April 13, 2010
St Alban’s Episcopal Church
John 20:19-31
The Rev Deborah Magdalene, OSH
Jesus suddenly appears to his disciples in a room – without opening a locked door. He has fatal wounds, yet is vitally alive and peaceful. He shares his peace with them, sends them out into the world, and then blows a holy breath of heaven on them all, baptizing them into a new creation.
He breathes on them and says, ‘Receive the Holy Spirit,’ and God’s breath of life and truth abides in them, as he had promised them it would. Earlier in the Gospel of John, Jesus said, “If anyone is thirsty let him come to me and drink. Whoever believes in me, as the Scripture has said, streams of living water will flow from within him.” Then John tells us that “by this he meant the Spirit, which believers in him were to receive; for as yet there was no Spirit, for Jesus was not yet glorified.”
What happens in this locked room, when the risen Christ appears to his confused and frightened friends is the beginning of a new creation. It is God’s own breath that Christ blows over his friends. It is the stream of living water, the fountain of all life. Jesus is now glorified. But not everyone who sees him understands what they have seen.
In Genesis we hear that when God formed the first human from the dust of the earth, God’s breath brought the human to life. Ezekiel told the dry bones, “Dry bones, hear the word of Yahweh, I am going to make breath enter you and you will live!” And God tells Ezekiel to say to the breath itself, “Come from the four winds, breath; breathe on these dead, so that they come to life!”
The disciples gathered in the locked room are not at all clear what this breath of life is. They are frightened. They are isolated. They are full of doubt. Jesus suddenly appears to them and says, “Peace be with you.” And after he shows them his wounded hands and pierced side they glow with joy. It is really Jesus. The joy of Easter morning is breathtaking and mysterious and full of hope. But that is not the full story. In fact, in the Gospel of John, if it weren’t for Thomas expressing his doubts in such a bold way, we wouldn’t hear the truth of the resurrection. We have much to thank Thomas for.
When I was 17 the faith of my childhood died. I’m sure this happened over a period of time, but as I remember it, I suddenly realized during the recitation of the Creed that I didn’t believe anymore.
I stood outside of myself for a moment and watched my body recite the Creed like a wind-up doll. I looked around me and everyone looked like they possessed something that I suddenly didn’t have any more. The wave of doubt pounding over me didn’t appear to be touching them.
They went on with the liturgy like everything was normal. But inside of me everything felt changed and unfamiliar. I was now outside the group. This used to be my group. I prayed that the feeling would go away, and yet I understood at a gut level that something mature was waking up inside of me.
The next week it happened again. This time I stopped saying the Creed. And nothing happened to me. I didn’t feel guilty. I felt honest and adult. But I felt frightened and completely without familiar landmarks. I felt very alone. The reality of doubt filled me head to toe. And it never occurred to me to share my angst with anyone.
I didn’t know then what I know now. I didn’t know that doubt is the beginning of mature faith. I didn’t know that there were others who had experienced exactly what was happening to me. In my teenage hubris I believed I had to walk this path alone because I felt so alone. So I left the church.
It is painful to sit, week after week, in the midst of people who believe in something that you don’t understand. Many people experience the isolation of doubt that Thomas did, but very few are brave enough to ask the hard questions.
Lack of understanding and the fear it instills causes many of Jesus’ own disciples to abandon him. His friends anxiously whisper about him. What is it this man teaches? What do the healings mean? No one dares put words to what they instinctively know is true for fear of what people will think. But, what is it exactly that they are afraid of?
John’s Gospel tells us that the Jewish authorities have the power to exclude the faithful from their place of worship for saying out loud what they believe to be true – because what they believe confronts and questions the Jewish faith of their fathers and mothers.
At the time John’s Gospel is being written the people who boldly pray in the name of Jesus – who are courageous enough to say who they believe Jesus is – are thrown out of the synagogue and shunned.
In the year 70, after the destruction of the temple in Jerusalem, the Jewish authorities make an historic decision. They excommunicate all the Christians from the synagogues, forcing them to choose between Judaism or following ‘the way’ of their Jewish leader Jesus.
When John writes that the disciples locked the doors because “they were afraid of the Jews” he is naming the fear that has consumed the community since Jesus was condemned to die. The band of early Christians are being shunned, excommunicated and put to death because what they believe threatens the faith of their own religious family. It is a family feud over how to interpret the truth.
What horrifies the Jewish leaders is what the confused and frightened disciples finally started saying about Jesus. And it is Thomas who said it first.
The doors are locked for fear of the Jews and Jesus suddenly appears among them. He says twice, ‘Peace be with you’, and he shows them his wounds. The disciples don’t understand what they have seen. They tell Thomas that they have seen the Lord. They have yet to comprehend what seeing him means.
Thomas is no fool. He thinks they have seen an apparition – a ghost. He doubts because he is human and is trying to be calm and logical. They must all be crazy with grief. He wants to see for himself and actually touch his teacher before he will allow himself to believe he is alive.
Eight days later, or one week from Easter morning, which is today, Jesus appears in the locked room again. This time Thomas is there. Jesus again says, ‘Peace be with you.’ Then, in an intimate moment, he looks directly at Thomas and says, "Put your finger here and see my hands.
Reach out your hand and put it in my side. Do not doubt but believe."
Thomas answers him with the supreme Christological pronouncement of John’s Gospel, "My Lord and my God!" It is the profound truth of the resurrection. All that Jesus said and did in his lifetime were signs pointing to the nature of his being. Jesus’ resurrection from the dead is the final sign.
It is not a resuscitated Jesus who is alive again, but an entirely new form of life. Because of Thomas’ insistence that he see more evidence before he can believe, Jesus comes to him and gives him more than he asked for. Contrary to popular understanding, Thomas never actually touches Jesus. He sees, and believes, and proclaims him to be God.
Thomas’ words “My Lord and my God” are spoken on behalf of the entire Christian community. They are the last words spoken by a disciple in the Fourth Gospel and are meant to have a covenantal aspect. It is these words which invite us to look again at what Jesus says in the midst of his friends, behind doors shut tight against their powerful fears.
Peace be with you. He has said this before. At the Last Supper, when he was predicting his death, he said pointedly,
“Peace I leave with you; my peace I give to you.....
"I will not leave you orphaned; I am coming to you.
In a little while the world will no longer see me, but you will see me;
Because I live, you also will live.
On that day you will know that I am in my Father, and you in me, and I in you”. (John 14:18-20)
This is what Thomas realizes as he gazes on the wounded risen Christ before his eyes. It’s not the wounds, but the memory of Jesus’ promise that penetrates his fear. It is an “Aha!” moment that allows everything to fall into place.
All the mystery of Jesus’ strange yet familiar post-resurrection presence coincides with the realization of who he really is. He is the man they remember, yet he is changed. This is what he promised them would happen. But who, in their right mind could believe such a thing was possible?
What finally moves us all from fear to faith is a profound shifting of the ground we walk on. We remember with clarity that everything was leading up to this moment. We see with new eyes that the moments in our lives are all connected. We are just a tiny piece of God’s miraculous creation.
This is the day, in the darkness of a room filled with fear when the disciples finally understand that Jesus is in the Father, and they are in Jesus, and he is in them.
When he breathes on them he blows new life into them, just as God breathed the breath of life into the first human ‘Adam’, and blew a living spirit into Ezekiel’s dry bones. This Holy Breath of God is now what sustains them, advocates for them, and draws them together in community.
The disciples are to go out from the dark, closed room, into the light of day and fear no more. The Holy Spirit within them is now breathing the truth of Jesus into their DNA, and they will never be the same again.
When we share the peace with each other it is this moment that we remember. May the Peace of the risen Christ be always with you. Amen.
Monday, April 12, 2010
Maundy Thursday notes
April 1, 2010
Maundy is short for the Latin word Maundatum (commandment) Love one another How?
Tonight is chock full of sacramental gifts.
The sacraments are Outward and visible signs of inward and spiritual grace, given by Christ as sure and certain means by which we receive that grace. (BCP)
• Meal – Agape (love) feast.
o Our meal together is a sign of the meal the disciples ate with Jesus – the Last Supper.
• Water – wash/bathe the feet –
o In remembrance of Jesus bathing the disciple’s feet
o reminds us of our own baptism and points us toward the baptisms awaiting us at the Easter Vigil.
o We are washed clean in the water of Christ so that we can follow the path of Jesus with pure souls
• Bread – used by Jesus first to signify who will betray him –
o and then to become the Body of Christ, the Bread of Heaven
o We receive the bread of Christ tonight for the last time before the altar is stripped and it is taken away from us
• Wine –
o Bread most likely dipped in a mixture of wine and olive oil before it is given to Judas
o both the bread and the wine are first used to point out betrayal before they become the Body and Blood of Christ
In Matthew’s gospel Jesus says: “So when you are offering your gift at the altar, if you remember that your brother or sister has something against you, 24 leave your gift there before the altar and go; first be reconciled to your brother or sister, and then come and offer your gift.”(5:23-24)
Why are the gifts of the Eucharist so wrapped up in betrayal?
It is probable that Tiger Woods understands this better than anyone.
After the entire world learned of his betrayal of his wife, Elin, Tiger Woods was admitted to a strenuous rehabilitation center ironically called “Gentle Path”
12 Step Program that helps you face the ugly face of your own addiction. In this case – addiction to sex.
First admit powerlessness over your own ability to manage your life, then make a decision to allow God to do the managing from here on out.
Before you can come to the altar and receive sacramental grace, Jesus asks us first to be reconciled to those whom we’ve hurt the most.
Full Disclosure: Tiger had to face his wife and fully disclose the nature of his addiction.
Not such a “gentle” path
The hardest step is letting go of the outcome of your full disclosure. Confession with a priest is one thing, but confession to a partner is something else altogether.
Last Sunday we saws how quickly the crowd could turn against Jesus. We went from Palm fronds, hosannas and carpeted runways to Pilate’s headquarters where we shouted, “crucify him!”
As Jesus washes the feet of his closest followers he knows who will betray him. We will.
The intimacy of the foot washing ceremony is meant to jar us.
If we imagine Jesus at our feet looking up into our eyes as he washes us clean we get a hint of the intimacy involved in God’s love for us. It is trusting in that love that will bring us through the grief of Good Friday. We can’t predict how the Resurrection makes all things new, but we can have faith that it will. It is through Love.
Maundy is short for the Latin word Maundatum (commandment) Love one another How?
Tonight is chock full of sacramental gifts.
The sacraments are Outward and visible signs of inward and spiritual grace, given by Christ as sure and certain means by which we receive that grace. (BCP)
• Meal – Agape (love) feast.
o Our meal together is a sign of the meal the disciples ate with Jesus – the Last Supper.
• Water – wash/bathe the feet –
o In remembrance of Jesus bathing the disciple’s feet
o reminds us of our own baptism and points us toward the baptisms awaiting us at the Easter Vigil.
o We are washed clean in the water of Christ so that we can follow the path of Jesus with pure souls
• Bread – used by Jesus first to signify who will betray him –
o and then to become the Body of Christ, the Bread of Heaven
o We receive the bread of Christ tonight for the last time before the altar is stripped and it is taken away from us
• Wine –
o Bread most likely dipped in a mixture of wine and olive oil before it is given to Judas
o both the bread and the wine are first used to point out betrayal before they become the Body and Blood of Christ
In Matthew’s gospel Jesus says: “So when you are offering your gift at the altar, if you remember that your brother or sister has something against you, 24 leave your gift there before the altar and go; first be reconciled to your brother or sister, and then come and offer your gift.”(5:23-24)
Why are the gifts of the Eucharist so wrapped up in betrayal?
It is probable that Tiger Woods understands this better than anyone.
After the entire world learned of his betrayal of his wife, Elin, Tiger Woods was admitted to a strenuous rehabilitation center ironically called “Gentle Path”
12 Step Program that helps you face the ugly face of your own addiction. In this case – addiction to sex.
First admit powerlessness over your own ability to manage your life, then make a decision to allow God to do the managing from here on out.
Before you can come to the altar and receive sacramental grace, Jesus asks us first to be reconciled to those whom we’ve hurt the most.
Full Disclosure: Tiger had to face his wife and fully disclose the nature of his addiction.
Not such a “gentle” path
The hardest step is letting go of the outcome of your full disclosure. Confession with a priest is one thing, but confession to a partner is something else altogether.
Last Sunday we saws how quickly the crowd could turn against Jesus. We went from Palm fronds, hosannas and carpeted runways to Pilate’s headquarters where we shouted, “crucify him!”
As Jesus washes the feet of his closest followers he knows who will betray him. We will.
The intimacy of the foot washing ceremony is meant to jar us.
If we imagine Jesus at our feet looking up into our eyes as he washes us clean we get a hint of the intimacy involved in God’s love for us. It is trusting in that love that will bring us through the grief of Good Friday. We can’t predict how the Resurrection makes all things new, but we can have faith that it will. It is through Love.
Saturday, April 3, 2010
The Widow's Mite
The 23rd Sunday after Pentecost
The Rev. Deborah Magdalene, OSH
Ruth 3:1-5, 4:13-17 and Mark 12:38-44
Jesus said, “Beware of the scribes – they devour widow’s houses and say long prayers just for the sake of appearance!” Then, he calls his disciples to come near and watch one widow in particular. We don’t know her circumstances. She could be young, old, infirm, or healthy. We can tell by her offering that she is destitute. Widows in First Century Jerusalem were at the bottom of the social strata pile – along with the diseased and crippled, foreigners and most women. The self- important scribes that Jesus refers to would scoff at the amount of money this poor widow placed in the temple’s treasury.
But we are familiar with her offering as the famous “Widow’s mite” – the tiny donation that represents everything this woman has. The same “everything” that we are asked to give to the God of Love and Justice. Jesus makes a point of calling the disciples to observe the widow as a teaching moment. What is it, exactly, that he wants them to understand? They know very well about giving everything they have. They have already given up their jobs, homes, and family in order to follow Jesus.
Those of us in religious orders know what it feels like to give up everything and follow a call. It’s a pretty heady feeling. I got quite a bit of attention when I told my fellow teachers that I was quitting my job as a Speech Therapist, selling my home, and moving to a convent in New York. I felt a bit special, unique and important for a few, brief months. I watched my motley collection of furniture go out the door to friends, family, and strangers, and I sent boxes and boxes of trash and recycling to their various resting places. I was starting over again and allowed a chance at a new life. I was headed forward toward a new adventure that beckoned me toward the unknown, but much fantasized convent.
As soon as I arrived at the convent the novelty of my situation evaporated. All of the women I was now living with had given everything up years ago and they were less than impressed with my sacrifices. In fact, as they watched my many “essentials” move in, they remembered the days when they brought all that they owned in one small suitcase. I had a little travel trailer stuffed to the gills with books, clothes, bedding, and favorite pictures, chairs, and bookshelves.
I soon learned that this business of giving everything up for Jesus was meant to be more of a day-to-day offering of self than an audible clink in the collection plate. The kind of offering that Jesus attempts to teach his thick-skinned disciples and the rest of us who are less than spiritually brilliant, is the moment-by-moment offering of our steadfast love and undying commitment to God.
The Hebrew word for this lovingly tenacious spirit is hesed – the steadfast love of God given freely to us as an act of grace. And, nowhere in the Bible is hesed better illustrated than in the Book of Ruth.
I’m going to fill in what is missing from our reading this morning so that the impact of Ruth’s unusual actions on the threshing floor can affect us more powerfully.
The story begins in Bethlehem, literally, the House of Bread in Hebrew. Naomi, her husband, and two sons leave Bethlehem because of a severe famine in the land. Ironically, there is no bread in the House of Bread.
They travel very far away to the land of Moab – one of Israel’s historic enemies on the far side of the Jordan River. They go to a land held in contempt, yet find abundance there. They prosper on all counts. The sons marry Moabite women and the family settles in to their new home for the next ten years.
Then disaster hits in ways that remind us of Job. First Naomi’s husband dies, and then both of her sons. Suddenly there are three widows: Naomi, the Israelite, and two young Moabite women, Ruth and Orpah.
Hebrew customs leave widows with very few viable options. The Torah demands that the oldest brother of the deceased will marry his widow so that the father’s line can be continued. Naomi knows that if she has any chance of survival it will be with her own people back in Bethlehem. In addition to family she has heard that the famine is over. She sets her face to return to the House of Bread and her daughters-in-law follow in her footsteps.
But Naomi stops, turns back to them, and tells them that they must not follow her. They have no male relatives in Bethlehem and Naomi knows that no self-respecting Israelite would marry a Moabite woman. “Go back to your mother’s home,” she tells them, “and may God grant that there you will find a new husband.”
But the young women surprisingly resist. They show their mother-in-law Naomi an abundance of hesed – a steadfast loving-kindness that refuses to part from her. Naomi gets more explicit with them. “What hope do you have of getting a husband from me? I am old. I have no more sons in my womb and I have no hope of ever having another husband. I am without hope, and am so bitter that my name is no longer Naomi, which means Pleasant, but Mara, which means Bitter. Your only hope, my daughters is to return to your own mother and find a husband among your people.”
Orpah listens to Naomi’s pleas and returns, tearfully, to her home in Moab. Ruth however, clings tenaciously and lovingly to Naomi, in a direct imitation of the quality of God’s love for us.
“Do not press me to leave you,” Ruth says, “Where you go I will go; where you lodge I will lodge; your people shall be my people, and your God, my God.” Here is the hesed of a new convert to Judaism, demonstrating that even from the land of the enemy can emerge the most faithful of God’s people.
When Ruth and Naomi return to Bethlehem it is harvest time. The people of Bethlehem are gathering the abundance of grain that will go into their famous bread. It is a new day and famine no longer rules the land. One of the most prominent land-owners is a man named Boaz, a relative of Naomi’s deceased husband. With Naomi’s blessings, Ruth makes her way to Boaz’ fields and begins to gather up the scraps behind the harvesters, as is the custom of the poor.
Boaz notices this beautiful and strangely exotic new woman among the gleaners. He asks about her and is unperturbed by her troublesome ancestry. He watches as Ruth works tirelessly, without taking any breaks. Boaz approaches her and tells her that he has heard of what she did for Naomi. He blesses her for showing such tenacious love for Naomi that she left her own people to come to a land she did not know and worship the God of Israel.
He promises to protect Ruth and asks her to eat with him and his men. Then he prays for her, “May the Lord reward you for your deeds, and may you have a full reward from the Lord, the God of Israel, under whose wings you have come for refuge!”
When Naomi finds out that Ruth has found favor with Boaz, she hatches the plan for Ruth to sneak down to the threshing floor at night and lay at the feet of Boaz. She instructs Ruth that when Boaz wakes and discovers her there he will tell her what to do. Ruth obediently follows Naomi’s plan to the letter.
We don’t know the symbolism of Ruth uncovering Boaz’ feet, but the implication is that the intimacy of her actions, coupled with the fact that it was the middle of the night, forced Boaz to take some action.
When Boaz takes Ruth as his wife he takes possession of Ruth’s deceased husband’s name, continuing the important line of inheritance. His decision, essentially, restores the fortunes of Naomi, who lost her sons and had no grandchildren to carry on the line. By marrying Ruth, Boaz brings new hope to Naomi’s bitterness.
The child that Ruth bears is given to Naomi to nurse. What was once barren in her is now fertile, because of Ruth’s self-giving hesed – her faithful and tenacious love. And by giving Naomi her first-born child, Ruth is giving her mother-in-law everything she has. Just as the widow at the temple gave her two copper coins.
The story of Ruth and Naomi is continued in the line of descendants that come from this special child. They name him Obed, and he becomes the father of David. It is from David’s line that Jesus comes. It is because of these family ties that Joseph and Mary must return to Bethlehem for the census. Jesus is born in the same House of Bread where his female ancestors found the abundance of new life.
It is this abundance that Jesus wants the disciples to learn from the widow at the temple. What the widow offers to God is her undying, faithful, and abiding love for her creator. It is this love that is represented in the two small coins. When there are no more coins to give, she will continue to give her love and willingness to do whatever God asks of her.
What we offer to God is much larger than a yearly pledge or a frantic fishing in our wallets for some loose change to put in the plate. What God asks of us is a never-ending supply of our own hesed – to mirror back to God the same tenaciously faithful love he has shown to us through Jesus Christ.
If you watch today while the offerings go up to the altar you will see how we reenact our faithful love for God. The wine and the bread are at the back of the church for a reason. They come from us, and are given back to God in recognition that all that we have is ours only because God gave it to us in the first place.
Our offerings of money and food for the food bank are symbolic gestures of what we give to God from our inner being. Yes, we need the money to run this church and to uphold our responsibilities as a member of this diocese. But, the money is really not the point.
The meaning comes from what that money means to us. We prosper in this life when we recognize that our lives are completely dependent upon God. The offering we give here is a wake-up call. We come together as a community to watch our offerings of tangible gifts travel up to the altar where they are transformed into the intangible hesed- filled gift of God to us through the broken body of Christ.
We lift the offerings up to God in recognition of all that he gives us, and what little we are able to give back. Then we move into the Great Thanksgiving where we sing God’s praise before we recount in the prayer what Jesus did for us.
We dine on nothing less than Christ himself, giving us his entire being. It is harvest time, and as Christians, we gather together to offer God our abundance. We give of ourselves in order to see a communal reminder of what we’re asked to give God every moment of every day – our undying and tenaciously faithful love of Christ and each other. May we walk in that love always.
The Rev. Deborah Magdalene, OSH
Ruth 3:1-5, 4:13-17 and Mark 12:38-44
Jesus said, “Beware of the scribes – they devour widow’s houses and say long prayers just for the sake of appearance!” Then, he calls his disciples to come near and watch one widow in particular. We don’t know her circumstances. She could be young, old, infirm, or healthy. We can tell by her offering that she is destitute. Widows in First Century Jerusalem were at the bottom of the social strata pile – along with the diseased and crippled, foreigners and most women. The self- important scribes that Jesus refers to would scoff at the amount of money this poor widow placed in the temple’s treasury.
But we are familiar with her offering as the famous “Widow’s mite” – the tiny donation that represents everything this woman has. The same “everything” that we are asked to give to the God of Love and Justice. Jesus makes a point of calling the disciples to observe the widow as a teaching moment. What is it, exactly, that he wants them to understand? They know very well about giving everything they have. They have already given up their jobs, homes, and family in order to follow Jesus.
Those of us in religious orders know what it feels like to give up everything and follow a call. It’s a pretty heady feeling. I got quite a bit of attention when I told my fellow teachers that I was quitting my job as a Speech Therapist, selling my home, and moving to a convent in New York. I felt a bit special, unique and important for a few, brief months. I watched my motley collection of furniture go out the door to friends, family, and strangers, and I sent boxes and boxes of trash and recycling to their various resting places. I was starting over again and allowed a chance at a new life. I was headed forward toward a new adventure that beckoned me toward the unknown, but much fantasized convent.
As soon as I arrived at the convent the novelty of my situation evaporated. All of the women I was now living with had given everything up years ago and they were less than impressed with my sacrifices. In fact, as they watched my many “essentials” move in, they remembered the days when they brought all that they owned in one small suitcase. I had a little travel trailer stuffed to the gills with books, clothes, bedding, and favorite pictures, chairs, and bookshelves.
I soon learned that this business of giving everything up for Jesus was meant to be more of a day-to-day offering of self than an audible clink in the collection plate. The kind of offering that Jesus attempts to teach his thick-skinned disciples and the rest of us who are less than spiritually brilliant, is the moment-by-moment offering of our steadfast love and undying commitment to God.
The Hebrew word for this lovingly tenacious spirit is hesed – the steadfast love of God given freely to us as an act of grace. And, nowhere in the Bible is hesed better illustrated than in the Book of Ruth.
I’m going to fill in what is missing from our reading this morning so that the impact of Ruth’s unusual actions on the threshing floor can affect us more powerfully.
The story begins in Bethlehem, literally, the House of Bread in Hebrew. Naomi, her husband, and two sons leave Bethlehem because of a severe famine in the land. Ironically, there is no bread in the House of Bread.
They travel very far away to the land of Moab – one of Israel’s historic enemies on the far side of the Jordan River. They go to a land held in contempt, yet find abundance there. They prosper on all counts. The sons marry Moabite women and the family settles in to their new home for the next ten years.
Then disaster hits in ways that remind us of Job. First Naomi’s husband dies, and then both of her sons. Suddenly there are three widows: Naomi, the Israelite, and two young Moabite women, Ruth and Orpah.
Hebrew customs leave widows with very few viable options. The Torah demands that the oldest brother of the deceased will marry his widow so that the father’s line can be continued. Naomi knows that if she has any chance of survival it will be with her own people back in Bethlehem. In addition to family she has heard that the famine is over. She sets her face to return to the House of Bread and her daughters-in-law follow in her footsteps.
But Naomi stops, turns back to them, and tells them that they must not follow her. They have no male relatives in Bethlehem and Naomi knows that no self-respecting Israelite would marry a Moabite woman. “Go back to your mother’s home,” she tells them, “and may God grant that there you will find a new husband.”
But the young women surprisingly resist. They show their mother-in-law Naomi an abundance of hesed – a steadfast loving-kindness that refuses to part from her. Naomi gets more explicit with them. “What hope do you have of getting a husband from me? I am old. I have no more sons in my womb and I have no hope of ever having another husband. I am without hope, and am so bitter that my name is no longer Naomi, which means Pleasant, but Mara, which means Bitter. Your only hope, my daughters is to return to your own mother and find a husband among your people.”
Orpah listens to Naomi’s pleas and returns, tearfully, to her home in Moab. Ruth however, clings tenaciously and lovingly to Naomi, in a direct imitation of the quality of God’s love for us.
“Do not press me to leave you,” Ruth says, “Where you go I will go; where you lodge I will lodge; your people shall be my people, and your God, my God.” Here is the hesed of a new convert to Judaism, demonstrating that even from the land of the enemy can emerge the most faithful of God’s people.
When Ruth and Naomi return to Bethlehem it is harvest time. The people of Bethlehem are gathering the abundance of grain that will go into their famous bread. It is a new day and famine no longer rules the land. One of the most prominent land-owners is a man named Boaz, a relative of Naomi’s deceased husband. With Naomi’s blessings, Ruth makes her way to Boaz’ fields and begins to gather up the scraps behind the harvesters, as is the custom of the poor.
Boaz notices this beautiful and strangely exotic new woman among the gleaners. He asks about her and is unperturbed by her troublesome ancestry. He watches as Ruth works tirelessly, without taking any breaks. Boaz approaches her and tells her that he has heard of what she did for Naomi. He blesses her for showing such tenacious love for Naomi that she left her own people to come to a land she did not know and worship the God of Israel.
He promises to protect Ruth and asks her to eat with him and his men. Then he prays for her, “May the Lord reward you for your deeds, and may you have a full reward from the Lord, the God of Israel, under whose wings you have come for refuge!”
When Naomi finds out that Ruth has found favor with Boaz, she hatches the plan for Ruth to sneak down to the threshing floor at night and lay at the feet of Boaz. She instructs Ruth that when Boaz wakes and discovers her there he will tell her what to do. Ruth obediently follows Naomi’s plan to the letter.
We don’t know the symbolism of Ruth uncovering Boaz’ feet, but the implication is that the intimacy of her actions, coupled with the fact that it was the middle of the night, forced Boaz to take some action.
When Boaz takes Ruth as his wife he takes possession of Ruth’s deceased husband’s name, continuing the important line of inheritance. His decision, essentially, restores the fortunes of Naomi, who lost her sons and had no grandchildren to carry on the line. By marrying Ruth, Boaz brings new hope to Naomi’s bitterness.
The child that Ruth bears is given to Naomi to nurse. What was once barren in her is now fertile, because of Ruth’s self-giving hesed – her faithful and tenacious love. And by giving Naomi her first-born child, Ruth is giving her mother-in-law everything she has. Just as the widow at the temple gave her two copper coins.
The story of Ruth and Naomi is continued in the line of descendants that come from this special child. They name him Obed, and he becomes the father of David. It is from David’s line that Jesus comes. It is because of these family ties that Joseph and Mary must return to Bethlehem for the census. Jesus is born in the same House of Bread where his female ancestors found the abundance of new life.
It is this abundance that Jesus wants the disciples to learn from the widow at the temple. What the widow offers to God is her undying, faithful, and abiding love for her creator. It is this love that is represented in the two small coins. When there are no more coins to give, she will continue to give her love and willingness to do whatever God asks of her.
What we offer to God is much larger than a yearly pledge or a frantic fishing in our wallets for some loose change to put in the plate. What God asks of us is a never-ending supply of our own hesed – to mirror back to God the same tenaciously faithful love he has shown to us through Jesus Christ.
If you watch today while the offerings go up to the altar you will see how we reenact our faithful love for God. The wine and the bread are at the back of the church for a reason. They come from us, and are given back to God in recognition that all that we have is ours only because God gave it to us in the first place.
Our offerings of money and food for the food bank are symbolic gestures of what we give to God from our inner being. Yes, we need the money to run this church and to uphold our responsibilities as a member of this diocese. But, the money is really not the point.
The meaning comes from what that money means to us. We prosper in this life when we recognize that our lives are completely dependent upon God. The offering we give here is a wake-up call. We come together as a community to watch our offerings of tangible gifts travel up to the altar where they are transformed into the intangible hesed- filled gift of God to us through the broken body of Christ.
We lift the offerings up to God in recognition of all that he gives us, and what little we are able to give back. Then we move into the Great Thanksgiving where we sing God’s praise before we recount in the prayer what Jesus did for us.
We dine on nothing less than Christ himself, giving us his entire being. It is harvest time, and as Christians, we gather together to offer God our abundance. We give of ourselves in order to see a communal reminder of what we’re asked to give God every moment of every day – our undying and tenaciously faithful love of Christ and each other. May we walk in that love always.
Wednesday, March 31, 2010
Christ the King
11/22/2009
The Rev Deborah Magdalene, OSH
John 18:33-37 and Revelation 1:4b-8
Today we end the Christian year by celebrating the authority and mercy of God as seen through Christ in his glory. It is Christ the King Sunday where we sing songs of praise and thanksgiving that the center of our lives is not a cause, or a person, or even a theology, but none other than the risen Christ – who was, and is, and is to come.
This ultimate and eternal power of Christ is manifested not only in his role as savior, but by his authority, power, dominion and influence over all those who believe. Today we are given a glance into heaven where God’s creation is always in the process of being created and where eternity touches our lives today.
We have vibrant images of the reign of Christ in today’s readings. The gospel reading from John takes us to Pontius Pilate’s headquarters where Jesus is being tried by Roman law. The author wants to make clear the difference between the other-worldly quality of God’s kingdom and the fragile, broken and sinful nature of human kingdoms.
The entire Gospel of John is written as a trial, which culminates in the crucifixion and resurrection of Christ. These scenes with Pilate lead up to Jesus’ shameful death by order of the crowds of Jews gathered outside Pilate’s chambers.
Pilate asks Jesus, “Are you the king of the Jews?” to which Jesus replies, “My kingdom is not from this world. If my kingdom were from this world, my followers would be fighting to keep me from being handed over to the Jews.”
Here is the key to understanding this episode between Jesus and Pilate. Jesus says that if his kingdom were from this world his followers would be fighting to keep him from being handed over to the Jews, who want his death.
Why aren’t the disciples there fighting to save Jesus? His words indicate that the disciples already know that Jesus has come to rule a world that exists beyond the one they can see and touch. Since his followers are not fighting to protect him we are led to believe that they fully understand the nature of his kingship. Can they know that Jesus reigning over a heavenly kingdom is the culmination of God’s plan for the redemption of the whole world?
Just prior to this scene with Pilot, Peter denies Jesus three times, showing us how frightened and confused he is by Jesus’ arrest and trial. The other disciples are nowhere to be seen, and we can gather that they are as numb and shell-shocked as Peter. What are we to make of this apparent contradiction – that Jesus says his followers have good reason not to fight for his life, but we see that the reason appears to be fright, denial, and shock? Are those good reasons?
The community that these words were written for were being persecuted by a group of Jews who wanted to purify the synagogues. The Jesus community that formed around John the Evangelist believed that they were good and faithful Jews who went to synagogues, followed the food customs, and lived transformed lives because of believing the truth of who Jesus really was – the much anticipated Messiah who died shamefully on a cross.
It was this shameful death that convinced many that Jesus could not be the Messiah. A number of influential Jews believed that the Messiah was coming as a king of this world, not a heavenly world – and as such would never have died on a cross.
This controversy so threatened the status quo that an edict was issued to ban the Jewish followers of Jesus from the synagogues, and gave license to persecute them.
The answer to the dilemma lies in the upside-down nature of time in God’s world. What happened to the original disciples is happening to us today and was happening to the early Christians as they were being banished from the synagogues.
The words in John’s gospel are meant to be interpreted as eternal words. As such, they reflect back on what was, forward to what will be, and shining within this church right now, as what is.
Think for a moment about the stars. On a dark night, far away from the city lights, we look into the past as see in the present the light of one bright star. This star that we choose to gaze at could have exploded like fireworks thousands of years ago, but we see it as if it exists today.
John wrote his gospel to reflect the eternal quality of God’s world against the backdrop of the horrors of discrimination, exclusion, persecution, and death that filled the First Century Middle East.
The disciples are full of denial, shock, and fear when Jesus is confronting Pontius Pilate, AND they know later that they always knew the truth of who Jesus was, but needed the resurrection experiences to remind them of all that Jesus had said and what he promised those who believe in the truth. They listened to his voice, and they belong to him. In God’s time it all happens at once.
We experience eternal truths as “Aha!” moments when we see the past with the eyes of learned compassion, knowing now that we just didn’t see the whole picture back then. There were reasons we suffered so, and irreplaceable spiritual personal growth came from that very suffering. God never punishes us with catastrophes, but rather provides opportunities for us to rise up through the suffering, as our dependence upon God’s mercy grows in more intimate and personal ways.
Just over a week ago, on Nov. 14th, about 75 clergy and lay delegates who gathered at All Saints Episcopal School in Fort Worth, Texas, unanimously elected the Rt. Rev. C. Wallis Ohl, retired bishop of Northwest Texas, as their next provisional bishop.
One week ago today, a throng of more than 400 well-wishers gathered at St. Luke’s in the Meadow Church for the 5:00 p.m. ordination of the Rev. Susan Slaughter, who is 67 years old.
After her ordination, the newly elected Bishop Ohl immediately installed her as rector of the Fort Worth parish where she has served as deacon for several years, also making her the diocese’s first woman rector.
Presiding Bishop Katharine Jefferts Schori wrote the diocese that there is great gratitude “for this sign of resurrection in the Diocese of Fort Worth. Many thought this day would never arrive, but you have all been faithful, hopeful, and highly persistent.” She compared the diocese to the biblical story of the widow who persisted until she received justice.
She added, “May the Rev. Slaughter be a living witness to the ministry of such seekers after justice.”
Susan Slaughter is a grandmother and a widow; her husband of 28 years, Jerry, died two years ago. She had pursued her dream of becoming a priest since the 1980s but the former diocesan leadership opposed women’s ordination.
She holds bachelor and master’s degrees in teaching, speech pathology, audiology and counseling. She says, “It is with a deep sense of awe in the mysterious ways of our Lord that I arrive at this moment.”
The President of the House of Deputies, Bonnie Anderson, sent gifts, and called Susan Slaughter’s ordination “the day we see hope realized in God’s time.”
Here again, we have the upside-down nature of God’s time. At the General Convention in 2006 I spoke with a woman from the Diocese of Pittsburgh who was grieving at having to join her break-away diocese in their separate celebration of the Eucharist, held in a room away from the communal gathering of Episcopalians.
Her grief was as vibrant as the grief I heard at this recent convention from the men and women who chose to stay with the remnants of Episcopalians who stayed behind. Susan Slaughter was one of those.
In 2006 no-one could see the eventual outcome of our split Episcopalian views on sexuality, justice, and inclusion. Few anticipated any joy coming from such pain. But I’ve seen joy in the faces of the members of Christ Church, Savannah, and I cheered when I heard about Susan Slaughter.
I hate dissention. But I love strong relationships forged from hard times, suffering, and honest work. We have to follow our own truth, with Jesus as our guide, knowing that others who claim the same guide march to different rhythms.
It is in God’s time that we are able to see Jesus enthroned in glory, even as we look today at our own struggles, grief, and anger.
Jesus describes the quality of his kingship in terms of God’s eternal justice. The reading from the book of Revelation speaks of Jesus the King freeing us from our sins and making us royal.
We live with the promise that we will see Christ in his glory, and that eventually what we see will be seen by all. In God’s time, it is all happening right now. We are being created and are being redeemed as we pray, worship, and follow Christ’s path as community of believers.
It is Jesus on the throne, reigning in the majesty of peace, reconciliation, and mercy that we pray to today in the Prayers of the People. We do this at every Eucharist service.
But our attention is not always drawn to King of Kings, and Lord of Lords who is receiving our prayers.
In God’s time, that reality of vibrant Christ-Presence, ruling with eternal mercy, sucks up our prayers and supplications and transforms every fear and worry into peaceful and gentle resolution.
But because it is God’s time, and not our own, we have to trust that this will happen, in ways to glorious to envision. Jesus already died and rose for us. This fact alone invites us to be confident that all will be well, and justice will flow among us, as we worship our eternal Christ.
The Rev Deborah Magdalene, OSH
John 18:33-37 and Revelation 1:4b-8
Today we end the Christian year by celebrating the authority and mercy of God as seen through Christ in his glory. It is Christ the King Sunday where we sing songs of praise and thanksgiving that the center of our lives is not a cause, or a person, or even a theology, but none other than the risen Christ – who was, and is, and is to come.
This ultimate and eternal power of Christ is manifested not only in his role as savior, but by his authority, power, dominion and influence over all those who believe. Today we are given a glance into heaven where God’s creation is always in the process of being created and where eternity touches our lives today.
We have vibrant images of the reign of Christ in today’s readings. The gospel reading from John takes us to Pontius Pilate’s headquarters where Jesus is being tried by Roman law. The author wants to make clear the difference between the other-worldly quality of God’s kingdom and the fragile, broken and sinful nature of human kingdoms.
The entire Gospel of John is written as a trial, which culminates in the crucifixion and resurrection of Christ. These scenes with Pilate lead up to Jesus’ shameful death by order of the crowds of Jews gathered outside Pilate’s chambers.
Pilate asks Jesus, “Are you the king of the Jews?” to which Jesus replies, “My kingdom is not from this world. If my kingdom were from this world, my followers would be fighting to keep me from being handed over to the Jews.”
Here is the key to understanding this episode between Jesus and Pilate. Jesus says that if his kingdom were from this world his followers would be fighting to keep him from being handed over to the Jews, who want his death.
Why aren’t the disciples there fighting to save Jesus? His words indicate that the disciples already know that Jesus has come to rule a world that exists beyond the one they can see and touch. Since his followers are not fighting to protect him we are led to believe that they fully understand the nature of his kingship. Can they know that Jesus reigning over a heavenly kingdom is the culmination of God’s plan for the redemption of the whole world?
Just prior to this scene with Pilot, Peter denies Jesus three times, showing us how frightened and confused he is by Jesus’ arrest and trial. The other disciples are nowhere to be seen, and we can gather that they are as numb and shell-shocked as Peter. What are we to make of this apparent contradiction – that Jesus says his followers have good reason not to fight for his life, but we see that the reason appears to be fright, denial, and shock? Are those good reasons?
The community that these words were written for were being persecuted by a group of Jews who wanted to purify the synagogues. The Jesus community that formed around John the Evangelist believed that they were good and faithful Jews who went to synagogues, followed the food customs, and lived transformed lives because of believing the truth of who Jesus really was – the much anticipated Messiah who died shamefully on a cross.
It was this shameful death that convinced many that Jesus could not be the Messiah. A number of influential Jews believed that the Messiah was coming as a king of this world, not a heavenly world – and as such would never have died on a cross.
This controversy so threatened the status quo that an edict was issued to ban the Jewish followers of Jesus from the synagogues, and gave license to persecute them.
The answer to the dilemma lies in the upside-down nature of time in God’s world. What happened to the original disciples is happening to us today and was happening to the early Christians as they were being banished from the synagogues.
The words in John’s gospel are meant to be interpreted as eternal words. As such, they reflect back on what was, forward to what will be, and shining within this church right now, as what is.
Think for a moment about the stars. On a dark night, far away from the city lights, we look into the past as see in the present the light of one bright star. This star that we choose to gaze at could have exploded like fireworks thousands of years ago, but we see it as if it exists today.
John wrote his gospel to reflect the eternal quality of God’s world against the backdrop of the horrors of discrimination, exclusion, persecution, and death that filled the First Century Middle East.
The disciples are full of denial, shock, and fear when Jesus is confronting Pontius Pilate, AND they know later that they always knew the truth of who Jesus was, but needed the resurrection experiences to remind them of all that Jesus had said and what he promised those who believe in the truth. They listened to his voice, and they belong to him. In God’s time it all happens at once.
We experience eternal truths as “Aha!” moments when we see the past with the eyes of learned compassion, knowing now that we just didn’t see the whole picture back then. There were reasons we suffered so, and irreplaceable spiritual personal growth came from that very suffering. God never punishes us with catastrophes, but rather provides opportunities for us to rise up through the suffering, as our dependence upon God’s mercy grows in more intimate and personal ways.
Just over a week ago, on Nov. 14th, about 75 clergy and lay delegates who gathered at All Saints Episcopal School in Fort Worth, Texas, unanimously elected the Rt. Rev. C. Wallis Ohl, retired bishop of Northwest Texas, as their next provisional bishop.
One week ago today, a throng of more than 400 well-wishers gathered at St. Luke’s in the Meadow Church for the 5:00 p.m. ordination of the Rev. Susan Slaughter, who is 67 years old.
After her ordination, the newly elected Bishop Ohl immediately installed her as rector of the Fort Worth parish where she has served as deacon for several years, also making her the diocese’s first woman rector.
Presiding Bishop Katharine Jefferts Schori wrote the diocese that there is great gratitude “for this sign of resurrection in the Diocese of Fort Worth. Many thought this day would never arrive, but you have all been faithful, hopeful, and highly persistent.” She compared the diocese to the biblical story of the widow who persisted until she received justice.
She added, “May the Rev. Slaughter be a living witness to the ministry of such seekers after justice.”
Susan Slaughter is a grandmother and a widow; her husband of 28 years, Jerry, died two years ago. She had pursued her dream of becoming a priest since the 1980s but the former diocesan leadership opposed women’s ordination.
She holds bachelor and master’s degrees in teaching, speech pathology, audiology and counseling. She says, “It is with a deep sense of awe in the mysterious ways of our Lord that I arrive at this moment.”
The President of the House of Deputies, Bonnie Anderson, sent gifts, and called Susan Slaughter’s ordination “the day we see hope realized in God’s time.”
Here again, we have the upside-down nature of God’s time. At the General Convention in 2006 I spoke with a woman from the Diocese of Pittsburgh who was grieving at having to join her break-away diocese in their separate celebration of the Eucharist, held in a room away from the communal gathering of Episcopalians.
Her grief was as vibrant as the grief I heard at this recent convention from the men and women who chose to stay with the remnants of Episcopalians who stayed behind. Susan Slaughter was one of those.
In 2006 no-one could see the eventual outcome of our split Episcopalian views on sexuality, justice, and inclusion. Few anticipated any joy coming from such pain. But I’ve seen joy in the faces of the members of Christ Church, Savannah, and I cheered when I heard about Susan Slaughter.
I hate dissention. But I love strong relationships forged from hard times, suffering, and honest work. We have to follow our own truth, with Jesus as our guide, knowing that others who claim the same guide march to different rhythms.
It is in God’s time that we are able to see Jesus enthroned in glory, even as we look today at our own struggles, grief, and anger.
Jesus describes the quality of his kingship in terms of God’s eternal justice. The reading from the book of Revelation speaks of Jesus the King freeing us from our sins and making us royal.
We live with the promise that we will see Christ in his glory, and that eventually what we see will be seen by all. In God’s time, it is all happening right now. We are being created and are being redeemed as we pray, worship, and follow Christ’s path as community of believers.
It is Jesus on the throne, reigning in the majesty of peace, reconciliation, and mercy that we pray to today in the Prayers of the People. We do this at every Eucharist service.
But our attention is not always drawn to King of Kings, and Lord of Lords who is receiving our prayers.
In God’s time, that reality of vibrant Christ-Presence, ruling with eternal mercy, sucks up our prayers and supplications and transforms every fear and worry into peaceful and gentle resolution.
But because it is God’s time, and not our own, we have to trust that this will happen, in ways to glorious to envision. Jesus already died and rose for us. This fact alone invites us to be confident that all will be well, and justice will flow among us, as we worship our eternal Christ.
The Baptism of Christ
Sunday, January 10, 2010
The Rev. Deborah Magdalene, OSH
Isaiah 43:1-7, Acts 8:14-17, Luke 3:15-17, 21-22
We begin the season of Epiphany today with the Baptism of Christ. For the first Christians, it was Jesus’ baptism that introduced this extraordinary man and his ministry. During Epiphany we focus on the miraculous “showings” of God, through his son Jesus. These showings began this last Wednesday on the Feast of the Epiphany.
The Christmas season ends with the arrival of the three kings, travelling from the land of the Gentiles. Their gifts to the Christ Child represent the coming together of all nations under Christ.
The star they follow is the star of the Epiphany – the miraculous light of God, breaking through our dark doldrums and routines to show us a much grander and more glorious world than we could ever imagine on our own.
Epiphany shouts: “Arise, shine, for your light has come.” Throughout this season we are asked to pay attention to the epiphanies of God’s inspiration and creativity all around us – in our personal lives and in our shared sacred stories. Christ continues to shine his extraordinary light on our ordinary existence, transforming us all into little lanterns of God’s light.
Christ comes down to the Jordan River to be baptized, and emerges glowing with the light of God. The most important thing to remember about his baptism is that it was God’s action through his Christ, and toward us.
Luke is unique among the gospel writers in claiming that Jesus was baptized, not by John the Baptist, but by God. If you look carefully at our Gospel for today you will see that John’s name is not mentioned after Jesus enters the scene. The Baptist, for Luke, is the last of the Old Testament prophets, standing at the precipice of the old age and pointing across the divide to the One who brings in the new age.
The words, “After Jesus had been baptized...” omits John’s name on purpose. The phrase is meant to downplay the actions of the Baptist, and emphasizes that it is God who baptizes his son, as it is God who baptizes us. God affirms his presence at Christ’s baptism through another epiphany – the Holy Spirit, sent from God, descending as a dove upon Jesus, followed by God’s voice from heaven, proclaiming, “You are my Son, the Beloved. With you I am well pleased.”
This epiphany, or showing of God, is the first example of the Trinity revealing itself to the community. The audible voice of God, the visible body of the dove, and the presence of Christ, emerging naked out of the waters of the Jordan are a shocking sign of the emergence of a new creation. Our own baptisms are meant to shock us, if not by the temperature of the water then by the tangible presence of the Holy at every baptism.
The mention of water, Spirit, and the voice of God also recall the story in Genesis, when all three are mentioned as part of God’s activity in Creation.
Our baptisms are intended to make each of us a brand new creation taking our first breath after emerging out of the waters. God tells the story of the divine love that created the universe and continually creates history as each individual is baptized in the name of the Father, and of the Son, and of the Holy Spirit.
It is through the waters of baptism that God calls to mind the stories from Genesis: the creation of the world, where God’s Spirit hovered over the watery mass of chaos and divided the waters into seas, rivers, polar ice caps and streams by creating the magnificent masses of land.
The waters of Baptism remind us also of the story of Noah, when the torrential floods punished the sinful as they redeemed the faithful few who floated in a homemade ark. It is the dove that brought the good news of approaching land to Noah....the same dove of the Holy Spirit that anointed Christ. That this dove appears again at the baptism is no coincidence.
The land Noah and his family discovered rose out of the very water that caused so much death. God made a new covenant with the people – never again to destroy the world with the flood of many waters. The water that brought death to God’s creation is the same water that brought Noah’s family to the redemption of a new life, sealed with a promise and marked by a rainbow.
It is this same death and new life that we are called to in our baptism. We symbolically sink into the waters of death, renouncing our old way of life as we renounce Satan. We emerge from the waters, joyously alive – a brand new creation, as God makes a new covenant with us.
The baptism itself is the covenant, initiated by God. The water is the sign that reminds us of our emergence into a new life. Like a newborn, bursting naked out of the watery amniotic fluid, we are vulnerable, innocent and teachable. We emerge from an old world into a new, Christ-centered world where stars lead our way, and ancient sacred stories build our path.
The earliest Christians looked back to Isaiah and recognized that his prophesies had come true with Jesus – the beloved servant of God. When Isaiah wrote the words from our first lesson, he was anticipating the restoration of Israel after their Babylonian captivity, which happened in the sixth century before Christ.
Christians believed that what was written by the prophets not only predicted the restoration of Israel from Babylonian exile but also clearly pointed to the restoration of Israel through the coming of the Messiah. The first Christians were Jewish, and were so immersed in scripture that most of them had the first five books of the Bible memorized, as well as the Psalms, and much of the Prophets.
This immersion in Scripture allowed them to see that God’s mighty acts in history followed a consistent pattern, and that God is true to himself and his purpose.
The pattern God consistently follows isn’t as easy for us to see today. This is why we need to remind ourselves of God’s covenant with us through our sacraments, especially the Holy Eucharist and Holy Baptism.
That is why our current version of the Book of Common Prayer places Baptism front and center and gives a place of honor to the ancient Vigil of Easter where we tell the ancient stories of our faith and renew our baptismal vows at the font full of Holy Water before we receive the Easter Eucharist at the first light of dawn.
Look at the water imagery in the Isaiah reading in relation to baptism. “Now thus says the Lord, he who created you, O Jacob, he who formed you O Israel. Do not fear for I have redeemed you; I have called you by name and you are mine.”
The sponsors or parents of the soon-to-be-baptized Christian must say his or her name before presenting them to the priest. This first name is known as our Christian name, so that God and the Christian community can call us by name. The names of the Trinity are also called out as the new Christian receives the branding of the cross, marked with Holy Oil, as Christ’s own forever. The rainbow was Noah’s sign, and the cross is ours.
Before we are doused with or submerged into the water we can imagine God using Isaiah’s words, “When you pass through these waters I will be with you; and through the rivers, they shall not overwhelm you...For I am the Lord your God and your Savior.”
The ancients associated death with any body of water. Baptism likewise reminds us that we die in the baptismal water, in imitation of Christ dying for us. We emerge from the waters of death as newly resurrected children of Christ.
Jesus warns his disciples in Mark’s gospel, “The cup that I drink you will drink; and with the baptism with which I am baptized, you will be baptized.” Jesus refers to his approaching death as his baptism. And invites us to follow him there.
“Do not fear [the water of death] for I am with you; I will bring your offspring from the east, and from the west I will gather you; I will say to the north, ‘Give them up,’ and to the south, ‘Do not withhold;’ bring my sons from far way and my daughters from the end of the earth – everyone who is called by my name, whom I created for my glory, whom I formed and made.”
We are a new creation after our baptism. We are known as Christians, and are identified through our love.
The ancient baptismal rite was a lengthy process. All who sought admission to the Church had to be carefully scrutinized and examined. Christians were under persecution at the time, and they had to be certain that no spies infiltrated their ranks. To be baptized was to be called to a life of grateful, obedient service to God.
During the Eucharist service itself, the non-baptized were allowed to stay only until the sermon was finished. The Eucharist itself was celebrated just for the baptized.
Once you were selected as a baptismal candidate you began a three-year course of instruction known as the Catechism. The final phase of this instruction occurred during Lent, and culminated in the early dawn during the Easter Vigil, where the entire group was baptized by full immersion and then clothed in white garments and, in some cases, given a lit candle.
The newly baptized then processed into the church and received the laying on of hands by the bishop. He then poured oil on their heads and made the sign of the cross on their foreheads with his thumb. He blew air in their faces to represent the wind of the Holy Spirit. They then received the kiss of peace from the bishop and the entire congregation.
In this way the new Christians were welcomed to the table of the Lord where they were allowed to receive communion for the first time.
In our reading from the Acts of the Apostles, Peter and John pray for the coming of the Holy Spirit among the Samaritans. This group of Jews was particularly hated by the Orthodox Jews in Jerusalem. Saved and redeemed by their baptism into the body of Christ, they still lacked the vibrant sense of God’s presence.
The laying of hands is what brings the Holy Spirit among them. In the baptismal rite, it is the priest’s hands touching the head of the baptized, that signifies the same holy touch of the first apostles upon the heads of the brand new Christians.
John the Baptist is clear that he baptizes with water, but the one who is to come will baptize with the fire of the Holy Spirit. The first Christians understood that our baptism makes us Christ’s own forever, but it is only through prayer that can we receive the Holy Spirit.
Jesus is in the act of praying when the Spirit descends upon him. During the ancient baptismal ceremony, the non-baptized were allowed to listen to the readings and the sermon. But it was only after the three-year preparatory course of study, followed by their Easter baptism, that they were finally allowed to pray with the congregation.
Those early Christians took the story of Jesus’ baptism literally. He emerged from the waters of his baptism and immediately began to pray. The early Christians reserved the right to pray with fellow Christians only after the lengthy baptismal process was over. Because it took so long, many died before they were actually baptized. But they were considered saved and were as Christians.
Our modern service of baptism includes prayer before, during, and after the baptism – assuring all of us of the continual presence of the entire Trinity during our Eucharist service.
I invite you this morning to pay attention to the water in our service. Douse yourselves with water from the baptismal font, and dip you hand into the water at both entrances to this church.
Watch the water being poured into the wine at the preparation of the Eucharist. This represents the water of our creation, our baptism, and the water of Jesus’ first miracle that he turned miraculously into wine. The water that flowed from his side at his death becomes the mixture of water and wine that we drink.
We gather together this morning to remember Christ’s baptism as a sign for us to follow. May we pay attention to all of God’s signs, sent to us, because of God’s abiding and eternal love.
The Rev. Deborah Magdalene, OSH
Isaiah 43:1-7, Acts 8:14-17, Luke 3:15-17, 21-22
We begin the season of Epiphany today with the Baptism of Christ. For the first Christians, it was Jesus’ baptism that introduced this extraordinary man and his ministry. During Epiphany we focus on the miraculous “showings” of God, through his son Jesus. These showings began this last Wednesday on the Feast of the Epiphany.
The Christmas season ends with the arrival of the three kings, travelling from the land of the Gentiles. Their gifts to the Christ Child represent the coming together of all nations under Christ.
The star they follow is the star of the Epiphany – the miraculous light of God, breaking through our dark doldrums and routines to show us a much grander and more glorious world than we could ever imagine on our own.
Epiphany shouts: “Arise, shine, for your light has come.” Throughout this season we are asked to pay attention to the epiphanies of God’s inspiration and creativity all around us – in our personal lives and in our shared sacred stories. Christ continues to shine his extraordinary light on our ordinary existence, transforming us all into little lanterns of God’s light.
Christ comes down to the Jordan River to be baptized, and emerges glowing with the light of God. The most important thing to remember about his baptism is that it was God’s action through his Christ, and toward us.
Luke is unique among the gospel writers in claiming that Jesus was baptized, not by John the Baptist, but by God. If you look carefully at our Gospel for today you will see that John’s name is not mentioned after Jesus enters the scene. The Baptist, for Luke, is the last of the Old Testament prophets, standing at the precipice of the old age and pointing across the divide to the One who brings in the new age.
The words, “After Jesus had been baptized...” omits John’s name on purpose. The phrase is meant to downplay the actions of the Baptist, and emphasizes that it is God who baptizes his son, as it is God who baptizes us. God affirms his presence at Christ’s baptism through another epiphany – the Holy Spirit, sent from God, descending as a dove upon Jesus, followed by God’s voice from heaven, proclaiming, “You are my Son, the Beloved. With you I am well pleased.”
This epiphany, or showing of God, is the first example of the Trinity revealing itself to the community. The audible voice of God, the visible body of the dove, and the presence of Christ, emerging naked out of the waters of the Jordan are a shocking sign of the emergence of a new creation. Our own baptisms are meant to shock us, if not by the temperature of the water then by the tangible presence of the Holy at every baptism.
The mention of water, Spirit, and the voice of God also recall the story in Genesis, when all three are mentioned as part of God’s activity in Creation.
Our baptisms are intended to make each of us a brand new creation taking our first breath after emerging out of the waters. God tells the story of the divine love that created the universe and continually creates history as each individual is baptized in the name of the Father, and of the Son, and of the Holy Spirit.
It is through the waters of baptism that God calls to mind the stories from Genesis: the creation of the world, where God’s Spirit hovered over the watery mass of chaos and divided the waters into seas, rivers, polar ice caps and streams by creating the magnificent masses of land.
The waters of Baptism remind us also of the story of Noah, when the torrential floods punished the sinful as they redeemed the faithful few who floated in a homemade ark. It is the dove that brought the good news of approaching land to Noah....the same dove of the Holy Spirit that anointed Christ. That this dove appears again at the baptism is no coincidence.
The land Noah and his family discovered rose out of the very water that caused so much death. God made a new covenant with the people – never again to destroy the world with the flood of many waters. The water that brought death to God’s creation is the same water that brought Noah’s family to the redemption of a new life, sealed with a promise and marked by a rainbow.
It is this same death and new life that we are called to in our baptism. We symbolically sink into the waters of death, renouncing our old way of life as we renounce Satan. We emerge from the waters, joyously alive – a brand new creation, as God makes a new covenant with us.
The baptism itself is the covenant, initiated by God. The water is the sign that reminds us of our emergence into a new life. Like a newborn, bursting naked out of the watery amniotic fluid, we are vulnerable, innocent and teachable. We emerge from an old world into a new, Christ-centered world where stars lead our way, and ancient sacred stories build our path.
The earliest Christians looked back to Isaiah and recognized that his prophesies had come true with Jesus – the beloved servant of God. When Isaiah wrote the words from our first lesson, he was anticipating the restoration of Israel after their Babylonian captivity, which happened in the sixth century before Christ.
Christians believed that what was written by the prophets not only predicted the restoration of Israel from Babylonian exile but also clearly pointed to the restoration of Israel through the coming of the Messiah. The first Christians were Jewish, and were so immersed in scripture that most of them had the first five books of the Bible memorized, as well as the Psalms, and much of the Prophets.
This immersion in Scripture allowed them to see that God’s mighty acts in history followed a consistent pattern, and that God is true to himself and his purpose.
The pattern God consistently follows isn’t as easy for us to see today. This is why we need to remind ourselves of God’s covenant with us through our sacraments, especially the Holy Eucharist and Holy Baptism.
That is why our current version of the Book of Common Prayer places Baptism front and center and gives a place of honor to the ancient Vigil of Easter where we tell the ancient stories of our faith and renew our baptismal vows at the font full of Holy Water before we receive the Easter Eucharist at the first light of dawn.
Look at the water imagery in the Isaiah reading in relation to baptism. “Now thus says the Lord, he who created you, O Jacob, he who formed you O Israel. Do not fear for I have redeemed you; I have called you by name and you are mine.”
The sponsors or parents of the soon-to-be-baptized Christian must say his or her name before presenting them to the priest. This first name is known as our Christian name, so that God and the Christian community can call us by name. The names of the Trinity are also called out as the new Christian receives the branding of the cross, marked with Holy Oil, as Christ’s own forever. The rainbow was Noah’s sign, and the cross is ours.
Before we are doused with or submerged into the water we can imagine God using Isaiah’s words, “When you pass through these waters I will be with you; and through the rivers, they shall not overwhelm you...For I am the Lord your God and your Savior.”
The ancients associated death with any body of water. Baptism likewise reminds us that we die in the baptismal water, in imitation of Christ dying for us. We emerge from the waters of death as newly resurrected children of Christ.
Jesus warns his disciples in Mark’s gospel, “The cup that I drink you will drink; and with the baptism with which I am baptized, you will be baptized.” Jesus refers to his approaching death as his baptism. And invites us to follow him there.
“Do not fear [the water of death] for I am with you; I will bring your offspring from the east, and from the west I will gather you; I will say to the north, ‘Give them up,’ and to the south, ‘Do not withhold;’ bring my sons from far way and my daughters from the end of the earth – everyone who is called by my name, whom I created for my glory, whom I formed and made.”
We are a new creation after our baptism. We are known as Christians, and are identified through our love.
The ancient baptismal rite was a lengthy process. All who sought admission to the Church had to be carefully scrutinized and examined. Christians were under persecution at the time, and they had to be certain that no spies infiltrated their ranks. To be baptized was to be called to a life of grateful, obedient service to God.
During the Eucharist service itself, the non-baptized were allowed to stay only until the sermon was finished. The Eucharist itself was celebrated just for the baptized.
Once you were selected as a baptismal candidate you began a three-year course of instruction known as the Catechism. The final phase of this instruction occurred during Lent, and culminated in the early dawn during the Easter Vigil, where the entire group was baptized by full immersion and then clothed in white garments and, in some cases, given a lit candle.
The newly baptized then processed into the church and received the laying on of hands by the bishop. He then poured oil on their heads and made the sign of the cross on their foreheads with his thumb. He blew air in their faces to represent the wind of the Holy Spirit. They then received the kiss of peace from the bishop and the entire congregation.
In this way the new Christians were welcomed to the table of the Lord where they were allowed to receive communion for the first time.
In our reading from the Acts of the Apostles, Peter and John pray for the coming of the Holy Spirit among the Samaritans. This group of Jews was particularly hated by the Orthodox Jews in Jerusalem. Saved and redeemed by their baptism into the body of Christ, they still lacked the vibrant sense of God’s presence.
The laying of hands is what brings the Holy Spirit among them. In the baptismal rite, it is the priest’s hands touching the head of the baptized, that signifies the same holy touch of the first apostles upon the heads of the brand new Christians.
John the Baptist is clear that he baptizes with water, but the one who is to come will baptize with the fire of the Holy Spirit. The first Christians understood that our baptism makes us Christ’s own forever, but it is only through prayer that can we receive the Holy Spirit.
Jesus is in the act of praying when the Spirit descends upon him. During the ancient baptismal ceremony, the non-baptized were allowed to listen to the readings and the sermon. But it was only after the three-year preparatory course of study, followed by their Easter baptism, that they were finally allowed to pray with the congregation.
Those early Christians took the story of Jesus’ baptism literally. He emerged from the waters of his baptism and immediately began to pray. The early Christians reserved the right to pray with fellow Christians only after the lengthy baptismal process was over. Because it took so long, many died before they were actually baptized. But they were considered saved and were as Christians.
Our modern service of baptism includes prayer before, during, and after the baptism – assuring all of us of the continual presence of the entire Trinity during our Eucharist service.
I invite you this morning to pay attention to the water in our service. Douse yourselves with water from the baptismal font, and dip you hand into the water at both entrances to this church.
Watch the water being poured into the wine at the preparation of the Eucharist. This represents the water of our creation, our baptism, and the water of Jesus’ first miracle that he turned miraculously into wine. The water that flowed from his side at his death becomes the mixture of water and wine that we drink.
We gather together this morning to remember Christ’s baptism as a sign for us to follow. May we pay attention to all of God’s signs, sent to us, because of God’s abiding and eternal love.
Tuesday, March 30, 2010
Epiphany 4
January 31, 2010
The Rev Deborah Magdalene, OSH
Jeremiah 4:1-10, I Corinthians 13:1-13, Luke 4:21-39
“If I speak in the tongues of mortals and of angels, but do not have love, I am a noisy gong or a clanging cymbal.”
We are usually at a wedding when we hear this beautiful hymn to love from Paul’s first letter to the Corinthians. The words themselves are beautiful and have a calming effect, “Love is patient; love is kind; love does not insist on its own way; it is not irritable or resentful – Love rejoices in the truth....” he writes.
I look at the wedding couple and see an icon of God’s timeless love. But I know that only God’s love lasts for eternity. Human love, with all of its promise, has a dark shadow. And unless we learn the practice of giving up our own plans and expectations in order to follow God’s will in our lives we will flounder and get lost on the way.
The love that Paul describes so beautifully is about the daily struggle to lose one’s Self in a bottomless well of God-centeredness.
This is a love that only one man was able to pull off perfectly – Jesus from Nazareth. And in this letter to the Church in Corinth Paul goes to great lengths to help us understand the complexities and gifts of Christ’s God-centered love for us.
Paul is writing this letter to the ragtag group of new Christians in Corinth (in present-day Greece.) He writes his letter because they wrote to him, asking for clarification on how one is to practice Christianity on a daily basis. They have opposing and passionate ideas about how to live out God’s call, and they are feuding with each other over issues that threaten to tear the new Church apart.
Sounds like the Church we all know so well.
It is no easier for us to understand the call to love one another than it was for the first Christians, but our modern culture throws some unique stumbling blocks in our path.
The first thing that trips us up is our language. “Love” has so many meanings that we each picture our own definitions of love as soon as we hear the word.
Romantic love is everyone’s favorite – we can feel it, remember it, and at a deep level we all yearn for it to come again and wake us up. It feels good. The world is transformed when you’re ‘in love’ – food tastes better, the birds sing louder, and poetry suddenly springs from our lips.
Then there are all the other forms of love – I love the new movie Avatar, I love chocolate cake; and crab dipped in butter. I love my cat, and my parents. I love waking up on a day off and sitting by the window with a steaming cup of coffee.
When I grew up in the Episcopal Church I had a vague sense that the love we sang about in hymns was a different kind of love than the ones I’ve just described, but I couldn’t put the pieces together.
The two different worlds of church and home didn’t seem to have much in common. We went to church regularly because that was our responsibility. And we were proud that we were regular church-goers. Once home we went back to rocky and chaotic life as usual, until we dressed up in our finest the next week and proudly went off to church again.
Pride and arrogance are the primary blocks to living out God’s call to love one another as Christ loved us. It is this pride in being a Christian that threw me off track and is what gets to the heart of the problem in Corinth.
Even at the dawn of Christianity human pride started mucking up the clear Gospel of Christ. It is a very subtle and sneaky issue, this pride, which is why Jesus shows us the way to call it what it is and learn how to walk away from it.
Today’s gospel is the second half of the story we heard last week. Jesus is in his home town of Nazareth and is reading from the Prophet Isaiah. The verse he chose to read spoke of freedom, "The Spirit of the Lord is upon me, because he has anointed me to bring good news to the poor. He has sent me to proclaim release to the captives and recovery of sight to the blind, to let the oppressed go free and to proclaim the year of the Lord’s favor.” Luke 4:18
Then he puts down the scroll and says to them, “Today this scripture has been fulfilled in your hearing.” These are electric words. If Isaiah’s prophecy has come true then this means that their world is about to change. It would make sense to expect that their very own Jesus, Joseph’s son, would pay special attention to them since he is one of their very own.
Much of Galilee, and especially Nazareth, was looked down upon by the majority of Jews. They were called ‘peasants,’ ‘common people,’ and the ‘unwashed of the land.” They spoke with an accent colored by many different cultures and races. It is interesting to note that when Mary and Joseph are turned away from the inn in Bethlehem it was because they had no room for them, not because they were full.
It is quite possible that when the people of Nazareth heard Jesus speak they immediately pictured their long term dream of becoming privileged and chosen coming true. They wanted the privilege and status that went along with Jesus’ popularity. They had heard what he had done in other towns in Galilee. Just imagine what he would do in his home town, with the people who saw him grow up. Surely their days of hearing “Can anything good come out of Nazareth?” were over.
They were proud of Jesus as long as he lived up to their expectations. But he dashed their hopes to the ground and they turned on him like a pack of hungry dogs.
The two examples Jesus gives them illustrate the true nature of his call. The great prophets Elijah and Elisha skipped over all the Jews suffering from either starvation and thirst, or leprosy, and chose to heal instead a Gentile. Jesus doesn’t want to taunt or ridicule the Nazarenes, he just wants them to let go of their pride and arrogance and see that the word of God cannot be contained in one privileged home town.
Parker Palmer writes, "At the heart of any authentic religious experience is recognition that God's nature is too huge, God's movement too deep, ever to be comprehended by a single conception or point of view….God's truth is singular and eternal, but the forms in which we give it expression are as finite and fragile as clay pots, and we must always be ready to break them open on behalf of a larger vision of truth."
There is a reason that Luke uses this story as the introduction to Jesus’ ministry. It has all of the themes that Luke returns to again and again in his Gospel and the Book of Acts. Luke stresses throughout both books that Jesus came in order to bring the Gospel, the Good News, to all lands and all peoples.
Jesus fulfills what the prophets promised and brings his message to the people who need it the most – regardless of their class, status, religious beliefs or cleanliness. Jesus is persecuted by his own people because he shakes up the status quo and turns his back on their expectations of grandeur and fame.
At the end of the Gospel Jesus is crucified in Jerusalem – at the very heart of the Jewish power center. Today’s reading prepares us for what lies ahead for Jesus and his followers – the vengeance of an angry crowd that has missed the point of Jesus’ words.
What the crowd at Nazareth didn’t have was the love of God that drove Jesus to find a more receptive audience. The full extent of this cosmic love wasn’t understood until Resurrection. It was only then that everything he taught began to fall into place.
Paul was one of the people that hunted down the Christians with vengeance and murderous rage. His conversion showed him the extent of his pride and arrogance and gave him the fuel to warn others of the dangers self-righteousness.
Paul is able to see that the Christians in Corinth are in grave danger. Their self-centered dissents threaten to break the church apart. The love Paul describes is agape, the unmotivated and free gift of God’s love for us. It is vibrantly different from the self-seeking, romantic love of human beings. It doesn’t necessarily feel good when we act in accord with this agape love, but it does resonate with God’s will for us and for the entire world.
The people of Corinth were proud of all their spiritual gifts – they were speaking in tongues and prophesying. They were eating together and singing songs of thanksgiving and praise. But they were excluding many people from the inner circle and were fighting with each other over who had the best gifts.
Paul emphasizes that any spectacular manifestations of spiritual power or prophecy are pointless unless they flow from the selfless and unmotivated fountain of God’s love.
There are two important characteristics of this love: agape is beyond our control and it depends upon a deep and abiding humility. One cannot love by willpower alone. We can’t leave the church today and make the promise, “Today I will love,” and then succeed at loving everyone.
Love is beyond our control. In order to understand its illusive and penetrating power you must practice true humility. And this is the most difficult of Christ’s teachings.
There is a story of a man who wanted to be humble: “He was very happy when he managed to be humble. But he was very sorry that he was happy that he was humble. And he was very happy that he was so sorry that he was happy that he was humble.”
This story describes the problems we run into when we try to be humble – it creates a vicious circle. Once humility is possessed it is lost, since humility grows out of knowing one’s poverty.
This poverty is what connects us to Christ’s love. He became poor for our sake and asks us to do the same. Love is not a feeling at all, but a relationship with the divine that is simply there at times and not at all in our control. It is a radiation of cosmic power, like a wave. Our job is to lose our need for control and let the wave of God’s love overpower us.
We can’t really love one another without admitting that our human ability to act out this love is wounded. We are dependent upon God acting through us. We must attribute any true act of love as stemming from God alone. And we must learn the difficult task of letting others glow with the love of God when we feel left out. Love is not a quantifiable substance. There is enough love of God to fill each of us for eternity. And we need not be jealous of other’s gifts.
The people of Nazareth didn’t understand this. They were angry, threatened and jealous that Jesus took his gifts elsewhere. They were left standing on the precipice wondering where he disappeared to, and clueless to the message he brought.
If they were to act in the spirit of Paul’s letter to the Corinthians they would give up their self-centered need to be famous and accepted and follow Jesus to the next town. Agape love celebrates at every lost sheep found and every wounded soul saved.
It is our daily challenge to let go of our own preconceptions of love in order to admit we have no idea where God’s love might take us today. May we help each other to nurture this love in our own community.
The Rev Deborah Magdalene, OSH
Jeremiah 4:1-10, I Corinthians 13:1-13, Luke 4:21-39
“If I speak in the tongues of mortals and of angels, but do not have love, I am a noisy gong or a clanging cymbal.”
We are usually at a wedding when we hear this beautiful hymn to love from Paul’s first letter to the Corinthians. The words themselves are beautiful and have a calming effect, “Love is patient; love is kind; love does not insist on its own way; it is not irritable or resentful – Love rejoices in the truth....” he writes.
I look at the wedding couple and see an icon of God’s timeless love. But I know that only God’s love lasts for eternity. Human love, with all of its promise, has a dark shadow. And unless we learn the practice of giving up our own plans and expectations in order to follow God’s will in our lives we will flounder and get lost on the way.
The love that Paul describes so beautifully is about the daily struggle to lose one’s Self in a bottomless well of God-centeredness.
This is a love that only one man was able to pull off perfectly – Jesus from Nazareth. And in this letter to the Church in Corinth Paul goes to great lengths to help us understand the complexities and gifts of Christ’s God-centered love for us.
Paul is writing this letter to the ragtag group of new Christians in Corinth (in present-day Greece.) He writes his letter because they wrote to him, asking for clarification on how one is to practice Christianity on a daily basis. They have opposing and passionate ideas about how to live out God’s call, and they are feuding with each other over issues that threaten to tear the new Church apart.
Sounds like the Church we all know so well.
It is no easier for us to understand the call to love one another than it was for the first Christians, but our modern culture throws some unique stumbling blocks in our path.
The first thing that trips us up is our language. “Love” has so many meanings that we each picture our own definitions of love as soon as we hear the word.
Romantic love is everyone’s favorite – we can feel it, remember it, and at a deep level we all yearn for it to come again and wake us up. It feels good. The world is transformed when you’re ‘in love’ – food tastes better, the birds sing louder, and poetry suddenly springs from our lips.
Then there are all the other forms of love – I love the new movie Avatar, I love chocolate cake; and crab dipped in butter. I love my cat, and my parents. I love waking up on a day off and sitting by the window with a steaming cup of coffee.
When I grew up in the Episcopal Church I had a vague sense that the love we sang about in hymns was a different kind of love than the ones I’ve just described, but I couldn’t put the pieces together.
The two different worlds of church and home didn’t seem to have much in common. We went to church regularly because that was our responsibility. And we were proud that we were regular church-goers. Once home we went back to rocky and chaotic life as usual, until we dressed up in our finest the next week and proudly went off to church again.
Pride and arrogance are the primary blocks to living out God’s call to love one another as Christ loved us. It is this pride in being a Christian that threw me off track and is what gets to the heart of the problem in Corinth.
Even at the dawn of Christianity human pride started mucking up the clear Gospel of Christ. It is a very subtle and sneaky issue, this pride, which is why Jesus shows us the way to call it what it is and learn how to walk away from it.
Today’s gospel is the second half of the story we heard last week. Jesus is in his home town of Nazareth and is reading from the Prophet Isaiah. The verse he chose to read spoke of freedom, "The Spirit of the Lord is upon me, because he has anointed me to bring good news to the poor. He has sent me to proclaim release to the captives and recovery of sight to the blind, to let the oppressed go free and to proclaim the year of the Lord’s favor.” Luke 4:18
Then he puts down the scroll and says to them, “Today this scripture has been fulfilled in your hearing.” These are electric words. If Isaiah’s prophecy has come true then this means that their world is about to change. It would make sense to expect that their very own Jesus, Joseph’s son, would pay special attention to them since he is one of their very own.
Much of Galilee, and especially Nazareth, was looked down upon by the majority of Jews. They were called ‘peasants,’ ‘common people,’ and the ‘unwashed of the land.” They spoke with an accent colored by many different cultures and races. It is interesting to note that when Mary and Joseph are turned away from the inn in Bethlehem it was because they had no room for them, not because they were full.
It is quite possible that when the people of Nazareth heard Jesus speak they immediately pictured their long term dream of becoming privileged and chosen coming true. They wanted the privilege and status that went along with Jesus’ popularity. They had heard what he had done in other towns in Galilee. Just imagine what he would do in his home town, with the people who saw him grow up. Surely their days of hearing “Can anything good come out of Nazareth?” were over.
They were proud of Jesus as long as he lived up to their expectations. But he dashed their hopes to the ground and they turned on him like a pack of hungry dogs.
The two examples Jesus gives them illustrate the true nature of his call. The great prophets Elijah and Elisha skipped over all the Jews suffering from either starvation and thirst, or leprosy, and chose to heal instead a Gentile. Jesus doesn’t want to taunt or ridicule the Nazarenes, he just wants them to let go of their pride and arrogance and see that the word of God cannot be contained in one privileged home town.
Parker Palmer writes, "At the heart of any authentic religious experience is recognition that God's nature is too huge, God's movement too deep, ever to be comprehended by a single conception or point of view….God's truth is singular and eternal, but the forms in which we give it expression are as finite and fragile as clay pots, and we must always be ready to break them open on behalf of a larger vision of truth."
There is a reason that Luke uses this story as the introduction to Jesus’ ministry. It has all of the themes that Luke returns to again and again in his Gospel and the Book of Acts. Luke stresses throughout both books that Jesus came in order to bring the Gospel, the Good News, to all lands and all peoples.
Jesus fulfills what the prophets promised and brings his message to the people who need it the most – regardless of their class, status, religious beliefs or cleanliness. Jesus is persecuted by his own people because he shakes up the status quo and turns his back on their expectations of grandeur and fame.
At the end of the Gospel Jesus is crucified in Jerusalem – at the very heart of the Jewish power center. Today’s reading prepares us for what lies ahead for Jesus and his followers – the vengeance of an angry crowd that has missed the point of Jesus’ words.
What the crowd at Nazareth didn’t have was the love of God that drove Jesus to find a more receptive audience. The full extent of this cosmic love wasn’t understood until Resurrection. It was only then that everything he taught began to fall into place.
Paul was one of the people that hunted down the Christians with vengeance and murderous rage. His conversion showed him the extent of his pride and arrogance and gave him the fuel to warn others of the dangers self-righteousness.
Paul is able to see that the Christians in Corinth are in grave danger. Their self-centered dissents threaten to break the church apart. The love Paul describes is agape, the unmotivated and free gift of God’s love for us. It is vibrantly different from the self-seeking, romantic love of human beings. It doesn’t necessarily feel good when we act in accord with this agape love, but it does resonate with God’s will for us and for the entire world.
The people of Corinth were proud of all their spiritual gifts – they were speaking in tongues and prophesying. They were eating together and singing songs of thanksgiving and praise. But they were excluding many people from the inner circle and were fighting with each other over who had the best gifts.
Paul emphasizes that any spectacular manifestations of spiritual power or prophecy are pointless unless they flow from the selfless and unmotivated fountain of God’s love.
There are two important characteristics of this love: agape is beyond our control and it depends upon a deep and abiding humility. One cannot love by willpower alone. We can’t leave the church today and make the promise, “Today I will love,” and then succeed at loving everyone.
Love is beyond our control. In order to understand its illusive and penetrating power you must practice true humility. And this is the most difficult of Christ’s teachings.
There is a story of a man who wanted to be humble: “He was very happy when he managed to be humble. But he was very sorry that he was happy that he was humble. And he was very happy that he was so sorry that he was happy that he was humble.”
This story describes the problems we run into when we try to be humble – it creates a vicious circle. Once humility is possessed it is lost, since humility grows out of knowing one’s poverty.
This poverty is what connects us to Christ’s love. He became poor for our sake and asks us to do the same. Love is not a feeling at all, but a relationship with the divine that is simply there at times and not at all in our control. It is a radiation of cosmic power, like a wave. Our job is to lose our need for control and let the wave of God’s love overpower us.
We can’t really love one another without admitting that our human ability to act out this love is wounded. We are dependent upon God acting through us. We must attribute any true act of love as stemming from God alone. And we must learn the difficult task of letting others glow with the love of God when we feel left out. Love is not a quantifiable substance. There is enough love of God to fill each of us for eternity. And we need not be jealous of other’s gifts.
The people of Nazareth didn’t understand this. They were angry, threatened and jealous that Jesus took his gifts elsewhere. They were left standing on the precipice wondering where he disappeared to, and clueless to the message he brought.
If they were to act in the spirit of Paul’s letter to the Corinthians they would give up their self-centered need to be famous and accepted and follow Jesus to the next town. Agape love celebrates at every lost sheep found and every wounded soul saved.
It is our daily challenge to let go of our own preconceptions of love in order to admit we have no idea where God’s love might take us today. May we help each other to nurture this love in our own community.
Last Sunday in Epiphany
February 14, 2010
The Rev Deborah Magdalene, OSH
St Alban’s Episcopal Church
“With You, Oh God, is the fountain of life, and in your light we see light.” (Ps 36:9)
When I was 20 years old I spent the summer working in a High Sierra camp in Yosemite National Park. The camp was called “Sunrise” and at 10,000ft high it felt like a home among the clouds.
It was the most amazing summer of my youth. I worked as a waitress in the food tent, a maid in the overnight tents, and as a concierge, mountain guide, and naturalist in my off hours. I played my guitar and sang John Denver songs to the campfire in the evenings.
My favorite hike was to a place called Cloud’s Rest, a huge slab of granite that served as an overlook to Yosemite Valley, nestled 6,000ft below. Sitting on the edge of this precipice I felt close to God. And like the name implies, hikers were regularly engulfed in the cold mist of clouds coming to rest like lamb’s wool on the cold granite dome. When the clouds came it was time for the hikers to leave. Lightening is often not very far behind.
The season of Epiphany comes to a close today with the story of Jesus’ transfiguration on a mountain top in Galilee. It is a story of the illuminating light of God setting off a chain of reactions that brings light into the lives of the hopeless and helpless even as it sends Jesus to his fate on the cross.
Epiphany begins with the wise men from the east, following the light of a star to find the infant Jesus, lying in a manger. What they discover brings them to their knees, as they recognize the true nature of God in a unique infant.
The word “epiphany” means, “the appearance or manifestation God.” Another term for this phenomenon is theophany: “a visible manifestation of God.” The season of Epiphany features the Gospel stories where the divine nature of Jesus emanates from him like the light of the sun, blinding in its power and able to transform doubt into dazzling belief.
During Epiphany, we hear Jesus teaching in the synagogue at Nazareth, “The Spirit of God is upon me because he has anointed me to bring good news to the poor.” (Luke 4: 18) Jesus’ first miracle is the turning of water into a ridiculous abundance of fine wine, revealing his glory to the disciples, “who believed in him” from that point on. (John 2:11)
Jesus increases the disciples’ faith by giving them such an abundant catch of fish that their boats begin to sink, leaving them questioning their sanity and shaking with fear and awe.
At Jesus’ baptism, John the Baptist’s followers hear the voice of God proclaim, “You are my Son, the Beloved, with you I am well pleased.” (Luke 3:22) They witness a dove, a sign from God, descending on Jesus in a fluttering of wings, stirring up awe, wonder, and fear as the known world changes before their eyes.
Epiphany stories wake us up and recharge our batteries so that we can make it through the hard times ahead. We are about to descend into Lent, beginning this Wednesday, as ashes are smeared on our heads and we are reminded that we are “but dust and to dust we shall return.”
It is helpful to remember that even dust originates from the stars and has the capacity to glow, just as we carry the light of Christ through the darkest of times. Faith is belief without tangible evidence. Our faith in the light of Christ is buoyed by Epiphany stories but gains its power from the testing of darkness.
Mountaintop experiences end, but we carry the faith we receive on the mountaintop securely in our communal heart – passing the flame among us in order to keep it alive.
Today’s readings compare two mountaintop experiences – Moses and Jesus. Paul teaches the Corinthians how the two stories differ. Let’s look at how they are the same.
Moses descends from the mountain with his face glowing so brightly that it hurts the eyes of all who look upon him. But, “Moses did not know that the skin of his face shone because he had been talking with God.” (Exodus 34:29)
His transformation was for the benefit of the God’s people. The rays of light radiating from Moses’ face provide evidence of his intimate relationship with God. The fear of those who witness this physical transformation, this theophany, or epiphany, instills a respectful obedience from the Israelites. This man Moses is obviously someone who can lead them through the wilderness because he speaks to God so intensely that his face glows with God’s light.
The Israelites believed that no-one could look upon the face of God and live. The light they see radiating from Moses is God’s light in a human face. They don’t know how to handle this new phenomenon. When in doubt, better to veil Moses’ face while it glows, lest they gaze upon the light of God and die because of it.
The Jewish liturgy continues the practice of keeping scripture under a veil, or covering, reminding the faithful that underneath the veil waits the blinding light of God’s revelation.
Jesus is on the mountaintop to pray. Just like Moses, Jesus climbs to the highest point he can find in order to enter into the luminal space between earth and heaven, human and divine. The air is thin up there and it literally takes your breath away. Jesus already stands with one foot in eternity, but when he prays, wherever he is, time stands still – the past becomes present, and the future twinkles with reality.
Peter, James and John gaze upon Moses and Elijah, standing there on either side of Jesus. Commentators explain that the presence of Moses and Elijah is confirmation that Jesus is the continuation of the ancient faith story of his people, and is the fulfillment of all that has come before.
Moses represents the Torah, the great and ancient stories of creation, human sin, redemption, promise, and covenant. Elijah represents the stories of the great prophets – warning humankind to pay attention to God in their midst, calling them repeatedly to change direction and focus on God’s will instead of their own.
Jesus is planted firmly in between the two figures as the bridge between the old and the new, between promise and fulfillment. As Moses led his people out of slavery into freedom, Jesus will lead all of God’s people out of the slavery of sin and death into a new home where all of creation will be redeemed.
I have a great deal of sympathy for Peter, wanting to build some kind of sheltering monument for Moses, Elijah and Jesus. It is a natural enough thing to want to build shrines where the Holy has taken place. Just look at what the Christians have done to the Holy Land.
There are treasures of gold, jewels and icons, lit by the light of eternal flames that burn around the entrances to the cave in Bethlehem, the mount of the Transfiguration, and the tomb at Calvary – none of which are verifiably holy sites, but it doesn’t seem to matter.
What matters is that there are places here on earth where Holy events actually happened. And that is enough to bring tears to pilgrim’s eyes even thousands of years from the time it all happened. Jesus did climb some mountain in Galilee, but as our Gospel stories emphasize – no-one built a shrine, so we’re not exactly sure where it was.
Peter wants to remember it forever. He’d like to come there again, to the very mountaintop where Jesus was transfigured before them, in order to remember that Yes, it really happened, and there were three of us there to see this marvelous theophany.
This is not what Jesus wants them to do. No matter how powerful a transformative experience is, it is not in the remembering of it, or the hallowing of the place where it happened that its power lies. No. The power of an experience of the Holy is what transforms within us.
Think of a time when you have seen someone’s face glow with the radiance of holiness. We have all seen it. We recognize it at ordinations, consecrations, baptisms, and Christmas Eves. We see it in the eyes of children reaching out for the blessed bread at communion.
Frederick Bueckner writes, “That they had caught something from Christ, I thought. Something of who he was and is flickered out through who they were.”
Paul explains to the Corinthians that with Jesus, a new light has come upon us all: a light that results in our own transformation. Paul uses the term ‘light’ interchangeably with truth. The truth of the Gospel is light to those who believe, but is veiled to those who don’t. Here Paul is using the word ‘veil’ to mean misunderstand.
When Moses descended from the mountaintop his face was radiant with blinding light. Those who believe in the truth of the Gospel see the words themselves as glowing with the light of truth.
“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.” (2Cor 3:18)
What Paul is teaching us is exactly why Jesus told the disciples not to be afraid. The glory of God, living in the truth of who Jesus is, changes all believers into bearers of the same glory that lit Christ from within.
What Peter, James and John witness is the light of Christ shining a light straight to his fate in Jerusalem. Moses and Elijah whisper to Jesus where he is to go, and it is this news that lights him up with the holy purpose of God. When he descends from the mountain he turns his face resolutely toward Jerusalem, knowing what will happen to him there. And he tells his disciples not to fear.
The light of Epiphany points us toward Calvary and challenges us to be steadfast in our faith and never to abandon our hope in God’s glory.
When I left my aerie in Yosemite I was married within the year and quickly had two children. I suffered from a prolonged post partum depression that eventually morphed into clinical depression. I didn’t quite lose my faith, but it became the darkest time of my life.
It was because of my belief that my children needed to find God in their own lives that I finally went back to church. I was acting on instinct alone, having them baptized at the Easter vigil service when they were 3 and 4 years old. Their baptism was the beginning of a long journey of faith for me. I never left the church again, and it was through pastoral counseling that my depression finally lifted.
The Psalmist writes, “With You, Oh God, is the fountain of life, and in your light we see light.” It is our responsibility as Christians to carry the light within us as if it is the Christ child himself.
Throughout the season of Lent we will come up for air every Sunday, reminding each other that Easter already came, so we can celebrate the Resurrection in the midst of our disciplines and dark Lenten stories.
Matthew writes, “Let your light shine before others, so that they may see your good works and give glory to your Father in heaven.” (Matthew 5:16) It is in the sharing of our Epiphany light that we keep it glowing. We must be as ready to ask for this light when we need it as we are to offer it when we feel abundant. It takes faith seekers as well as faith givers to make a complete community.
May we have the grace to look at our own St. Alban’s community and share not only the light of Christ with each other, but also our pain and struggles. It is what Jesus asks us all to do as we walk with him from the mountaintop to Jerusalem.
The Rev Deborah Magdalene, OSH
St Alban’s Episcopal Church
“With You, Oh God, is the fountain of life, and in your light we see light.” (Ps 36:9)
When I was 20 years old I spent the summer working in a High Sierra camp in Yosemite National Park. The camp was called “Sunrise” and at 10,000ft high it felt like a home among the clouds.
It was the most amazing summer of my youth. I worked as a waitress in the food tent, a maid in the overnight tents, and as a concierge, mountain guide, and naturalist in my off hours. I played my guitar and sang John Denver songs to the campfire in the evenings.
My favorite hike was to a place called Cloud’s Rest, a huge slab of granite that served as an overlook to Yosemite Valley, nestled 6,000ft below. Sitting on the edge of this precipice I felt close to God. And like the name implies, hikers were regularly engulfed in the cold mist of clouds coming to rest like lamb’s wool on the cold granite dome. When the clouds came it was time for the hikers to leave. Lightening is often not very far behind.
The season of Epiphany comes to a close today with the story of Jesus’ transfiguration on a mountain top in Galilee. It is a story of the illuminating light of God setting off a chain of reactions that brings light into the lives of the hopeless and helpless even as it sends Jesus to his fate on the cross.
Epiphany begins with the wise men from the east, following the light of a star to find the infant Jesus, lying in a manger. What they discover brings them to their knees, as they recognize the true nature of God in a unique infant.
The word “epiphany” means, “the appearance or manifestation God.” Another term for this phenomenon is theophany: “a visible manifestation of God.” The season of Epiphany features the Gospel stories where the divine nature of Jesus emanates from him like the light of the sun, blinding in its power and able to transform doubt into dazzling belief.
During Epiphany, we hear Jesus teaching in the synagogue at Nazareth, “The Spirit of God is upon me because he has anointed me to bring good news to the poor.” (Luke 4: 18) Jesus’ first miracle is the turning of water into a ridiculous abundance of fine wine, revealing his glory to the disciples, “who believed in him” from that point on. (John 2:11)
Jesus increases the disciples’ faith by giving them such an abundant catch of fish that their boats begin to sink, leaving them questioning their sanity and shaking with fear and awe.
At Jesus’ baptism, John the Baptist’s followers hear the voice of God proclaim, “You are my Son, the Beloved, with you I am well pleased.” (Luke 3:22) They witness a dove, a sign from God, descending on Jesus in a fluttering of wings, stirring up awe, wonder, and fear as the known world changes before their eyes.
Epiphany stories wake us up and recharge our batteries so that we can make it through the hard times ahead. We are about to descend into Lent, beginning this Wednesday, as ashes are smeared on our heads and we are reminded that we are “but dust and to dust we shall return.”
It is helpful to remember that even dust originates from the stars and has the capacity to glow, just as we carry the light of Christ through the darkest of times. Faith is belief without tangible evidence. Our faith in the light of Christ is buoyed by Epiphany stories but gains its power from the testing of darkness.
Mountaintop experiences end, but we carry the faith we receive on the mountaintop securely in our communal heart – passing the flame among us in order to keep it alive.
Today’s readings compare two mountaintop experiences – Moses and Jesus. Paul teaches the Corinthians how the two stories differ. Let’s look at how they are the same.
Moses descends from the mountain with his face glowing so brightly that it hurts the eyes of all who look upon him. But, “Moses did not know that the skin of his face shone because he had been talking with God.” (Exodus 34:29)
His transformation was for the benefit of the God’s people. The rays of light radiating from Moses’ face provide evidence of his intimate relationship with God. The fear of those who witness this physical transformation, this theophany, or epiphany, instills a respectful obedience from the Israelites. This man Moses is obviously someone who can lead them through the wilderness because he speaks to God so intensely that his face glows with God’s light.
The Israelites believed that no-one could look upon the face of God and live. The light they see radiating from Moses is God’s light in a human face. They don’t know how to handle this new phenomenon. When in doubt, better to veil Moses’ face while it glows, lest they gaze upon the light of God and die because of it.
The Jewish liturgy continues the practice of keeping scripture under a veil, or covering, reminding the faithful that underneath the veil waits the blinding light of God’s revelation.
Jesus is on the mountaintop to pray. Just like Moses, Jesus climbs to the highest point he can find in order to enter into the luminal space between earth and heaven, human and divine. The air is thin up there and it literally takes your breath away. Jesus already stands with one foot in eternity, but when he prays, wherever he is, time stands still – the past becomes present, and the future twinkles with reality.
Peter, James and John gaze upon Moses and Elijah, standing there on either side of Jesus. Commentators explain that the presence of Moses and Elijah is confirmation that Jesus is the continuation of the ancient faith story of his people, and is the fulfillment of all that has come before.
Moses represents the Torah, the great and ancient stories of creation, human sin, redemption, promise, and covenant. Elijah represents the stories of the great prophets – warning humankind to pay attention to God in their midst, calling them repeatedly to change direction and focus on God’s will instead of their own.
Jesus is planted firmly in between the two figures as the bridge between the old and the new, between promise and fulfillment. As Moses led his people out of slavery into freedom, Jesus will lead all of God’s people out of the slavery of sin and death into a new home where all of creation will be redeemed.
I have a great deal of sympathy for Peter, wanting to build some kind of sheltering monument for Moses, Elijah and Jesus. It is a natural enough thing to want to build shrines where the Holy has taken place. Just look at what the Christians have done to the Holy Land.
There are treasures of gold, jewels and icons, lit by the light of eternal flames that burn around the entrances to the cave in Bethlehem, the mount of the Transfiguration, and the tomb at Calvary – none of which are verifiably holy sites, but it doesn’t seem to matter.
What matters is that there are places here on earth where Holy events actually happened. And that is enough to bring tears to pilgrim’s eyes even thousands of years from the time it all happened. Jesus did climb some mountain in Galilee, but as our Gospel stories emphasize – no-one built a shrine, so we’re not exactly sure where it was.
Peter wants to remember it forever. He’d like to come there again, to the very mountaintop where Jesus was transfigured before them, in order to remember that Yes, it really happened, and there were three of us there to see this marvelous theophany.
This is not what Jesus wants them to do. No matter how powerful a transformative experience is, it is not in the remembering of it, or the hallowing of the place where it happened that its power lies. No. The power of an experience of the Holy is what transforms within us.
Think of a time when you have seen someone’s face glow with the radiance of holiness. We have all seen it. We recognize it at ordinations, consecrations, baptisms, and Christmas Eves. We see it in the eyes of children reaching out for the blessed bread at communion.
Frederick Bueckner writes, “That they had caught something from Christ, I thought. Something of who he was and is flickered out through who they were.”
Paul explains to the Corinthians that with Jesus, a new light has come upon us all: a light that results in our own transformation. Paul uses the term ‘light’ interchangeably with truth. The truth of the Gospel is light to those who believe, but is veiled to those who don’t. Here Paul is using the word ‘veil’ to mean misunderstand.
When Moses descended from the mountaintop his face was radiant with blinding light. Those who believe in the truth of the Gospel see the words themselves as glowing with the light of truth.
“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.” (2Cor 3:18)
What Paul is teaching us is exactly why Jesus told the disciples not to be afraid. The glory of God, living in the truth of who Jesus is, changes all believers into bearers of the same glory that lit Christ from within.
What Peter, James and John witness is the light of Christ shining a light straight to his fate in Jerusalem. Moses and Elijah whisper to Jesus where he is to go, and it is this news that lights him up with the holy purpose of God. When he descends from the mountain he turns his face resolutely toward Jerusalem, knowing what will happen to him there. And he tells his disciples not to fear.
The light of Epiphany points us toward Calvary and challenges us to be steadfast in our faith and never to abandon our hope in God’s glory.
When I left my aerie in Yosemite I was married within the year and quickly had two children. I suffered from a prolonged post partum depression that eventually morphed into clinical depression. I didn’t quite lose my faith, but it became the darkest time of my life.
It was because of my belief that my children needed to find God in their own lives that I finally went back to church. I was acting on instinct alone, having them baptized at the Easter vigil service when they were 3 and 4 years old. Their baptism was the beginning of a long journey of faith for me. I never left the church again, and it was through pastoral counseling that my depression finally lifted.
The Psalmist writes, “With You, Oh God, is the fountain of life, and in your light we see light.” It is our responsibility as Christians to carry the light within us as if it is the Christ child himself.
Throughout the season of Lent we will come up for air every Sunday, reminding each other that Easter already came, so we can celebrate the Resurrection in the midst of our disciplines and dark Lenten stories.
Matthew writes, “Let your light shine before others, so that they may see your good works and give glory to your Father in heaven.” (Matthew 5:16) It is in the sharing of our Epiphany light that we keep it glowing. We must be as ready to ask for this light when we need it as we are to offer it when we feel abundant. It takes faith seekers as well as faith givers to make a complete community.
May we have the grace to look at our own St. Alban’s community and share not only the light of Christ with each other, but also our pain and struggles. It is what Jesus asks us all to do as we walk with him from the mountaintop to Jerusalem.
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