remember Nancy Reagan and the campaign to “Just Say NO” to drugs? On one level, it’s the obvious solution: each individual ostensibly has a choice whether or not to take drugs; if everyone chose not to, there would be no drug problem. But — even leaving aside the complicated international political and economic forces involved in the American drug problem — on an individual level, so much else affects a person’s decision to use drugs or not that it is simplistic to the point of ludicrous to imagine that a slogan alone is the answer.

As one of my colleagues put it once: “We could all wear buttons that say: ‘Love one another’ — but that wouldn’t make us Christians.”

It seems to me that there is a lot of sentimental baggage attached to the word, LOVE. Loving others gets equated with “always being nice.” In a parish Bible study I led (some years ago), I asked participants to describe how they went about loving others. I can’t remember what everyone said, but one response has stuck with me. The person said: “When some jerk cuts me off in traffic, I say a prayer for them instead of yelling at them.”

Sometimes we seem to think that “all” we have to do is to think nice thoughts about others — and indeed, some of the work we must do to love one another is internal: working on our attitude, on the way we see one another, on the ways we react in certain situations, to certain sorts of folk. But I point out that the kind of love I believe Jesus is talking about is a verb; it’s a series of actions; it’s the way we behave, rather than a state of mind or a type of feeling.

Let me give you an example — maybe not a happy or optimistic example, but doubtless a familiar situation. I know a couple who were married for twenty-two or -three years. It was not a perfect marriage — perhaps not even a healthy one. There was a lot of tension, a lot of arguing; but they stayed together until their kids were in college and high school. When they divorced it wasn’t a surprise to anyone, though it was (as such things are) painful. I talked with each of them (separately) about the marriage and the divorce, about their feelings, and I vividly recall him saying: “I still love her; I’ve always loved her;” and her saying, “He always said he loved me, but he never behaved as though I mattered.”

If simply feeling love, simply thinking kind thoughts, isn’t enough to hold a relationship together — even as intimate and self-selecting a relationship as marriage — how can love (the noun, the feeling) knit together the disparate and often conflicting factions in a local community, or the global one?

I believe that the love Jesus commands us to express is the verb form, the action. In another memorable passage in John’s Gospel, which we heard a couple of weeks ago, Jesus asks Peter: “Do you love me?” and when Peter says that he does, Jesus replies: “Feed my sheep.” It isn’t enough merely to live within the comfort of the noun-form; possessing love for Jesus ought to impel us to loving acts in his name. After all, his love for us drew him to the Cross. If we only feel that inner and private love for Jesus — and for our fellow human — but never do anything to make it concrete, we run the risk of failing to communicate our inner convictions, our deepest feelings to the people who most need what we have to give.

Let’s face it: it isn’t easy to love even our families and neighbors — but Jesus’ directive to love is not limited to those with whom we have many things in common. We are also required to love strangers and foreigners, even our enemies, because (as the passage from Revelation would have it) all of us — those like us and those very, very different from us — belong to God. So although it’s all well and good to revere a beloved passage from the Bible — like today’s passage from John’s Gospel — it is also tremendously important that we understand that Jesus’ directive to love one another is altogether more than a simple slogan. It is a challenge, and one that we often — both as individuals and collectively as a community or nation — fail.

Loving one another isn’t easy. It involves so much more than just “being nice” or thinking kind thoughts about others. It’s more, too, than doing good works for those less fortunate — although that is definitely a valid way to express love and compassion. But the kind of love Jesus talks about — Love one another — is reciprocal; it involves being in relationship with the other. It’s specific and very concrete, and it can take wildly different forms: confronting alcoholics or addicts with their disease and getting them into treatment; marching in support of reformed immigration laws; setting definite, clear, and firm limits with a teenager; visiting someone who is sick or shut in; volunteering at the Haven; and so on. It takes more effort to enter into a relationship, than just to write a check to a group doing good work; but Jesus often asks us to do difficult, challenging, and risky things. And just because a thing is difficult doesn’t mean it isn’t worth doing.

To illustrate this, let me tell you a parable. It’s about my wonderful cat Petrouchka — who I had for eighteen years and still miss. Now, cats aren’t human. They don’t have the same kind of language; I can’t really know what went on in his little kitty brain. But I do know that we had a relationship that involved an exchange, a mutual dependence which — for lack of a translation into Cat Language — I will call love. My part involved, of course, care for his needs like food (which he enjoyed tremendously) and regular visits to the vet (which he did NOT enjoy, but needed), as well as things like patting, brushing and scritching all the places he couldn’t reach very well. His side involved greeting me at the door when I came home, sleeping on the bed, shedding on everything — especially things which needed dry cleaning! — and sitting in my lap and purring. More than anything else, I think it was the lap sitting which he identified as his job, his responsibility. It was how he loved, how he actively made concrete his side of the bond we shared.

He had lots of opportunities to sit in my lap, because I spent (and spend still) long hours sitting in front of my computer. Much of my creative output has been influenced in one way or another by the warm, furry, purring presence of my animal friend.

Several years ago, I invested in a kneeling chair for my computer desk. It was one of those ones that have a slanted seat and a slanted knee rest designed to distribute one’s weight a bit differently and to allow for the correct alignment of the spine. I liked the chair a lot: it was far more comfortable than a conventional chair for long writing sessions — but it put my lap at a 45 degree angle, too steep for my faithful kitty lounger. Petrouchka was upset. For a solid half hour, he wound around my chair, across my desk (and keyboard), nudged my knees with his face, and tried to convey his dissatisfaction with the turn of events. I was apologetic, but there didn’t seem to be anything else to do. Finally, he got under the desk and surveyed the situation; then, to my utter astonishment, he climbed onto the part of the chair where my knees went, and leaned his front legs and chest against my thigh. I reached down and patted him; he wriggled around until he was completely secure and comfortable, then went into purring overdrive. Lap sitting was how he made love concrete. If I was dense enough to make it difficult, it still didn’t negate his obligation. If he couldn’t “talk” me out of the new chair, why then, he still had to find a way to make it work.

We have to love like that: actively, concretely; we have to love actively, even — and perhaps especially — when others seem to make it harder for us to love them. Jesus gave us an example of that active, unshakable love. His love for us was undeterred even by the Cross. We can hope and pray that our love will not be so severely tested, but even when it’s difficult, even when the tried and true methods fail to work, even when the rules change and the other makes it harder for us, even when it means questioning things we would prefer to accept without examining, we are still called to love, to make our love real, concrete, visible, tangible. And when we do, others will know — with the inner certainty which goes far beyond verbal assurances — that we are in truth disciples of Christ.

In the name of God, AMEN.

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

April 1, 2010 - Maundy Thursday, Year C, RCL

Exodus 12:1-4 (5-10) 11-14
I Corinthians 11:23-26
John 13:1-15

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

In the Episcopal Church, our liturgy is — among other things — an act of remembrance. In our weekly Sunday Eucharist, we reenact the last supper, recalling the Passover meal where Jesus gave himself to his Disciples in the bread and wine. In many important ways, the proper liturgies appointed for Holy Week help us relive the events of Holy Week: on Palm Sunday, we hear the Passion Gospel read. There is something visceral and powerful about starting the service with a joyful procession and, by the middle of the service, hearing the cries of “Crucify him!” as the crowd turns on Jesus, and even the Disciples fail him. In a similar way, the services of Holy Week help us live out Jesus’ progression from the triumphal entry into Jerusalem to his death on the Cross. Tonight, this Maundy Thursday service moves us into the story of the Last Supper, with the foot washing and the institution of the Eucharist.

Rituals and rites are important to us; and in tonight’s appointed lessons, we actually read accounts of three different events that have been turned into liturgy, into ways to celebrate and remember our sacred history. In the passage from the Hebrew Scriptures, we read the account of the establishment of the first Passover meal — and in it, we see the roots of the ritual Seder meal, which is still observed by our Jewish sisters and brothers. The image of the sacrificial lamb, whose blood on the doorposts and lintel of the houses of the Israelites saved the people from death and judgment, still resonates within us; our own liturgical and theological language refers to Jesus as the Lamb of God, who takes away the sins of the world; or as the Paschal Lamb, who died to save us. At the end of the Exodus passage, the enduring nature of this ritual, this Seder meal, is specifically expressed: “This day shall be a day of remembrance for you. You shall celebrate it as a festival to the LORD; throughout your generations you shall observe it as a perpetual ordinance.” By observing this tradition, the whole community is enabled to remember and celebrate a defining moment in the sacred history of the children of Israel.

In the passage from the first letter to the Church at Corinth, the Apostle Paul describes the roots of the Eucharistic meal, which celebrates and reenacts the Last Supper. It provides another level of resonance if we recall that the Last Supper itself was a Seder meal; Jesus celebrated the Passover with his disciples, and used that significant moment to give his followers a new way to celebrate and remember the lessons of his ministry. “The Lord Jesus on the night when he was betrayed took a loaf of bread, and when he had given thanks, he broke it and said, ‘This is my body that is for you. Do this in remembrance of me.’” And like the writer of Exodus, Paul also makes explicit the intention that this ritual meal should endure, and its purpose for the faith community: “For as often as you eat this bread and drink the cup, you proclaim the Lord’s death until he comes.”

In John’s Gospel, we have a prelude, as it were, to the establishment of the Eucharist. John describes the way Jesus washes the disciples’ feet, as a way to make clear the new understanding of power that Jesus’ Incarnation makes apparent. This year, as I considered this very familiar Gospel passage, I found myself thinking about Peter’s reaction, “Lord, you will never wash my feet,” and then, Jesus’ remarkable and enigmatic response: “Unless I wash you, you have no share with me.” It’s easy to understand Peter’s feelings — especially for we who have had the virtues of self-reliance so thoroughly inculcated in us by our culture. Peter didn’t want this; he didn’t need it; and he didn’t feel it was sufficiently respectful (or respectable) behavior, either for him or for Jesus. But at the Last Supper, in the Eucharist he is establishing, Jesus is giving the Disciples (and their eventual followers) what they need: he is providing a ritual of identity — like the Passover meal was for the Israelites. And he is giving them, by his example and by their participation in it, a lesson they (and we) would do well to remember. “Unless I wash you, you have no share with me.” Ministry is reciprocal; everyone must take their turn serving, and being served. The model of leadership Jesus gives is service — but even the leaders (and the Disciples were certainly the leaders of the nascent Christian movement) must be willing to be served. “Unless I wash you, you have no share with me.” Neither Peter, nor any others of the Disciples, would have objected had Jesus asked them to wash his feet; but he didn’t. He asked them to allow him to serve them, in the most menial of tasks, by washing their feet. Jesus finishes this remarkable lesson with this explanation: “Do you know what I have done to you? You call me Teacher and Lord—and you are right, for that is what I am. So if I, your Lord and Teacher, have washed your feet, you also ought to wash one another’s feet.” This sounds like the conclusions of our other two readings, the statements that signify the ritual is to endure, as a significant element of the community’s identity. But it doesn’t really surprise me that we don’t include foot-washing in our weekly Eucharistic celebration, even if it might be good for us to have such a reminder more often than once a year. It’s such an intimacy that it’s hard to spiritualize it. The bread and wine we consume in the Eucharist is understood to be the spiritual, symbolic nourishment of Jesus’ presence. But washing feet, or allowing them to be washed, is harder to make into a symbol; and in our secret heart of hearts, we often imagine that Jesus really intended us to be the ones providing service and giving gifts, not the ones receiving service and accepting charity.

But ministry is reciprocal. In order to love one another, in order to serve one another, we must all allow ourselves to be loved and to be served. If we only give and never receive, if we only lead and never follow, if we only serve and never accept service, if we only pour out love and never allow ourselves to be loved back, we run the risk of completely subverting the new way of living Jesus was Incarnated to teach us. If we never allow ourselves (as the foot-washing metaphor has it) to be washed, then we are not sharing in the ministry Jesus entrusted to us; we are instead trying to conform to some code of behavior we hope will make us acceptable to God. We are, by our insistence on being the ones who (only) serve, setting up our own new version of the Holiness Code. Remember, we can do nothing to earn or deserve Christ’s love. No amount of service, no amount of sacrifice, will suffice. But the flip side of that is that nothing we do (or fail to do) can make Christ stop loving us, either. What we can choose is whether or not to accept that love. “Unless I wash you, you have no share in me.”

This Maundy Thursday, it is my prayer that, learning the lessons Jesus’ foot washing teaches, we will be moved by Christ’s compassion to find ways to respond to others’ needs, and to accept the gifts of love and service others offer to us; so that our faith and our community will be strengthened to make manifest the love and compassion of Christ to this hurting world.

In the name of Christ, Amen.

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

March 28, 2010 - Palm Sunday, Year C, RCL

Isaiah 50:4-9a
Philippians 2:5-11
Luke 22:39 – 23:56

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

When I was a kid, I was always a bit confused by Palm Sunday. It seemed, to my unsophisticated and overactive self, to be more fun than Easter, since we got to march around the church with palms, and even after the procession was over, we could spend the rest of the service poking siblings or otherwise fiddling with officially sanctioned props. Easter — at least, Church-Easter, which even as a child I understood had very little to do with bunnies, jellybeans, and chocolate eggs — Easter was much more solemn, and generally involved some kind of fancy, new, (and inevitably uncomfortable) dressy outfit.

But even for adults, liturgically, Palm Sunday is still somewhat confused. There’s the celebration of the Triumphal Entry into Jerusalem, which we re-enact in our own formalized way; but the readings and the Passion story move us straight on to the bleak events of Good Friday, so that even the Eucharist (which we will celebrate in a few minutes) is more somber, evoking — more strongly than usual — the Last Supper. It’s as though the whole of the Holy Week observances are compressed into this service, and we’re left to contemplate the Crucifixion and death of Jesus for the whole long week, as though Jesus were already in his tomb, instead of simply moving — deliberately and inexorably — toward it.

So what does a preacher do with that? There’s so much, in the familiar Passion story, that it’s an almost overwhelming task to address it all. This year, though, I found myself struck by an exchange in the account of Jesus’ triumphal entry. Luke sets the scene: the nearly riotously enthusiastic crowd, mobbing Jesus and crying out joyfully, with extravagant praise for God, and subversive titles for Jesus: “Blessed is the king who comes in the name of the Lord! Peace in heaven, and glory in highest heaven!” And some of the Pharisees object; “Teacher, order your disciples to stop.” But Jesus responds: “I tell you, if these were silent, the stones would shout out.”

What an interesting thing to say. It’s certainly a theme, a metaphor, in the Psalms and the writings of the prophets, that the inanimate created world praises God. We even have Paul, in his letter to the Christians at Philippi, writing about how God “highly exalted him…so that…every tongue should confess that Jesus Christ is Lord, to the glory of God the Father.” But for Jesus to say, essentially, that if human voices are prevented from crying praise, then creation itself would provide the chorus, sounds as though he is affirming that he is, indeed, the Messiah, the Anointed One — the blessed king who comes in the name of the Lord.

Of course, we know that; and Paul knew that. But we Christians read all of Scripture from a place beyond the Resurrection, looking back through it and subsequent events. Remember, though, that up until this point in the story, up until the moment when he entered Jerusalem, Jesus had been careful — even wary — of accepting the mantle of the Messiah, as though he knew that his understanding of his calling and the crowd’s expectations of the Messiah were at significant variance.

I have no doubt that Jesus knew how dangerous it was, how rash and risky it was, to enter Jerusalem in such a showy and theologically loaded manner. Jesus was aware, even if the disciples weren’t, that the powers and principalities in control of Roman-occupied Palestine were not safe to rile; political theater could (and did) turn deadly very, very easily, and protests (and protestors) had scant legal recourse. Coming into Jerusalem decked out in theologically significant symbols, at the head of an exuberant mob, was something that neither the Roman overlords nor the collaborating local religious and political leaders could allow to pass. But Jesus did it anyway. Neither in ignorance, nor in naïveté, but knowing and accepting the risks, Jesus laid himself open to the will of God. Jesus understood, as some of the prophets before him understood, that God’s favor wasn’t a guarantee of safety. It wasn’t that it was safe for Jesus to enter Jerusalem as the Messiah because God would never let anything really terrible happen to the Divinely Chosen one. Jesus knew, even then, that there wouldn’t be legions of angels dispatched to rescue him from the power of the authorities, and the self-protective fear and rage of the mob. He knew, like Isaiah before him, that God could grant great responsibility, and yet, still not intervene to remove consequences. As Isaiah wrote: “The Lord GOD has given me the tongue of a teacher, that I may know how to sustain the weary with a word. Morning by morning he wakens— wakens my ear to listen as those who are taught. The Lord GOD has opened my ear, and I was not rebellious, I did not turn backward.
I gave my back to those who struck me, and my cheeks to those who pulled out the beard; I did not hide my face from insult and spitting.” Even those beloved of God suffer. Jesus had no illusions, even if (perhaps) the disciples didn’t entirely understand.

So what does this have to say to us, today? We try to be good people, to take Christ as our model and guide; but do we really understand how much of a risk it is, to open oneself entirely to the uncompromising will of God? Jesus opened himself up to God, more completely than any other human being before or since; but God didn’t protect him from the consequences of his actions. Doing the right thing, whether in ancient Palestine or in modern Vermont, does not guarantee a comfortable outcome.

In his letter to the Philippians, Paul writes: “Let the same mind be in you that was in Christ Jesus, who, though he was in the form of God, did not regard equality with God as something to be exploited, but emptied himself, taking the form of a slave, being born in human likeness. And being found in human form, he humbled himself and became obedient to the point of death— even death on a cross.” In Christ Jesus, God became human, one of us; a creature, subjected to the ills and indignities of life, just as each one of us is. And, as a human being, with free will and ample opportunities to choose differently, Jesus remained faithful to the will of God, even though it required him to be vulnerable, to be betrayed, to suffer, and to die a shameful and horrific death. Yet, Paul says — to the Philippians and to us — “Let the same mind be in you…” Understand the demands God may make, and accept them, anyway. Do the right thing; stand up for what you believe in; open yourself to the ungentle power of God. You may suffer. Doing the right thing, following Christ, being faithful to God’s will doesn’t mean that everything will work out in some safe and comfortable way. But trust that, no matter what the consequences, God is with you. In the portion of Psalm 31 we read this morning, the Psalmist says: “I am the scorn of all my adversaries, a horror to my neighbors, an object of dread to my acquaintances; those who see me in the street flee from me. I have passed out of mind like one who is dead; I have become like a broken vessel. … But I trust in you, O LORD; I say, ‘You are my God.’”
We know better than to believe that the outward circumstances of our lives reflect the quality of our relationship with God; we know better than to think that illness, or injury, or pain, earthquake, or fire, or flood, poverty, or unemployment, or loss, are evidence of a person’s particular sinfulness. We know better than to imagine that success and happiness and comfort indicate that someone is especially beloved of God. But even though we know better, those attitudes creep in, sometimes. We want, so much, to be able to control our outward circumstances; we want, so much, for there to be reasons — for suffering, for joy — that we can understand. The myth our culture promulgates — that we can and do control our reality — seems so much more appealing than the randomness of suffering, and the lack of guaranteed results for particular courses of action. God has great power; but that power is Love, and Love cannot be compelled, or coerced, or earned. Love is always a risk. The Beloved may love you back, or betray you. The very people Jesus loved cried “Hosanna!” when he came into Jerusalem, and “Crucify!” a few days later. But we know, looking back through the Resurrection — and through the subsequent world-changing history of Christianity — that Jesus was right to love, right to risk, right to follow God. His actions were vindicated, although he was not rescued. There was no last-minute reprieve, no release from the ordeal. “Father, I place my life in your hands,” he said, and then breathed his last — he did not plead, or rage, or despair; he stayed open to God, trusting in God, through it all.

It is my prayer, this Holy Week and always, that we will find in our own hearts and spirits the strength to love as God loves, to follow where Christ leads, and to open ourselves fearlessly to the Spirit’s unexpected inspiration.

In the Name of Christ, AMEN.

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

March 14, 2010 - Lent 4, Year C, RCL

Joshua 5:9-12
II Corinthians 5:16-21
Luke 15:1-3, 11b-32

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

The parable known as the Prodigal Son has, I think, a great deal to teach us — even though it is one of the most familiar stories in the New Testament. Generally, we read this parable as a sentimental story about how one can always go home again. We tend to identify with the loving and forgiving father — or possibly with the sinning but repentant son; and we recognize the elder son as the villain of the piece, the one who fails to get the point. The historical and political context and the radically offensive elements of this parable generally elude our sentimental understanding. But they shouldn’t. Possibly, in an attempt to underscore the political setting for this parable, the Revised Common Lectionary uses three verses from the beginning of the chapter to remind us who was actually in Jesus’ audience. “Now all the tax collectors and sinners were coming near to listen to him…” — that is: the undesirables, the poor, the collaborators with Rome; people who did not feel they had any share in the Temple worship, or place of respect within the social order. “And the Pharisees and the scribes…” — that is: the respectable people, the righteous members of the Temple, the educated people; the establishment — “were grumbling and saying, ‘This fellow welcomes sinners and eats with them.’” This may not sound too terrible to us, but remember that the cultural expectations for a teacher, a rabbi, or a prophet, involved acting in ways that would demonstrate one’s adherence to the Law and the teachings of the Temple. Sharing table fellowship — and thus courting ritual uncleanness — with undesirables and sinners was definitely not behavior people expected of their spiritual leaders. Challenged on this front, Jesus “told them this parable,” which was not a comfortable, sentimental story in that context. First of all, to Jesus’ audience, the thought of asking one’s father for one’s inheritance before he was dead would have been shocking to the point of revulsion. Remember, in the Hebraic law, a son could be put to death for disobedience or disrespect toward his father — and what is respectful about asking a father to fork over half of his possessions when he’s not even on his deathbed? The fact that the father in the parable did what his son asked would have shown — not generosity, nor compassion, nor even fond indulgence, but — weakness, bad judgment, possibly even madness. And then, the younger son takes everything he (now) owns and travels to a distant country — far beyond Jerusalem and the Temple, far away from the place where God was most fittingly worshiped; and in that distant country, he “squandered his property in dissolute living.” It would be hard for Jesus’ audience to think of much worse that this impudent and irreverent young man could do; but Jesus isn’t done making his point. The younger son hires himself out to one of the foreigners, and is sent off to tend his employer’s pigs. In a culture where pigs were animals so unclean they were considered inedible, herding swine was a metaphor for descending to the utter depths of depravity. When the son decides to return, and crafts his careful little speech of contrition, Jesus’ audience would hardly have expected that to succeed; but the actual reaction of the father in the story was even more unexpected. To Jesus’ audience, the father’s behavior in the parable would have seemed undignified, rash, absurd to the point of madness. He runs — runs — to greet the son, embraces and kisses him before the young man has the chance to give his carefully worked-out speech of repentance and humility. The son isn’t being rewarded for repenting; the father doesn’t listen to his change of heart, evaluate and THEN accept it; the father simply welcomes him with joy — without first discerning whether the son truly intends to change and live life in a new and more respectful way.

Neither the respectable scribes and Pharisees, nor the undesirables and sinners in Jesus’ audience could possibly have missed his point: that God loves us beyond and in spite of our sinfulness; whether we are righteous, self-righteous, rebellious, or contrite, God loves us, longs for us, welcomes us, embraces us. In a culture where one’s relationship to God was defined by one’s ability to keep the Law, theology like this was outrageous, even blasphemous. And then, Jesus takes a swipe at the elder son, who (possibly quite reasonably) objects that he’s been following the rules all along, and the father hasn’t done any extravagantly grateful and loving things for him. The father in the parable responds, essentially, “Well, son, you’ve had everything all along. Why are you standing in judgment?”

Here’s another message Jesus’ audience could never have missed. Love transcends Law; studying the Torah and obeying the Law doesn’t make one especially beloved of God. For the children of Israel, who considered themselves pretty exclusively the people of the one true God — and who defined that relationship through the Law expressed in the Torah — that would have seemed an unthinkably broad message of inclusion.

It seems to me that Jesus expected his critics (the scribes and the Pharisees for whom he told this parable) to recognize themselves not in the returning son, nor even in the lavishly welcoming father, but in the elder son. The message of inclusion and love may have been intended to comfort the tax collectors and sinners; but for the respectable people, then — and for us, today — this passage offers a serious challenge about an “inner circle” faith — the theological understanding which says: “I belong; but you don’t.” Jesus is saying, essentially, that it doesn’t matter to God whether one follows the Law or not: God’s love is for the righteous — and the unrighteous — whenever and however they are able to perceive it. When the father in the parable says to the elder son, “Son, you are always with me, and all that is mine is yours,” he is pointing out that what is important is the relationship, not some reward; living with the father, sharing work and play, joys and sorrows, is what’s important, and meaningful, and fulfilling — it’s not a case of working hard and following the rules in order to obtain some distant, elusive goal.

This is pretty radical stuff, really. We are so conditioned by our culture to value hard work and self-reliance, that it is all too easy for us to approach our faith as a discipline to work at, in order to achieve salvation. The idea that we’re already saved, whether we succeed at obeying the Law and living righteously or not, is difficult for us. The idea that our neighbors — who, for basic laziness or a host of other reasons, don’t bother to get up and come to church — are every bit as beloved by God as we are, is sometimes hard to take. We want, so much, to be especially deserving; and our culture encourages us to imagine that, through our own hard work and perseverance, we are able to achieve anything. The idea that God’s limitless and unconditional love is simply given to us — without our having to do anything to earn it — is somehow threatening. Like the elder brother in the parable, we imagine that we attain some special status in God’s eyes by behaving in ways we define as ‘good’ or ‘proper.’ But what God really wants from us is that we love — one another and God — with the same prodigal and extravagant love God showers upon us.

Frankly, it is easier — and far less risky — to follow a set of narrowly defined rules than it is to throw open the doors of one’s heart and love the people whom God puts in one’s way. Frankly, it is easier — and far less risky — to treat one’s faith as a discipline, a set of tasks and chores, than it is to enter into an undefined and constantly changing relationship with the living God. Frankly, it is easier — and far less risky — to stand well back from the world, hedging oneself ‘round with the comfortable belief that there’s nothing one person can do, than it is to accept the challenge of discipleship, to take up the cause of justice, and to work — in whatever ways one is called — for the coming of God’s reign. But the easy way, the safe way, is not God’s way; and it is not the way for us Christians, either.

Think, for a moment, about the father in our parable. He forgave and welcomed his wastrel son before he knew whether or not the boy had learned his lesson. The father took no precautions, dictated no terms, extracted no promises, and demanded no apology. He simply reacted with joy and love; he welcomed his son home, and threw a party. God extends that same, loving welcome to each and every one of us. We are loved despite our faults and failings, loved for who we are — not for what we’ve done or not done. No matter how unworthy we may feel, no matter what mistakes we’ve made, no matter how we’ve failed, we are beloved by God; and all we have to do is to open our eyes and see it, open our hearts and accept it. That God loves others as we are loved should not be threatening. We’re not in competition for some finite prize; God has more than enough love to go around. If we read the Scriptures, come to church, pledge, volunteer, and try to love one another, that’s a wonderful thing — but it doesn’t make us worthy of God’s love; it doesn’t make us deserving of Christ’s sacrifice on our behalf. We mustn’t fall into the older brother’s trap: imagining that God is interested in some transaction, or that the way we behave dictates how much can God loves us. It doesn’t. God loves us, regardless.

God’s unconditional and limitless love — and our acceptance of it — can transform our lives. The discipline and rules of a faithful life are not the things we do to earn God’s love; they are, instead, some of the ways we respond to that love, some of the ways we act out our gratitude and love for God and one another. When we truly accept that we are loved by God, and take up the challenge to share that same love with others, our lives — and the lives we touch — are transformed. For, as the Apostle Paul reminds us, we are indeed “ambassadors for Christ, since God is making his appeal through us…” And by virtue of our Baptism and our commitment to God in Christ, each of us has a ministry of reconciliation, a sacred charge, an important challenge to draw others into relationship with God, and to bring to those who most need it the amazing, powerful, transformative, and precious good news that God loves them, and longs for them, and — through each one of us — welcomes them with joy.

In the Name of God,
AMEN

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

March 7, 2010 - Lent 3, Year C, RCL

Exodus 3:1-15
I Corinthians 10:1-13
Luke 13:1-9

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

One of the things that makes it difficult, sometimes, to connect the great, familiar, archetypal stories of Scripture — like the calling of Moses — to our own lives and experience is the way that God’s communication (in Scripture) is always so clear, so unambiguous, and so obvious. The angel of the Lord, we are told, appeared to Moses “in a flame of fire out of a bush.” And Moses, looking at this sight, sees — and notices! — that the bush “was blazing, yet it was not consumed.” Moses then decides that he has to turn aside and investigate this “great sight, and see why the bush is not burned up.” I can’t help feeling that, were I tending someone else’s livestock in a dry-climate wilderness, I might have a very different reaction to the sight of open flames; it probably wouldn’t occur to me to try to figure out whether or not the bush was actually being consumed. I think I’d be more focused on getting the goats (or sheep, or whatever) — and myself! — out of range of a possible brush fire. The story-teller in me (or perhaps the editor in me), wishes that some less alarming metaphor had been chosen: a cool blue light emanating from the shrubbery, or a drift of vividly colored and enticingly scented mist. But flames and fire have their elemental appeal, and are associated with the appearance of God, and the Holy Spirit, in many places in Scripture.

As the story unfolds, the quality of the communication between God and Moses is remarkably direct. God instructs Moses to remove his sandals, since he has come to stand on holy ground; and God goes on to identify God’s-self, to outline a specific problem — the mistreatment of the Israelites at the hands of their Egyptian taskmasters — and to propose a response. “So come,” God says to Moses. “I will send you to Pharaoh to bring my people, the Israelites, out of Egypt.” Moses raises obvious (and to me quite reasonable) objections: “Who am I that I should go to Pharaoh, and bring the Israelites out of Egypt?” But God overrides this by insisting that God will be with Moses. Still doubtful, Moses asks (essentially) why the Israelites should believe him, when he tells them God sent him, and asks God’s name. “I AM WHO I AM,” God responds; and with that, Moses has to be content.

The Hebrew phrase that, in the NRSV, is translated, “I AM WHO I AM” could also be expressed in other ways. Literally, it might be closer to say: “I-shall-be that I-shall-be;” or even, “I am that I am.” Later attempts to render this concept in Greek, resulted in amplifications like: “I am the BEING, the WAS, and the IS TO COME,” which describes God as beyond the influence of normal Time. What, in the story conversation, sounds almost like a refusal to give a name, becomes metaphorically (and theologically) significant, if we accept the mysterious name of God as a reflection of the essential mystery of the Divine nature. Perhaps, by expressing the Divine name as I AM, God is revealing the Divine self as the one who is always there, always present to us, whenever we make the effort to seek God.

For Moses, in today’s story, the interaction with God is essentially unambiguous; although it is also mysterious and powerful, daunting and overwhelming, the encounter can be summed up in very simple, direct terms. God provides a sign (the bush that burns without being consumed). Moses discerns significance in the sign and stops to see whether he can uncover its deeper implications. When Moses approaches, God provides an explanation — in words — of a problem, and charges Moses with addressing it in a specific way. Moses resists, but is reassured, and ultimately accepts the mission. Because the story is told in such unambiguous terms, we may find it hard to recognize similar patterns in our own lives and experience; but I think they are there. The trick, for us, may be to relinquish the expectation that the sign (or the Divine directions) will be outlined, in our own lives, in such broad, vivid strokes. In our lives, the significant events God provides may not take the form of (obvious) burning bushes, so much as (subtle — maybe even obscure) moments of intuition and vague glimpses of insight. Instead of the clear (verbal) explication of situation and response God gives to Moses, we may find ourselves struggling to perceive patterns and formulate contingencies without access to some external summation of facts and strategies.

It’s understandable — though possibly a deep, human failing — that we crave certainty and reasons. “Do you think,” Jesus asks, “that the Galileans Pilate had murdered were any worse sinners than any other Galileans? I tell you, No.” Jesus asks this question because he is challenging an assumption of his culture: that one could judge the quality of person’s relationship to God by the external circumstances of his or her life. The Temple taught and people believed that sinners were punished and righteous persons thrived. On some level, we resonate to that old, erroneous understanding; we want to believe that (in some way) we affect and shape our own reality. On some level, we find the idea that if we’re good, God will reward us — and its converse — compelling. Perhaps it is because that understanding leaves us with (at least the illusion of) control; we dislike the idea that suffering is random, that God’s love can neither be earned nor deserved, that our external circumstances are more random than controlled. We cherish the illusion that certainty can be attained; and perhaps, we insulate ourselves from the challenges God directs toward us by clinging to the assumption that if God really wanted us to do something, God would tell us about it — with flagrantly unambiguous signs, and clear and explicit directions in words.

“Who am I,” Moses says to God, “that I should go to Pharaoh, and bring the Israelites out of Egypt?” And we, knowing how the story ends, can’t quite avoid a conviction that Moses is being silly: he’s the one destined to help the Israelites shake off the yoke of their Egyptian oppressors. But, when we are faced with our own subtle and complicated efforts at discernment, we are quite likely to ask ourselves a similar question — and to feel it is entirely justified. After all, Moses was special — one of the archetypal characters out of Scripture — and we’re just ordinary. But I think that part of the point this story about Moses’ calling is making for us is that, throughout Scripture — and history for that matter — God uses ordinary, straightforward people to take on quite extraordinary tasks and challenges. It’s not Moses’ objection that we should notice and hold onto, but God’s reassurance: “I will be with you.”

God — the BEING, the WAS, and the IS TO COME — is always with us; God (I-shall-be that I-shall-be) empowers us with the Divine presence, no matter how ordinary, how inadequate we may feel. Every single one of us is made in God’s image: God made us to contain the same creative power, the same potential for compassion, the same capacity of imagination, that God has. This means that none of us is ordinary; every single one of us has the potential to take amazing, powerful, transformative action in our lives. What we need to do is to open our hearts, shed our crippling assumptions and damaging expectations. We need to stop waiting for miraculous interventions in our lives and history; we need to stop hoping for someone else — someone as “special” and archetypal as a Moses — to emerge from the camouflage of the human population to lead us into a new promised land. Miracles and archetypes aren’t easily recognized in real time — they need the gloss of hindsight, the accretions of popular history, in order to become recognizable. What we need to do — each and every one of us — is to cease exempting ourselves (because we think we are ordinary) from the work of discernment and start to look — really look! — for the subtle, insubstantial, tentative, ambiguous indications of God’s intentions for us. The signs are there, but we need to learn how to recognize them.

There are a couple of important insights expressed in Jesus’ parable of the unprofitable fig tree. First, no one is expecting flashy, impossible miracles: the landowner merely wants all the trees to bear fruit; they don’t have to bear multiple kinds of fruit, nor are they expected to produce gold, jewels, or wheat. But they are called to be fruitful. It’s not enough just to take up growing space; green leaves are a start, but not the fulfillment of the mission. We are called to live out our faith in such a way that others (and we) recognize the tangible results — the fruit, as it were — of our spiritual convictions.

Second, we are not expected to achieve fruitfulness without help. In the parable, when the gardener intercedes for the unproductive tree, he also promises to provide help. It’s like God’s assurances to Moses: “I will be with you.” You won’t have to bring the Israelites out of Egypt without help. Each of us may be called — urged, lured, prodded, or hinted — toward some unexpected and transformative mission; but we don’t embark upon it alone or unaided.

“I AM WHO I AM,” God tells Moses; and Jesus shows us another face of God in the gardener who intercedes, who buys us time and gives us help, so that we may grow into His image and bear rich and unique fruit. I AM calls each of us to be who we are, to express in our lives the unique facet of God’s nature which is within each of us. And Jesus — the Christ; God With Us — provides us with an example, and the help and nurturing we need in order to grow into the full potential with which God has so richly blessed us.

It is my prayer that we will open our minds and eyes, as we seek to discern God at work in our lives and our world; and that as we become more adept at recognizing the subtle signs and ambiguous visions with which God challenges us, we will also find the courage to step out in faith and to follow, however hesitantly, upon the path the Spirit lays before our feet.

In the Name of Christ, AMEN

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

Feb. 21, 2010 - Lent 1, Year C, RCL

Deuteronomy 26:1-11
Romans 10:8b-13
Luke 4:1-13

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

It is interesting to note that today, the first Sunday in Lent, all of the assigned lectionary readings have something to do with how we define and understand our relationship with God. The passage from Deuteronomy recounts instructions for a kind of first fruits offering, to be made by the children of Israel when they “have come into the land that the Lord your God is giving you as an inheritance to possess, and you possess it, and settle in it…” The children of Israel are instructed to take some of the “first of all the fruit of the ground, which you harvest” and to offer it to God in a particular way. The words they are instructed to say recount the story of the exile into Egypt and (in shortened form) the deliverance God provided. “When the Egyptians treated us harshly and afflicted us…we cried to the Lord, the God of our ancestors; the Lord heard our voice and our affliction, our toil, and our oppression. The Lord brought us out of Egypt with a mighty hand and an outstretched arm … and he brought us into this place and gave us this land…” The offering the passage describes sounds like something that would easily translate into a religious ceremony. It expresses, in the ritual of the offering made and the words said, a particular connection, a particular relationship to God. It acknowledges a covenant through which the people whom the Lord brought out of Egypt continue to assert their connection to God. God is their God, and they are God’s people. They remember and recount the past actions of God, make their offering to recommit themselves as God’s people, and then they celebrate the continuation of their relationship with God.

The section of Psalm 91 appointed for today echoes some of these themes of covenant and connection. “You who live in the shelter of the Most High…will say to the Lord, “My refuge and my fortress; my God, in whom I trust.” Because you have made the Lord your refuge…no evil shall befall you, no scourge come near your tent. For he will command his angels concerning you to guard you in all your ways. On their hands they will bear you up, so that you do not dash your foot against a stone. … Those who love me, I will deliver; I will protect those who know my name.”

The reading from Paul’s letter to the Christians at Rome encapsulates another understanding of relationship to the Divine. “For one believes with the heart and so is justified, and one confesses with the mouth and so is saved. The scripture says, ‘No one who believes in him will be put to shame.’ For there is no distinction between Jew and Greek; the same Lord is Lord of all and is generous to all who call on him. For, ‘Everyone who calls on the name of the Lord shall be saved.’ This is like the understanding expressed in Psalm 91; but Paul takes it a little further. The understanding of the children of Israel was that their relationship with God was an exclusive one: they were God’s people; other ethnic and cultural groups — lumped together in the term ‘Gentiles’ — who were not descendants of the “wandering Aramean,” were not connected to God in the same way. But Paul, by evangelizing beyond the Jewish community, demonstrated a wider, more inclusive theology; and in this passage, he quotes bits of scripture to support his theology. Paul’s theological emphasis is not on being saved so much as it is on who can be saved. “No one who believes…will be put to shame;” and “Everyone who calls upon the name of the Lord shall be saved.” “For there is no distinction between Jew and Greek; the same Lord is Lord of all and is generous to all who call on him.” The idea that there is no distinction between Jew and Greek, the understanding that God loves all human beings and longs for all of us to enter into relationship with the Divine is a theological revelation that helped to make Christianity a history-changing force in the ancient world; and that inclusive understanding of the love of God expressed in Christ Jesus continues to challenge, define, and shape us, even today. Our individual relationships with God are important; but so is our community’s openness to any and all who are seeking God’s presence. And through us — both as individuals and as a community of faith — we know that God is constantly reaching out to, and encouraging us to draw in, other beloved children whom God loves.

The story of Jesus’ temptation in the wilderness is one we always hear on the first Sunday in Lent. In Luke’s Gospel, Jesus’ Lenten experience occurs immediately after his Baptism (which we celebrated at the beginning of the Epiphany season), and we are told that after his baptism, “Jesus, full of the Holy Spirit, returned from the Jordan and was led by the Spirit in the wilderness, where for forty days he was tempted by the devil.” The story uses folktale elements: forty days to express (in story-teller’s code) a long time (remember the forty days and forty nights of the Flood?); the devil personified, so that the temptations may be cast as conversations; three (a good, symbolic number) temptations; exaggerations, vivid imagery, and so on. We are told that Jesus ate nothing for forty days, and at the end of them “he was famished. The devil said to him, ‘If you are the Son of God, command this stone to become a loaf of bread.’” In some ways, this is a deceptively innocuous temptation. What’s wrong with bread, after all? But of course, it’s not really about bread. What’s significant in this temptation is the attempt to get Jesus to collude in redefining who he is according to the devil’s (not God’s) definition. “If you are the Son of God…” then overthrow the created order that God established by turning this rock into food. In short, if you (as God’s Son) have access to the Divine power, then use it to satisfy your own needs. But instead, Jesus responds, “It is written, ‘One does not live by bread alone.’” Hearing this, we need to remember (as Luke’s audience would have done) the rest of the passage of Scripture Jesus cites: “One does not live by bread alone, but by every word that proceeds from the mouth of God.” The first temptation, then, is to stop listening to God and to allow oneself to be redirected — and redefined — by one’s own needs.

The second temptation is one we recognize all too clearly. In an instant of time, the devil shows Jesus all the kingdoms of the world, and offers him power in exchange for his integrity. “If you, then,” the devil says, “will worship me, it will all be yours.” This is the same temptation that whispers to us, whenever we swallow our qualms — in our jobs or our politics or our interpersonal relationships — and do or say whatever we think will improve our position, rather than what we know in our heart is right. It’s usually not as stark, for us, as world domination; but whenever we choose to do things in the name of security or comfort or looking out for ourselves, we have succumbed to the temptation Jesus was wise enough to reject. “It is written,” Jesus reminds the devil — and us, “‘Worship the Lord your God, and serve only him.’” Sometimes I think it is difficult for us to grapple with how radical and fundamental this answer is, both to Jesus’ earthly ministry and to our own attempts to follow his example. When Jesus rejects this temptation, he is rejecting not just temporal power, but all ambition to be or do anything other than that which God wills for him. For Jesus, there are no greater goals, no extenuating circumstances, no rationalization, no ends that justify means apart from God’s vision and direction for him. It’s also important for us to pay attention to the fact that for Jesus, worship was is no way separate from service; Jesus couldn’t serve God if he spent all his time in passive contemplation. Prayer is a part of it, and Jesus indeed takes time to pray, but most of his energy is spent in teaching, healing, listening, working — serving God, in short, in every moment of his daily life. In our own Lenten wilderness, we might do well to think about how, for us, the most meaningful form of discipleship comes from following Jesus. It isn’t enough just to come to church and quietly absorb our weekly dose of religion if we are not also putting God first in our daily life, and asking ourselves, with great regularity, whether our actions reflect our faith and embody Christ to the world.

At first, the third temptation seems almost ridiculous to us. The devil takes Jesus to a high place and says, “If you are the Son of God, throw yourself down from here, for it is written, ‘He will command his angels concerning you, to protect you,’ and ‘On their hands they will bear you up, so that you will not dash your foot against a stone.’” And we are left thinking that no one could really be fool enough to fall for that sort of reasoning. But in a way, this last temptation the devil offers Jesus is also familiar to us: it’s the temptation of believing that everything is about us, our lives, our individual concerns. In a sense, the devil is encouraging Jesus to think he is the center of everything, so important, in fact, that the very angels would be sent to rescue him if he did something foolish. We know better (or think we do) than to jump off a building, but we’re vulnerable to the idea that what we want is so important that God, the universe, and Fate will help us to get it. “It is said,” Jesus answers the devil, “‘Do not put the Lord your God to the test.’”

This Lent, I challenge all of us to spend some time wrestling with our own temptations. Let us each examine those things that get in the way of our faithful attempts to follow Christ, to serve God. If by ‘worship’ we mean participate in Sunday services, and regard God and Christ with a kind of holy but paralyzed awe, then it’s far easier to worship than to follow; but as disciples, it is following to which we are called. In his earthly ministry — shaped, no doubt, by his own time of wrestling and testing in the wilderness — Jesus proclaimed powerful, new ideas about the relationship between God and people. He taught that God was present and active in people’s daily lives, not fenced off from the common people by Temple ritual and priests. His teaching and healing efforts were not reserved for those people who, through their influence or wealth, could “advance” his message. He spoke out against the injustices of his time, and angered both the religious hierarchy and the political overlords. According to our modern culture’s standards, he was neither successful nor comfortable, but he walked so closely with God that we, two thousand years later, are still inspired to call him Lord and to strive to follow where he leads us.

This Lent, let us consider all the things that hinder us from following. Let us wrestle with our modern devils of complacency, comfort, apathy, and self-involvement; and through all of it, let us cling to the knowledge that we are called to worship and serve the Lord our God, and to follow Christ wherever he — with his boundless compassion and thirst for justice — leads us.

In the name of Christ, AMEN.

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

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

Feb. 7, 2010 - Resurrection: Can Something Be Said for the Impossible?

Isaiah 6
1 Cor 15
Luke 5

For I handed on to you as of first importance what I had received: that Christ died for our sins … and that he was buried, and that he was raised on the third day . … and that he appeared to Cephas, then to the twelve, then to more than five hundred (brothers) … then to James, then to all the apostles. Last of all … he appeared to me. And a few lines down, Paul adds: If there is no resurrection of the dead, then Christ has not been raised; and if Christ has not been raised, then our proclamation has been in vain and your faith has been in vain.

If Christ has not been raised, then our faith is in vain. So says Paul two thousand years ago —- and so says the church after him. Still, for some of us, perhaps many of us, with our twenty-first century, enlightenment, even, some say, post-modern minds, this is a hard saying, one we hardly know what to do with, though in the Easter eve, vigil service, when we come out of the candle-lit darkness, and the church lights flash on, we will all shout joyously, “Alleluia. Christ is risen, He is risen indeed. Alleluia!” … So let us talk, and think, you and I, about the resurrection. It’s time —- certainly for me.

And yet, I hesitate. In light of the world-wide problems of our time: the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan, the ever present threats of terrorist acts, the devastating earthquake in Haiti, the droughts in Africa, our high unemployment rates, our broken health care system, our rising climate temperatures, in light of all this, and more, is it escapist fantasizing to reflect on a two thousand year old resurrection text? Just a week ago I wrote to a friend, another retired professor with whom I had been in graduate school back in the sixties, telling him that I intend to preach on one of Paul’s resurrection texts and asking him to write me his thoughts on the subject. He responded at once, warning me off the subject of the afterlife, Christ’s or ours, saying that it’s enough to think of the resurrection as Christ’s spirit present in us when we go out to the other in love and justice, demonstrating in our actions concern for their well being. “Is that not life enough,” asked my friend. And he told a story of the Buddha, who when asked by a disciple, do we exist after our death or do we not exist after our death, (the Buddha) answered: “that question profits us not; it does not lead to edification.” To which my friend added: what it does lead to is endless speculation.

Well, our faith is a resurrection faith, so not to talk about it is simply being evasive. Still, my friend’s words are worth heeding: in our resurrection talk, we do need to avoid saying anything that leads to endless speculation and we should say only those things that are edifying to our life of faith. So let us stick to what is basic, and I want to start with the most basic statement of all, which is this: death is as much a part of our life as birth. And just as birth reminds us of all the possibilities of life, creative and tragic ones, joys and sorrows, loves and hates, things that we make and things that we destroy, so death reminds us that our life is only for a time, that there will come a time when life is emptied out of us, that just as we were not, so we will be not. Nothing lies ahead. The great atheistic, existentialist philosophers, the early Heidegger, Sartre, Camus, tell us that our consciousness of death sharpens each moment of our life, that the awareness that life is limited makes each moment more meaningful to us, and that our fear of the nothingness that lies ahead of us can be overcome by taking courage. To which our faith responds: courage to overcome nothingness comes from God, for God’s life, which is eternal life, is the power to overcome nothingness —- and our faith adds one more thing or perhaps it’s better to say our faith asks us one more question: can it be that our fear that nothingness lies ahead of us is unfounded? To which a resurrection faith answers: be assured, your fears are unfounded, what lies ahead of you is eternal life. I cannot say this without thinking of Bonhoeffer’s last words, reported by a friend who was with him at the time of his execution (in April 1945) by the Nazis. Bonhoeffer, many of you will know, was a German pastor and theologian imprisoned for his involvement in the plot to assassinate Hitler. As he left his prison cell and walked down the steps to his death, he said this: “This is the end —- for me the beginning of life.”

Even now as I say these words there is something in me, some feeling in me, that aches to say, “yes,” to these words, that aches to affirm the faith in these words. But there is another feeling in me, a simultaneous feeling, that stops my mouth, that won’t let it get past the first phrase of Bonhoeffer’s statement: “This is the end.” Perhaps some of you, too, have that double feeling. We ache to affirm; our mouth is stopped. What shall we do with that double feeling? How shall we understand it?

There is a novel, recently published, with the improbable name, “36 Arguments for the Existence of God.” The lead character in the novel, a philosopher named Seltzer, writes a book listing thirty-six arguments for God’s existence —- and refuting each one of them. One of those arguments is the argument from insignificance. It goes like this. In a million years or two million or for all we know in two thousand years, nothing that happens now will matter. It is intolerable, existentially impossible, to think that everything that matters will come to not matter, as if everything were nothing, as if everything never happened. Only the existence of an eternal God can assure eternal significance to temporal events. Therefore, God must exist. The corollary to this argument pertains to our concerns regarding eternal life. It is intolerable, existentially impossible, to think that in a million or a thousand or for all we know in a hundred years our lives and the lives of those we love, which mean so much to us, will not mean anything at all; in fact, it will be as if none of our lives ever were. Only eternal life for every existent being can resolve this existentially intolerable situation. In the novel, the philosopher, Seltzer, dismisses this type of argument for God and, by extension, for eternal life, as falling victim to “the fallacy of wishful thinking” —- which is to say that the only basis for either argument lies in our wishes, our desires, our dreams, and that wishes and desires and dreams do not create reality.

I think we all understand Seltzer’s dismissal of an argument based on wishes and desires. For Seltzer, like all of us, feel the constraints of modern science upon our thinking. Science for us not only informs us about the nature of reality, it tends to set the conditions for what is possible and what is impossible in reality. So here we are, people of faith, caught in the cross hairs of our double feelings, having on the one hand the constraints of science regarding what is possible, and on the other hand we have our wishes, our desires, our dreams … for what appears impossible. And now we have come upon not the end, as some might think, and others might fear, but upon the crucial question, which is this: Is there anything that can be said for the impossible, for these wishes and desires of ours for something to be possible which appears to us to be beyond possibility? Specifically, given the Pauline text that is before us this morning, is there anything that can be said for the resurrection of Christ and our resurrection, or rather, to put it a little more positively, what can be said about the resurrection, since as soon as we think about it, it seems beyond possibility.

Bear with me now for I need to introduce a distinction that’s a little academic but will be useful to us: let us, from here on, use the word “impossible” to refer to what cannot be, and use the phrase “beyond possibility” to refer to what lies beyond the horizon of our knowledge, and will always lie beyond the horizon of our knowledge, to that place where knowledge fails us, and where all we have to go on is our faith. So our question is this: can we think of our resurrection faith as referring not to the impossible but to what lies beyond possibility, to what lies out there, in the future, unknown, yet coming to us, a wish beyond our wishes, a desire beyond our desires. We can if we are willing to let go of what is impossible and to allow what is beyond possibility to break through the horizon of our knowledge. In doing so, in letting go of the impossible, we will be letting go of some old dogmas, old notions, old beliefs of the resurrection, not discounting them —- for they are affirmations of our faith in the risen Christ —- but reaching beyond them, so that the resurrection seems to us as something we believe in but can see only darkly, sense only dimly, and certainly cannot conceptualize. If we do this we can avoid the endless, and futile, speculations that my friend from my graduate school days so fears, and perhaps, also, say something edifying to our life in faith.

But is it possible to give up some of our old notions, for example, of the risen Christ eating fish with the disciples or inviting Thomas to touch his wounded hands, without giving up something that is essential to our resurrection faith? It is possible if —- and this is a very big “if” —- we let Paul be our guide here or, rather, if we let Paul’s epistles be the decisive authority on the resurrection appearances. This may strike us as a little odd until we remember that Paul’s letters are the earliest of church documents, written twenty years or so after the death of Christ, while the gospels were written anywhere from thirty-five to sixty years after Christ’s death. Also, of all the New Testament writers, Paul is the only one to have experienced the risen Christ. So let us look at Paul’s resurrection language. In this morning’s lectionary text, he confines himself to the word, appearance. Christ appeared first to Peter, then appeared to the twelve, then appeared to more than five hundred brothers and sisters, and “last of all he appeared to (Paul).” Further down in the same chapter of the epistle, Paul writes that “flesh and blood cannot inherit the kingdom” and then he uses the phrase “spiritual body” to describe the nature of what is raised. In the letter to the Galatians, where Paul speaks of his experience of the risen Christ, an experience Luke famously describes decades later in elaborate and conflicting detail in (two accounts in) the Book of Acts, Paul in his own account confines himself to saying that God “was pleased to reveal his Son to me.” — [Only one more time does Paul refer to his experience, and that is in 1 Cor 9 where he writes, “ Have I not seen Christ the Lord?”]— All this is restrained, modest language. It is as if Paul is trying to avoid the language of impossibility, such as flesh and blood inheriting the kingdom, and confining himself to language which is redemptive but is vague and can only be dimly understood. For example, do any of us have a clear idea of what a spiritual body is? Is this not a desire, so unknown to us, so open ended, that it is a desire beyond our desires?

Now I know only too well that nothing that one person says or preaches about faith is ever sufficient to convince another person. The decision for faith is always one’s own decision made in solitude. Still before I go I would like to say one more thing about that decision which may prove helpful. Many of us sometimes say to ourselves, “Oh, if only I could experience the risen Christ as Paul and the disciples did, or if I could see and hear the Lord as Isaiah describes in this morning’s Old Testament reading or if I could speak with God as did Jeremiah and Elijah and Moses, then all my doubts would fly away and my faith would be strong and certain.” When we think this way, we are forgetting one thing. We are forgetting that Paul and Isaiah and Jeremiah and Elijah and even Moses have to ask themselves, “How do I know that the one who speaks to me and the one I see is really the Lord God and not some other reality or phantasm?” How do they, how does anybody, go about answering that question? Let me tell you a story and then I’ll be through.

This is the story of a young man, a graduate student in English literature, who got confused about who he was and things he had done, things that he greatly regretted, things that so troubled him that late at night when he was too tired to study any more, instead of going to bed, he would walk the streets, filled with self recriminations. On one of these late night walks, he came upon a large church with a brightly lit cross on its roof and its double doors bathed in light. The young man ran up the stone stairs of the church, convinced the doors would open and that he would find consolation sitting in the pews. With his two hands he grabbed the handles of both doors, but they would not move. The young man walked slowly away and as he walked he heard footsteps behind him, he began to walk faster, and the footsteps behind him speeded up, he began to run and then the footsteps were upon him. He looked up, filled with fear … and saw the head of Christ, who spoke to him and said, “You are forgiven,” and then disappeared though his presence remained felt. The young man, previously a very rational unbeliever, felt healing flow through him and he became a believer in Christ’s redemptive power, and thought that the doubts of faith would never trouble him. And that was true for a while. Of course, it was not long before he acknowledged to himself that there was a perfectly reasonable psychological explanation of his experience, and so he had to decide, in solitude, for no one else could decide for him, whether his vision was that of a phantasm stirred up by the inner dynamics of his psyche or whether it was, indeed, the risen Christ. The experience could not make the decision for him. He had to decide whether to interpret the experience in faith or whether to interpret it in unfaith.

Sisters and brothers in Christ, is that not how it is for all of us, whether we have personally experienced the living Christ or not. Religious experiences, even the most awesome of them, whether ours or someone else’s, do not in themselves decide upon their authenticity. We have to decide whether to interpret them in faith or in unfaith, just as we have to decide whether those desires of ours which reach beyond possibility arise out of a fear of ultimate nothingness or out of our openness to a reality that we can only sense dimly, uncertainly. How we answer that question will determine whether, like Bonhoeffer, we will be able to say, “This is the end, for me the beginning of life.” Or perhaps it will be enough, as Paul suggests, if, on this matter, all we can do in our prayers is “groan inwardly as we wait.” Yes, certainly, that will be enough.

Praise God for this grace.
Praise Christ.
Amen.

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