Althnough this sermon was preached in Year B, it is the end of the Prologue to St. John's Gospel, and so is approp[riate for every First Sunday after Christmass. Merry Christmass! Happy New Year! Perren
The Law was given by Moses, but grace and truth came through Jesus Christ.
The Torah was the center piece of Jewish religion. Torah means “teaching,” but Greek version of the Old Testament translated Torah with the word “Nomos” which is the usual Greek word for law. And so for nearly 2500 years it has been referred to as “The Law.”
The Law, (or Teaching), given by Moses, contained all the rules needed to make it possible for people to live together in peace with their God and with each other. If only each person would obey the rules, all would be perfect, and peace would prevail all over the earth. The punishments - as they saw it - of the Jewish people came from the fact that they did not obey the law, either by deliberate action or by accidental misstep. If only they would obey the Law, life would be fine and perfect. Obeying the law defined the People of God.
But in any case, they looked to the Law to save them.
To save them from what? What was the problem that they faced? Why did they find a need for a Law? What were they trying to accomplish? The answer, in part, lies in the Epistle to the Galatians. Underneath all the legal language Paul uses there, particularly in the 3rd chapter, there are at least two important things: First, our relationship with God is messed up, and needs to be restored. Because of this fact, our relationship with each other is also messed up. These two things, relationship with God and relationship with each other are fundamental to living together with peace and justice on the earth, here and now. The Law can point you in the right direction, says Paul, but the Law cannot restore the relationships.
Yet not only the ancient Jew, but people in every time and in every age, have tried to make law, or some other icon, and use it in order to take away from us the responsibility that is of the very nature of the creation itself.
Again and again we search for, and hope for, something external to ourselves that will remove from us the responsibility of making decisions about our relationships. One of the great disappointments of those of us who worked in the Civil Rights movements in the 60's is that the passage of laws giving legal status to equal rights for all people (not just black and white) - one of the disappointments is that even where the laws are obeyed, it is often done with a precision that requires an extra piece on the law. Instead of treating all people with the same respect and honor that we would expect for our selves, many people see how far they have to go to be obedient to the law, and then not go any farther. Others actively study the law to see what they can get away with legally. And while this is a great curse on our society in the matter of civil rights for all kinds and groups of people, this attempt to obey the law just enough to avoid getting indicted, it is equally true in other areas of our life. Without meaning to offend anyone who is trying to do the right thing, one of the duties of tax attorneys is to find what are improperly called loopholes in the law; the same is true of anti trust, and securities. Now I hope you see the real problem with obedience to the law. It has no heart; no generousity, no love.
The Law was given through Moses, but grace and truth came through Jesus Christ. John, or whoever is the author of the Fourth Gospel, tells us that Law is not sufficient, because it takes away from us our own responsibility; it removes us from the essential nature of Creation; it keeps us from Truth. When you look at the Greek of this passage, you will see that indeed the law was given through Moses - was given, is the verb. But the next part of the sentence is quite different: Grace and truth. The word for grace is χαρις, the basis of the word for self giving love, or, as the Revised Standard translates the word, steadfast love. And the word for come is the verb to be born: thus another translation might well be, “but love and truth are born in Jesus Christ.” It all reads, then, The Law was given through Moses, but love and truth are born in Jesus Christ.
Some of you may have heard of the late Dr. W. Edmonds Demming. General MacArthur brought Demming to Japan after World War 2 to teach the Japanese how to develop their economy. Many people are not aware that Dr. Demming was not only an Episcopalian, but a very active and devout member of St. Paul’s Parish K Street in Washington. Dr. Demming clearly understood what the Evangelist is talking about here. In fact, he made it the basis of his managerial instructions to businesses all over the world, especially in Japan. Individual responsibility and personal commitment are fundamental to successful businesses, to successful manufacturing, and to fundamental living together. The Fourth Gospel teaches us that: Dr. Demming teaches us that. People are not cogs in a machine. Each is a fully independent person, each with his or her own individual responsibility for excellence each step of the way. People and businesses and schools that work this way will be successful. Why? Because this is of the very essence of the universe that God has created.
Love and Truth are born through Jesus Christ. Listen to St. Paul: “When God gives you the Spirit and works miracles among you, is it because you keep the law? Or is it because you have faith in the Gospel message?.”
You see, it is not in some external thing that salvation can be found; it is not in the Law given through Moses; not even in law given through the Church or religious rules; Salvation is found in the Love and Truth born in the person of Jesus Christ. Again, St. Paul: It is through faith that you are all children of God in union with Christ Jesus; baptized into oneness with him, you have all put on Christ Jesus like a garment: there is no such thing as Jew and Greek, slave and freeman, male and female: you are all one person in Jesus Christ. Love and Truth are in Jesus Christ, and it is in our humanity that God came to show us this fundamental truth of nature. See how important the translation used in the Liturgy really is.
God’s love is so great that he not only became one of us, but even then he asked our cooperation, not only with the fact of the incarnation itself (Mary could have said “No thanks.”), but at each stage along the way, God asks our cooperation. For love and truth are born of the person of Jesus Christ.
Listen to the words of St. Gregory of Nazianzus, who died in 389: “Christ is born: glorify him.
Christ comes from heaven, go out to meet him.
Christ descends to earth: let us be raised on high.
Let all the world sing to the Lord; let the heavens rejoice and let the earth be glad, for his sake who was first in heaven and then on earth. . . The things of old have passed away; behold, all things are made new.
He who has no mother in heaven is now born without father on earth. The laws of nature are overthrown, for the upper world must be filled with citizens. He who is without flesh becomes enfleshed; the Word puts on a Body; the Invisible is seen; he whom no hand can touch is handled; the Timeless has a beginning; the Son of God becomes the Son of Man– Jesus Christ, the same yesterday today and forever. . . O strange conjunction! The Selfexistent comes into existence; the Uncreated is created. He shares in the poverty of my flesh, that I may share in the riches of his God head.
My sisters [and brothers] God asks your cooperation:– go from this place filled with his love and truth; through you let truth and love be born into that place where God has placed you as witness to the new life of Resurrection; for it is Resurrection Life that is born into the world –
through Jesus
through you!
Saturday, December 28, 2013
This sermon is for the First Sunday after Christmass. Although this one was preached in Year B, it it also appropriate for Year A -- this year. After all, it IS the concluding part of the Prologue to the Gospel according to John. Marry Christmass/ Happy New Year. Perren
The Law was given by Moses, but grace and truth came through Jesus Christ.
The Torah was the center piece of Jewish religion. Torah means “teaching,” but Greek version of the Old Testament translated Torah with the word “Nomos” which is the usual Greek word for law. And so for nearly 2500 years it has been referred to as “The Law.”
The Law, (or Teaching), given by Moses, contained all the rules needed to make it possible for people to live together in peace with their God and with each other. If only each person would obey the rules, all would be perfect, and peace would prevail all over the earth. The punishments - as they saw it - of the Jewish people came from the fact that they did not obey the law, either by deliberate action or by accidental misstep. If only they would obey the Law, life would be fine and perfect. Obeying the law defined the People of God.
But in any case, they looked to the Law to save them.
To save them from what? What was the problem that they faced? Why did they find a need for a Law? What were they trying to accomplish? The answer, in part, lies in the Epistle to the Galatians. Underneath all the legal language Paul uses there, particularly in the 3rd chapter, there are at least two important things: First, our relationship with God is messed up, and needs to be restored. Because of this fact, our relationship with each other is also messed up. These two things, relationship with God and relationship with each other are fundamental to living together with peace and justice on the earth, here and now. The Law can point you in the right direction, says Paul, but the Law cannot restore the relationships.
Yet not only the ancient Jew, but people in every time and in every age, have tried to make law, or some other icon, and use it in order to take away from us the responsibility that is of the very nature of the creation itself.
Again and again we search for, and hope for, something external to ourselves that will remove from us the responsibility of making decisions about our relationships. One of the great disappointments of those of us who worked in the Civil Rights movements in the 60's is that the passage of laws giving legal status to equal rights for all people (not just black and white) - one of the disappointments is that even where the laws are obeyed, it is often done with a precision that requires an extra piece on the law. Instead of treating all people with the same respect and honor that we would expect for our selves, many people see how far they have to go to be obedient to the law, and then not go any farther. Others actively study the law to see what they can get away with legally. And while this is a great curse on our society in the matter of civil rights for all kinds and groups of people, this attempt to obey the law just enough to avoid getting indicted, it is equally true in other areas of our life. Without meaning to offend anyone who is trying to do the right thing, one of the duties of tax attorneys is to find what are improperly called loopholes in the law; the same is true of anti trust, and securities. Now I hope you see the real problem with obedience to the law. It has no heart; no generousity, no love.
The Law was given through Moses, but grace and truth came through Jesus Christ. John, or whoever is the author of the Fourth Gospel, tells us that Law is not sufficient, because it takes away from us our own responsibility; it removes us from the essential nature of Creation; it keeps us from Truth. When you look at the Greek of this passage, you will see that indeed the law was given through Moses - was given, is the verb. But the next part of the sentence is quite different: Grace and truth. The word for grace is χαρις, the basis of the word for self giving love, or, as the Revised Standard translates the word, steadfast love. And the word for come is the verb to be born: thus another translation might well be, “but love and truth are born in Jesus Christ.” It all reads, then, The Law was given through Moses, but love and truth are born in Jesus Christ.
Some of you may have heard of the late Dr. W. Edmonds Demming. General MacArthur brought Demming to Japan after World War 2 to teach the Japanese how to develop their economy. Many people are not aware that Dr. Demming was not only an Episcopalian, but a very active and devout member of St. Paul’s Parish K Street in Washington. Dr. Demming clearly understood what the Evangelist is talking about here. In fact, he made it the basis of his managerial instructions to businesses all over the world, especially in Japan. Individual responsibility and personal commitment are fundamental to successful businesses, to successful manufacturing, and to fundamental living together. The Fourth Gospel teaches us that: Dr. Demming teaches us that. People are not cogs in a machine. Each is a fully independent person, each with his or her own individual responsibility for excellence each step of the way. People and businesses and schools that work this way will be successful. Why? Because this is of the very essence of the universe that God has created.
Love and Truth are born through Jesus Christ. Listen to St. Paul: “When God gives you the Spirit and works miracles among you, is it because you keep the law? Or is it because you have faith in the Gospel message?.”
You see, it is not in some external thing that salvation can be found; it is not in the Law given through Moses; not even in law given through the Church or religious rules; Salvation is found in the Love and Truth born in the person of Jesus Christ. Again, St. Paul: It is through faith that you are all children of God in union with Christ Jesus; baptized into oneness with him, you have all put on Christ Jesus like a garment: there is no such thing as Jew and Greek, slave and freeman, male and female: you are all one person in Jesus Christ. Love and Truth are in Jesus Christ, and it is in our humanity that God came to show us this fundamental truth of nature. See how important the translation used in the Liturgy really is.
God’s love is so great that he not only became one of us, but even then he asked our cooperation, not only with the fact of the incarnation itself (Mary could have said “No thanks.”), but at each stage along the way, God asks our cooperation. For love and truth are born of the person of Jesus Christ.
Listen to the words of St. Gregory of Nazianzus, who died in 389: “Christ is born: glorify him.
Christ comes from heaven, go out to meet him.
Christ descends to earth: let us be raised on high.
Let all the world sing to the Lord; let the heavens rejoice and let the earth be glad, for his sake who was first in heaven and then on earth. . . The things of old have passed away; behold, all things are made new.
He who has no mother in heaven is now born without father on earth. The laws of nature are overthrown, for the upper world must be filled with citizens. He who is without flesh becomes enfleshed; the Word puts on a Body; the Invisible is seen; he whom no hand can touch is handled; the Timeless has a beginning; the Son of God becomes the Son of Man– Jesus Christ, the same yesterday today and forever. . . O strange conjunction! The Selfexistent comes into existence; the Uncreated is created. He shares in the poverty of my flesh, that I may share in the riches of his God head.
My sisters [and brothers] God asks your cooperation:– go from this place filled with his love and truth; through you let truth and love be born into that place where God has placed you as witness to the new life of Resurrection; for it is Resurrection Life that is born into the world –
through Jesus
through you!
Tuesday, December 24, 2013
Christmass Midnight Mass
This sermon originated at the Convent of St, Mary in Peekskill, and has been updated twice since. It is still pertinent, I think. Merry Christmass!
Christmas Day, Mass of Midnight
The ox knows its owner; the donkey knows where his next meal is. Isaiah 1:2
When General Convention decided to produce the 1979 Book of Common Prayer, it instructed the Commission, it said (in my interpretation) that they were to reconstruct the theology on which th Prayer Book was based. The first American Prayer Book was already the Scottish revision of the Puritan dominated English book of 1662; our American Book was revised in 1892 and took advantage of the beginning of modern Biblical and historical studies – it began a process that continued with the 1928 Prayer Book that emphasized “Incarnation.” The “humanness” of Jesus; the fact that a real human being was born in Bethlehem, and that through that human being, humans were redeemed and brought into the very nature of God. It was this teaching that allowed the midnight mass of Christmass to outshine all other Christian celebration of Christmass. But the 1979 Commission was “instructed” to return to the “earliest” theology of the Church – the theology of “resurrection.” (You know, “Easter” we call it.) And so they did; generally speaking though, little attention was paid to this massive change. (Just one more step before I move into today.) Important as Incarnation is to our religion, it has zero meaning without Resurrection/New-Life/Creation theology.
We are here NOT because of the oxen, the donkey, the angels and the new born babe in swaddling clothing, the Virgin Mary, and the rest of the beautiful picture. You know, none of that has the slightest bit of importance without the Resurrection. There were more than 100 people who had claimed to be ‘messiah’ during the time of Jesus, and, except for their execution, they made no mark in the history of the world.
My friends, we are here, because Jesus was raised from the dead.
We are here because Jesus is a new act of creation, a new burst of the primal energy that my generation was beginning to learn to call “The Big Bang.” (A Roman Catholic priest invented the term at the end of the 1920s.) “Big Bang” was accepted as a term to explain what modern math and science of the time could not explain.
In fact, science STILL cannot explain it – in spite of math, mirrors telescopes, radio and other electronic waves. Stephen Hawking taught that even with all our scientific tools, we could explain and even diagram the actual beginning of the Great Universe in which we all live – but only so far. This huge expanding universe in which we live commenced from a dot so tiny that it had no measurements that we can determine with our math and quantum physics. We can get close, he said, but no closer than 10 to minus 1 with an excess of 40 places. He said that the laws of nature, as described by Isaac Newton’s studies are limited, and that we probably will never get closer than that to the moment of origin of the Universe.
(By the way, Isaac Newton was a member of the Church of England, the mother of the Episcopal Church, as also was Charles Darwin.)
Even though we really don’t know about that exact moment of the beginning of the universe, yet we have a story that we all learn and believe. It tells of how this tiny spot exploded, creating gasses that instantly began moving away from that spot outward into nothingness. It has been doing that for some 16 billion years – still moving into nothingness! This is the eternal human attempt to explain who we are, how we got here and what we are supposed to do. The fact is, though, that we cannot, through the use of what we know to this point in history, really understand it.
We kill each other, both literally and verbally; we accumulate bits and pieces of the debris from the original big bang, and think we have something of value; we try to force others to think and act as we do, and shower them with contempt or worse; we allow children to have less than the best tools to learn about life; we allow many to starve to death, as we heap our own plate high; we sleep in our comfortable beds as we allow others of our brothers and sisters to sleep under the shadow of the steps at the back entrance into the International Monetary Bank.
My friends, we come here to this place, week after week, month after month, year after year, because we believe that there is more meaning to all these scientific calculations. And so we retell our story here, each year, at the time of solstice, in the deepness of dark. We add our faith to the faith of the scientists; we tell the same story – exactly. But we see hope – a better ending. Yes,
“In the beginning of God’s creation, God created all you see, all you don’t see. . .
God spoke: “Light”
And light appeared. . . .
God created human beings,
he made them godlike
reflecting God’s nature
he created them male and female.. . .
God looked over everything he had made;
it was so good, so very good!
And, trusting in the work of Creation, God directed humans to examine the universe, and use it to bring joy, peace, justice into creation – infusing them and it with the love that brought it all into reality. And it doesn’t come about like magic – it comes about with the intertwining of all humans – each with his or her contribution to make toward the whole. Thus does Creation move to a fulfillment none of us can really understand. But we can tell about it in poetry. Listen:--
The Word was first,
the Word present to God,
God present to the Word.
The Word was God,
in readiness for God from day one.
Everything was created through him;
nothing – not one thing –
came into being without him.
What came into existence was Life,
and the Life was the light to live by.
The Life-Light blazed out of the darkness;
the darkness couldn’t put it out.
There once was a man, his name was John, sent by God to point out the way to Life-Light. He came to show everyone where to look, who to believe in. John was not himself the Light; he was there to show the way to the Light.
The Life-Light was the real thing:
Every person entering life,
he brings into Light.
He was in the world,
the world was there through him,
and yet the world didn’t even notice.
He came to his own people,
but they didn’t want him.
But whoever did want him,
who believed he was who he claimed
and would do what he said,
He made to be their true selves,
their child-of-God selves
These are the God-begotten,
not the blood-begotten,
not flesh begotten,
not sex begotten.
The Word became flesh and blood,
and moved into [our own] neighborhood.
We saw the glory with our own eyes
the one-of-a-kind glory,
like Father, like Son,
Generous inside and out
true from start to finish. (The Message translation)
But, you see, redemption was shown by the life , death and resurrection of Jesus. That event made it clear that the order of nature as God created it was in charge of things. We humans are not the subjects of God, bound by some law to obey him. No, we are partners with God in bringing the creation – in those places where we are in touch with it – into its fullest function, its fullest being. That’s why God the Word – or God the Communicator – moved into our neighborhood. He lives among his partners and he assists us in carrying out our share in the completion of the NEW CREATION.
THAT”S why we care about the ox and the donkey and the manger and the baby-son-of-Mary. For that baby-son-of-Mary is in totally real fact, you and me. We are here, because, if you will, because of the Great Vigil of Easter. When Jesus died in triumph on the Cross and went to bring the Light to those who had gone before, he did it to show that all who have faith in the great Creator God are EQUALLY the children of God. (I didn’t make this up; there is nothing new in what I say – you can read all about it in Paul’s writings, especially Romans and First Corinthians.)
You see, the manger is here – this table. [point at it]
The food and drink are from the old creation.
The newly born surround it and feast on the heavenly food.
And we, the new born in Jesus, are like the ox and the donkey,
for we know without any doubt that HERE is the meaning of Creation.
And it takes both our faith and the faith of the scientists and mathematicians to help us understand all this.
But when all is said and done,
the Word was made flesh and joins us here.
And as we struggle in our swaddling clothes,
the angels come right here, into this very place.
And they sing -- Oh! they sing --
Glory to God in the highest,
and
peace to all of good will.
Merry Christmass
Christmas Day, Mass of Midnight
The ox knows its owner; the donkey knows where his next meal is. Isaiah 1:2
When General Convention decided to produce the 1979 Book of Common Prayer, it instructed the Commission, it said (in my interpretation) that they were to reconstruct the theology on which th Prayer Book was based. The first American Prayer Book was already the Scottish revision of the Puritan dominated English book of 1662; our American Book was revised in 1892 and took advantage of the beginning of modern Biblical and historical studies – it began a process that continued with the 1928 Prayer Book that emphasized “Incarnation.” The “humanness” of Jesus; the fact that a real human being was born in Bethlehem, and that through that human being, humans were redeemed and brought into the very nature of God. It was this teaching that allowed the midnight mass of Christmass to outshine all other Christian celebration of Christmass. But the 1979 Commission was “instructed” to return to the “earliest” theology of the Church – the theology of “resurrection.” (You know, “Easter” we call it.) And so they did; generally speaking though, little attention was paid to this massive change. (Just one more step before I move into today.) Important as Incarnation is to our religion, it has zero meaning without Resurrection/New-Life/Creation theology.
We are here NOT because of the oxen, the donkey, the angels and the new born babe in swaddling clothing, the Virgin Mary, and the rest of the beautiful picture. You know, none of that has the slightest bit of importance without the Resurrection. There were more than 100 people who had claimed to be ‘messiah’ during the time of Jesus, and, except for their execution, they made no mark in the history of the world.
My friends, we are here, because Jesus was raised from the dead.
We are here because Jesus is a new act of creation, a new burst of the primal energy that my generation was beginning to learn to call “The Big Bang.” (A Roman Catholic priest invented the term at the end of the 1920s.) “Big Bang” was accepted as a term to explain what modern math and science of the time could not explain.
In fact, science STILL cannot explain it – in spite of math, mirrors telescopes, radio and other electronic waves. Stephen Hawking taught that even with all our scientific tools, we could explain and even diagram the actual beginning of the Great Universe in which we all live – but only so far. This huge expanding universe in which we live commenced from a dot so tiny that it had no measurements that we can determine with our math and quantum physics. We can get close, he said, but no closer than 10 to minus 1 with an excess of 40 places. He said that the laws of nature, as described by Isaac Newton’s studies are limited, and that we probably will never get closer than that to the moment of origin of the Universe.
(By the way, Isaac Newton was a member of the Church of England, the mother of the Episcopal Church, as also was Charles Darwin.)
Even though we really don’t know about that exact moment of the beginning of the universe, yet we have a story that we all learn and believe. It tells of how this tiny spot exploded, creating gasses that instantly began moving away from that spot outward into nothingness. It has been doing that for some 16 billion years – still moving into nothingness! This is the eternal human attempt to explain who we are, how we got here and what we are supposed to do. The fact is, though, that we cannot, through the use of what we know to this point in history, really understand it.
We kill each other, both literally and verbally; we accumulate bits and pieces of the debris from the original big bang, and think we have something of value; we try to force others to think and act as we do, and shower them with contempt or worse; we allow children to have less than the best tools to learn about life; we allow many to starve to death, as we heap our own plate high; we sleep in our comfortable beds as we allow others of our brothers and sisters to sleep under the shadow of the steps at the back entrance into the International Monetary Bank.
My friends, we come here to this place, week after week, month after month, year after year, because we believe that there is more meaning to all these scientific calculations. And so we retell our story here, each year, at the time of solstice, in the deepness of dark. We add our faith to the faith of the scientists; we tell the same story – exactly. But we see hope – a better ending. Yes,
“In the beginning of God’s creation, God created all you see, all you don’t see. . .
God spoke: “Light”
And light appeared. . . .
God created human beings,
he made them godlike
reflecting God’s nature
he created them male and female.. . .
God looked over everything he had made;
it was so good, so very good!
And, trusting in the work of Creation, God directed humans to examine the universe, and use it to bring joy, peace, justice into creation – infusing them and it with the love that brought it all into reality. And it doesn’t come about like magic – it comes about with the intertwining of all humans – each with his or her contribution to make toward the whole. Thus does Creation move to a fulfillment none of us can really understand. But we can tell about it in poetry. Listen:--
The Word was first,
the Word present to God,
God present to the Word.
The Word was God,
in readiness for God from day one.
Everything was created through him;
nothing – not one thing –
came into being without him.
What came into existence was Life,
and the Life was the light to live by.
The Life-Light blazed out of the darkness;
the darkness couldn’t put it out.
There once was a man, his name was John, sent by God to point out the way to Life-Light. He came to show everyone where to look, who to believe in. John was not himself the Light; he was there to show the way to the Light.
The Life-Light was the real thing:
Every person entering life,
he brings into Light.
He was in the world,
the world was there through him,
and yet the world didn’t even notice.
He came to his own people,
but they didn’t want him.
But whoever did want him,
who believed he was who he claimed
and would do what he said,
He made to be their true selves,
their child-of-God selves
These are the God-begotten,
not the blood-begotten,
not flesh begotten,
not sex begotten.
The Word became flesh and blood,
and moved into [our own] neighborhood.
We saw the glory with our own eyes
the one-of-a-kind glory,
like Father, like Son,
Generous inside and out
true from start to finish. (The Message translation)
But, you see, redemption was shown by the life , death and resurrection of Jesus. That event made it clear that the order of nature as God created it was in charge of things. We humans are not the subjects of God, bound by some law to obey him. No, we are partners with God in bringing the creation – in those places where we are in touch with it – into its fullest function, its fullest being. That’s why God the Word – or God the Communicator – moved into our neighborhood. He lives among his partners and he assists us in carrying out our share in the completion of the NEW CREATION.
THAT”S why we care about the ox and the donkey and the manger and the baby-son-of-Mary. For that baby-son-of-Mary is in totally real fact, you and me. We are here, because, if you will, because of the Great Vigil of Easter. When Jesus died in triumph on the Cross and went to bring the Light to those who had gone before, he did it to show that all who have faith in the great Creator God are EQUALLY the children of God. (I didn’t make this up; there is nothing new in what I say – you can read all about it in Paul’s writings, especially Romans and First Corinthians.)
You see, the manger is here – this table. [point at it]
The food and drink are from the old creation.
The newly born surround it and feast on the heavenly food.
And we, the new born in Jesus, are like the ox and the donkey,
for we know without any doubt that HERE is the meaning of Creation.
And it takes both our faith and the faith of the scientists and mathematicians to help us understand all this.
But when all is said and done,
the Word was made flesh and joins us here.
And as we struggle in our swaddling clothes,
the angels come right here, into this very place.
And they sing -- Oh! they sing --
Glory to God in the highest,
and
peace to all of good will.
Merry Christmass
Saturday, December 7, 2013
This is the second sermon in Advent for Year A. This sermon was preached at St. Thoms Parish, Croom (Diocese of Washington (DC)) in 1998. Perren
Advent 2, 1998, Series, Croom, A
Repent, for the kingdom of heaven has come near.
Last week we began this series of Advent Sermons with a discussion of Creation. If one does not understand the Biblical concept of Creation, the one cannot understand the Biblical concept of sin. These two things are so intertwined, that it is difficult to separate them: if indeed they should be separated. Let me try to clarify somewhat.
Whether you believe that the universe was created in a literal six days or you accept the current theory of the “big bang” and a gradual evolution is not a valid issue when discussing the Bible teaching about creation. The Bible is concerned to make it clear that however it was created, it was created by God and by God alone, and creation was created by God alone, from nothing apart from God. When we understand that fact, then we will see that everything that is created, everything that exists or that can exist, in fact flows from the very essence of God. Because everything that exists flows from the essence of God, that same everything participates in the nature of God; and because it participates in the nature of God, it shares in the underlying spirituality which God is. Thus, everything that exists is of God, is good, and shares in the purpose or will of God. To live in terms of reality means to live in terms of this fact about God and creation. And, in fact, all of Creation – with one outstanding exception – lives automatically in terms of reality. Plants, animals, land- and sea- scape, planets, galaxies; electrical charges: all of these things do the will of God, because they do exactly what they were made to do: they cannot do other.
To the best of our current knowledge, only human beings have an option. The Bible tells this in the story of the Man and his Wife in the Garden of Eden. (Again, whether you see them as actual people or as part of a story that explains a truth, is not important.) This story tells us about sin. And the way it tells about sin is to show that sin means living out of touch with reality – separated from God.
God made all creation – the Garden – and created humans to be the administrators, the stewards, the caretakers, of the creation. Humans were to be able to do this because they reflected God himself; they were God’s own image, so to speak. Among the great multitude of things that means, is that humans can see God’s purpose, and live in accord with that purpose. But if the image of God is complete, it also includes freedom. In a perfect love relationship, each does the will, or shares the life of, the other by actual free choice. That is the meaning of the command not to eat the fruit of the tree in the midst of the Garden. God intends humans to love just as God loves: a continual outpouring of love – the essence of life: for, remember, God is love.
But humans are able to choose what they do. Humans don’t do things automatically; as a seed, when watered and placed in the sun, grows automatically. And the story tells us that humans, when allowed this freedom, this choice, humans can and often do, choose to place self in that place in their relationship to reality where God belongs. And when humans replace God with their own will, what they have done is to move away from reality: they have separated themselves from God. Thus sin is living outside the realm of reality; sin is separation from God; sin is placing self where God belongs in life. It is as simple – and as complex – as that.
Life apart from God is as painful as being hungry; it is as distressful as being thirsty; it makes one a stranger among your own; it makes one blind to creation; it makes one unable to hear the truth; it places one in prison; it makes one naked, exposing foolishness for all to see. Above all, sin makes one assume God’s greatest prerogative: sin makes humans presume to judge the motives and actions of others. Sin is the root of all broken relationships; sin is the root of all harm; sin is the root of whatever places humans against each other or against creation; sin is so powerful that it can convince one that sin is not involved in any painful situation.
When you see this Bible approach to sin, you will see that sin is NOT a list of wrong actions. Sin is an attitude of mind; sin is the real motivation behind any action or event in our life. It is NOT what you do so much as it is WHY you do it.
It is in this matter that we Anglicans are very different in our approach than Roman Catholics and the Reformation Churches. Often you have heard of “Mortal Sin” and “Venial Sin.” You have heard it said that “such and such” is a sin. Actually, that is NOT the case. The thing “done or not done” is not in itself sin – what is sin, is the motive. When you don’t sin because it’s on a list; or when you confess a sin that is chosen from a list; someone else has made your decision for you: - your are one step back from personal responsibility. Not so with Anglicans. We speak of “Sins of Malice,” not Mortal Sins; we speak of “Sins of Infirmity,” not Venial sins. “Malice” means deliberate personal choice; “infirmity” means a weakness in resolve. The only sin that is unforgivable is the Sin against the Holy Spirit: that is the sin that says “I have done nothing wrong:- it is all the other party’s fault.”
In essence, sin is the failure to use our minds to interpret our perceptions of God’s world. We allow our feelings or emotions to overrun our wisdom. We make all our judgments based on our own perceptions.
Repent/change your ways: the kingdom of God has come near.
Advent 2, 1998, Series, Croom, A
Repent, for the kingdom of heaven has come near.
Last week we began this series of Advent Sermons with a discussion of Creation. If one does not understand the Biblical concept of Creation, the one cannot understand the Biblical concept of sin. These two things are so intertwined, that it is difficult to separate them: if indeed they should be separated. Let me try to clarify somewhat.
Whether you believe that the universe was created in a literal six days or you accept the current theory of the “big bang” and a gradual evolution is not a valid issue when discussing the Bible teaching about creation. The Bible is concerned to make it clear that however it was created, it was created by God and by God alone, and creation was created by God alone, from nothing apart from God. When we understand that fact, then we will see that everything that is created, everything that exists or that can exist, in fact flows from the very essence of God. Because everything that exists flows from the essence of God, that same everything participates in the nature of God; and because it participates in the nature of God, it shares in the underlying spirituality which God is. Thus, everything that exists is of God, is good, and shares in the purpose or will of God. To live in terms of reality means to live in terms of this fact about God and creation. And, in fact, all of Creation – with one outstanding exception – lives automatically in terms of reality. Plants, animals, land- and sea- scape, planets, galaxies; electrical charges: all of these things do the will of God, because they do exactly what they were made to do: they cannot do other.
To the best of our current knowledge, only human beings have an option. The Bible tells this in the story of the Man and his Wife in the Garden of Eden. (Again, whether you see them as actual people or as part of a story that explains a truth, is not important.) This story tells us about sin. And the way it tells about sin is to show that sin means living out of touch with reality – separated from God.
God made all creation – the Garden – and created humans to be the administrators, the stewards, the caretakers, of the creation. Humans were to be able to do this because they reflected God himself; they were God’s own image, so to speak. Among the great multitude of things that means, is that humans can see God’s purpose, and live in accord with that purpose. But if the image of God is complete, it also includes freedom. In a perfect love relationship, each does the will, or shares the life of, the other by actual free choice. That is the meaning of the command not to eat the fruit of the tree in the midst of the Garden. God intends humans to love just as God loves: a continual outpouring of love – the essence of life: for, remember, God is love.
But humans are able to choose what they do. Humans don’t do things automatically; as a seed, when watered and placed in the sun, grows automatically. And the story tells us that humans, when allowed this freedom, this choice, humans can and often do, choose to place self in that place in their relationship to reality where God belongs. And when humans replace God with their own will, what they have done is to move away from reality: they have separated themselves from God. Thus sin is living outside the realm of reality; sin is separation from God; sin is placing self where God belongs in life. It is as simple – and as complex – as that.
Life apart from God is as painful as being hungry; it is as distressful as being thirsty; it makes one a stranger among your own; it makes one blind to creation; it makes one unable to hear the truth; it places one in prison; it makes one naked, exposing foolishness for all to see. Above all, sin makes one assume God’s greatest prerogative: sin makes humans presume to judge the motives and actions of others. Sin is the root of all broken relationships; sin is the root of all harm; sin is the root of whatever places humans against each other or against creation; sin is so powerful that it can convince one that sin is not involved in any painful situation.
When you see this Bible approach to sin, you will see that sin is NOT a list of wrong actions. Sin is an attitude of mind; sin is the real motivation behind any action or event in our life. It is NOT what you do so much as it is WHY you do it.
It is in this matter that we Anglicans are very different in our approach than Roman Catholics and the Reformation Churches. Often you have heard of “Mortal Sin” and “Venial Sin.” You have heard it said that “such and such” is a sin. Actually, that is NOT the case. The thing “done or not done” is not in itself sin – what is sin, is the motive. When you don’t sin because it’s on a list; or when you confess a sin that is chosen from a list; someone else has made your decision for you: - your are one step back from personal responsibility. Not so with Anglicans. We speak of “Sins of Malice,” not Mortal Sins; we speak of “Sins of Infirmity,” not Venial sins. “Malice” means deliberate personal choice; “infirmity” means a weakness in resolve. The only sin that is unforgivable is the Sin against the Holy Spirit: that is the sin that says “I have done nothing wrong:- it is all the other party’s fault.”
In essence, sin is the failure to use our minds to interpret our perceptions of God’s world. We allow our feelings or emotions to overrun our wisdom. We make all our judgments based on our own perceptions.
Repent/change your ways: the kingdom of God has come near.
Friday, November 29, 2013
This is the first of a series of Advent Sermons I preached in Year A, 1998. I present it to you for critique and/or other comments. I had just become Rector of a parish for the first time in 25 years; although I had been in charge of Missions or troubled parishes for about 15 of those years. The Bible translation is The Revised English Bible.
Perren
Advent I, 1998, Series, Croom
In the beginning, God created. . . (Genesis 1:1)
Being left-brained and literal – male in other words – I have always had trouble with subtlety in general, and poetry in particular. I’m uncomfortable with ambiguity. If I’m not “getting” what someone else is “getting,” is anybody “getting” anything?’ So begins an article in a magazine dedicated to success and power that came my way recently. It occurred to me that this also applies in the field of religion, that is, the field of living meaningfully.
We live in a nation, a society, a culture, which is perhaps the most left-brained, the most literal, the least subtle – or most unsubtle – nation, society or culture that ever existed. According to the people who study these things, our brains are made up of two parts. One, the left side, deals primarily with logic, math, precision, organization. The right side deals primarily with art, colors, gestalt or intuition, subtlety poetry. Each of us is, in fact, a combination of the two parts: but still, the vast majority of us has the left side far more predominant in the way we understand and relate to the world around us. And it is precisely this fact that has made us the nation, society and culture we are.
Now don’t misread me; I am not condemning this; I am not complaining about this; I am not wishing that things were different. It is this left brain emphasis that has enabled us to produce all the wonderful things that we have to make our society so pleasant to live in: microwaves, TVs, radio, bumper food crops, tall buildings, space stations and all the rest.
But I am absolutely convinced that religion is primarily a right brain function. Yet, because we most often approach religion with a left-brain dominated mind, we miss much, if not most, of what religion has to offer us. And that is unfortunate, because most of what religion has to offer us is what our nation, our society and our culture really needs. We need to understand about power, about selfishness, about relationships with others and with the world in which we live. Our left-brain orientation tells us we need something, but we are often mystified about where to begin. That is why I have chosen to use the sermon time this Advent to speak about four absolute essentials: Creation; Sin; Judgement; Redemption. If we do not have some insight into the meaning of these four things – Creation; Sin; Judgement; Redemption – we will miss the meaning of Christmass; we will not understand our Liturgy; we will find spirituality incomprehensible; we will relate to others and to the world around us on a basis of law and/or materialism. Our religion will then become what left-brain orientation is best at: formalizing, stereotyping, standardizing, atomizing, studying, compartmentalizing.
The religion of the Book of Common Prayer, the religion of the Episcopal Church, the religion of the Bible: these do not conform to any left-brain concept. True religion and undefiled (to quote the Epistle of James) begins with what is unknowable to the left-brain. True religion tries to give us an understanding of those things that the left-brain finds unknowable: things we cannot see, hear, smell, touch, or taste. Yet, the right-brain insists, these things are just as real, just as knowable, just as important as are left-brain perceptions. Indeed, since we each have both parts to our brain, if we are to be whole, healthy, realistic people; there must be a balance between the parts: the two parts must work together to provide us with a balanced life. That is why, a week or so ago, we mentioned the four things that are distinctive of the Episcopal Church: Bible, Ministry, Creeds, Sacraments. Bible and Sacraments are right brain functions; Ministry and Creeds are left brain functions. Together, they provide a balanced Christian.
The Bible provides us with the results of centuries of right brain contemplation of reality. The Bible begins with these words: “In the beginning, God created. . . “ Reality, the world, the universe, clearly was not made by humans, even though humans seems to be the most intelligent or intellectual or creative beings in reality; nor was it made from anything; there must have been a time when it did not exist; who, or what ever made it, must exist separately from perceptible reality. That Creative Being, or Energy, we call by the name “God.” Who, or what God truly is we cannot comprehend. It is no accident, however, that the Hebrews gave God the name “Yahweh”: it is a form of the verb “to be”, and can be translated as “Reality.” But we can come to know and appreciate this God by the examination of “Reality”, the universe, the world, in which we live.
Do we make God in our image? Only if we see God from the left! If we look from the right, we will see that our ability to create, develop and manufacture and rationalize, are all reflections from the Reality who made us. We ‘image’ or ‘mirror’ the Creator. As wonderful and marvelous as are the incredible accomplishments that have come to humans because of this examination of Reality, we still cannot make anything from nothing. We are not origin/creative; we are only pro/creative. All Reality exists to work together for the furthering of whatever prompted God to make it (directly or indirectly) in the first place; as such it has a good purpose; known to God. Clearly that means we are caretakers, stewards, of Reality. We are not owners; we are servants, slaves, stewards, employees. We must start there: God, not we, made everything; God made it all good; for a purpose; our greatest fullilment comes from living in accord with this view, and saying “Thank you.”
Perren
Advent I, 1998, Series, Croom
In the beginning, God created. . . (Genesis 1:1)
Being left-brained and literal – male in other words – I have always had trouble with subtlety in general, and poetry in particular. I’m uncomfortable with ambiguity. If I’m not “getting” what someone else is “getting,” is anybody “getting” anything?’ So begins an article in a magazine dedicated to success and power that came my way recently. It occurred to me that this also applies in the field of religion, that is, the field of living meaningfully.
We live in a nation, a society, a culture, which is perhaps the most left-brained, the most literal, the least subtle – or most unsubtle – nation, society or culture that ever existed. According to the people who study these things, our brains are made up of two parts. One, the left side, deals primarily with logic, math, precision, organization. The right side deals primarily with art, colors, gestalt or intuition, subtlety poetry. Each of us is, in fact, a combination of the two parts: but still, the vast majority of us has the left side far more predominant in the way we understand and relate to the world around us. And it is precisely this fact that has made us the nation, society and culture we are.
Now don’t misread me; I am not condemning this; I am not complaining about this; I am not wishing that things were different. It is this left brain emphasis that has enabled us to produce all the wonderful things that we have to make our society so pleasant to live in: microwaves, TVs, radio, bumper food crops, tall buildings, space stations and all the rest.
But I am absolutely convinced that religion is primarily a right brain function. Yet, because we most often approach religion with a left-brain dominated mind, we miss much, if not most, of what religion has to offer us. And that is unfortunate, because most of what religion has to offer us is what our nation, our society and our culture really needs. We need to understand about power, about selfishness, about relationships with others and with the world in which we live. Our left-brain orientation tells us we need something, but we are often mystified about where to begin. That is why I have chosen to use the sermon time this Advent to speak about four absolute essentials: Creation; Sin; Judgement; Redemption. If we do not have some insight into the meaning of these four things – Creation; Sin; Judgement; Redemption – we will miss the meaning of Christmass; we will not understand our Liturgy; we will find spirituality incomprehensible; we will relate to others and to the world around us on a basis of law and/or materialism. Our religion will then become what left-brain orientation is best at: formalizing, stereotyping, standardizing, atomizing, studying, compartmentalizing.
The religion of the Book of Common Prayer, the religion of the Episcopal Church, the religion of the Bible: these do not conform to any left-brain concept. True religion and undefiled (to quote the Epistle of James) begins with what is unknowable to the left-brain. True religion tries to give us an understanding of those things that the left-brain finds unknowable: things we cannot see, hear, smell, touch, or taste. Yet, the right-brain insists, these things are just as real, just as knowable, just as important as are left-brain perceptions. Indeed, since we each have both parts to our brain, if we are to be whole, healthy, realistic people; there must be a balance between the parts: the two parts must work together to provide us with a balanced life. That is why, a week or so ago, we mentioned the four things that are distinctive of the Episcopal Church: Bible, Ministry, Creeds, Sacraments. Bible and Sacraments are right brain functions; Ministry and Creeds are left brain functions. Together, they provide a balanced Christian.
The Bible provides us with the results of centuries of right brain contemplation of reality. The Bible begins with these words: “In the beginning, God created. . . “ Reality, the world, the universe, clearly was not made by humans, even though humans seems to be the most intelligent or intellectual or creative beings in reality; nor was it made from anything; there must have been a time when it did not exist; who, or what ever made it, must exist separately from perceptible reality. That Creative Being, or Energy, we call by the name “God.” Who, or what God truly is we cannot comprehend. It is no accident, however, that the Hebrews gave God the name “Yahweh”: it is a form of the verb “to be”, and can be translated as “Reality.” But we can come to know and appreciate this God by the examination of “Reality”, the universe, the world, in which we live.
Do we make God in our image? Only if we see God from the left! If we look from the right, we will see that our ability to create, develop and manufacture and rationalize, are all reflections from the Reality who made us. We ‘image’ or ‘mirror’ the Creator. As wonderful and marvelous as are the incredible accomplishments that have come to humans because of this examination of Reality, we still cannot make anything from nothing. We are not origin/creative; we are only pro/creative. All Reality exists to work together for the furthering of whatever prompted God to make it (directly or indirectly) in the first place; as such it has a good purpose; known to God. Clearly that means we are caretakers, stewards, of Reality. We are not owners; we are servants, slaves, stewards, employees. We must start there: God, not we, made everything; God made it all good; for a purpose; our greatest fullilment comes from living in accord with this view, and saying “Thank you.”
Saturday, November 2, 2013
Sermon for November 3, 2013 -- St. John the Baptist, Milton, Delaware
St. John the Baptist, Milton, Proper 26, Pent 24 2013
Today is salvation day in this home! Here he is, Zacchaeus, son of Abraham! For the Son of Man came to find and restore the lost.” Luke 19:9-10
When I first came here, in September, I spoke about our culture’s fascination with Christmass – that is, the parts that have to do with our culture’s equal fascination with money and getting things. Many people, including me, think that this has come about through an incorrect interweaving of what we now call “government and religion.” When ever that has happened in history, religion becomes subservient to government. And when that happens, God, who made it all, also becomes subservient to government. This is not a new problem: Luke’s gospel – we have been listening to it for a whole year now – is absolutely opposed to that combination. Luke’s absolute opposition makes this very point very clear at the time of the birth of Jesus.
You recall that the Gospel at the Midnight Mass begins “Caesar Augustus ordered a census to be taken throughout the Empire. . . . Everyone had to travel to his own ancestral home to be accounted for. So Joseph went from the Galilean town of Nazareth up to Bethlehem in Judah, David’s town, for the census. As a descendant of David, he had to go there. He went with Mary, his finacée, who was pregnant.”
The people who first heard Luke’s telling the story knew perfectly well that this was a highly charged political statement. Caesar Augustus had just declared himself to be a god, the god to whom all his subjects were subservient. He, Caesar Augustus, because he was a god, had absolute control over all the people in his empire. If they did not obey the rules and regulations – laws, we call them – they were subject to imprisonment or death. This is called “Pax Romana.” It sounds wonderful – it means simply law and order – maintained by violence of every sort. Thus when the Emperor said, Go to your hometown for the first census, people did it – that way they remained alive.
So it is not in the least bit surprising that Joseph, even though he lives in Galilee, had to go back a suburb of Jerusalem, called “Bethlehem” – it means “house of bread” – because his ancestral family went back to David, who was accounted as the first (and perhaps only) Messiah-King of the Hebrews who was approved by the great creator God . But Joseph was not alone; and this is no casual trip; hundreds of thousands of people were doing exactly the same thing as was Joseph – going back to their ancestral home. They were doing it at the command of the Emperor/god Caesar Augustus. You can imagine that this was bringing about lots of anger from the vast majority of the people. But they did it!
Luke’s story of the birth of Jesus is his political comment on all this. (Yes, this is not all there was in what Luke wrote; but this is the first thing that was heard by those who first heard this.)
There are two further important points in Luke’s story. First, there are shepherds. Shepherds at that time, were rather like our minds here in Milton tell us it’s like in Wilmington – where there are “wandering” gangs all over the place. Shepherds were both the scum of society, and a great danger to everybody. But somehow a messenger gets to them that contains a message that God has acted – the Messiah (the Savior) – had just been born! BornS in that stupid little town called Bethlehem. So all these wicked and evil people – the shepherds – run off to have a look.
I really want you to understand that the whole thing is rather like we’re here in the midst of our church service and whole gang of strange people comes in rushing and shouting and screaming – perhaps they were even drunk – shouting political slogans against the Emperor! That’s what the shepherds would be doing! That’s the kind of presence they would have!
And then Luke throws in his bombshell against the Emperor.
A huge angelic choir was singing God’s praises:
Glory to God in the heavenly heights!
Peace to all men and women on earth –
those who truly want to make God’s message
of equality, justice, freedom, and love, Reality.
You see, says Luke, Caesar Augustus has to pronounce it, and send soldiers and other officials all over to tell his subjects about his order. God, on the other hand, not only needs no force, but God shows his total love for all people by using shepherds to begin the spreading of the message.
Luke is writing his gospel probably 65 or more years after the resurrection. The vast majority of the first Christians were Jews. They saw in Jesus and his followers the fulfillment of the Creation, and the Covenant with Abraham, and the coming of the Messiah, the new David.
Now if you sit down and read Luke’s Gospel, and his second book, Acts of Apostles, and try to understand them the way the first readers did, then you will see what Luke’s purpose really is. Really quite simple: the kingdom of God is not some “coming event.” The kingdom of God is, in fact, exactly, and fully, and completely – here! Right now!
And the reason this is so is because those who truly believe in the Creator-God are busy living the life of equality, justice, freedom, and love. It shines spectacularly in everything that the followers of Jesus did. They lived lives of care, concern,
and love. And they did it with no resort to violence. And this continued for several hundred years after Luke.
What in fact did these first followers of Jesus do? Well, they did two things. The first thing they did was to live loving lives. The second thing they did was to refuse to allow the worship of any one or thing other than the great Creator-God. For this to happen, sometimes they had to give up their very lives.
You see, the Resurrection of Jesus tells us many things. I want to talk about just one of those things right now.
Luke places a different picture in front of us. You remember that in Luke’s version of the Passion, Jesus is crucified between two criminals. One of them makes fun of Jesus: “Some Messiah you are! You save others --save us and yourself.” The other criminal sees the truth. And so he says “We are getting what we deserve; he did nothing to deserve this treatment – his death!”
Two things in this little bit of dialogue. First, Luke reminds us that there is nothing special about this execution – it’s the same kind of thing that happens to any criminal. And everyone knows that when the dead bodies are taken down from the crosses, the Romans just throw them away. But the second criminal notes that Jesus did nothing to deserve this treatment. And he says, “When your kingdom is fulfilled, please don’t forget me.” And that truth is why we are here today!
The second criminal believed! He knew that when his body was thrown away and that of the other criminal, no one is going to be sorry – probably there is no one at all who might even mourn. But that bright life, born in the cattle shed, hanging on the cross of death, will never be extinguished. No matter how many are killed in the name of Jesus, the message of equality, justice, peace, and love can never be extinguished. It will live forever; the bodies of his followers will radiate the message in every thing they do. The resurrected Jesus is alive!
And that is why the Roman Empire, with the most massive military the world had ever seen could not destroy the message of Jesus. The Empire was brought to its knees; not by armies, not by condemnations, not by courts of law, not by persecution, not by any form of violence.
It was the faith of the first Christians and their utter trust in God that fundamentally changed the Roman Empire.
How did all this happen? It really was very simple! Our patron, John the Baptist, came into the world to show that each adult needs to make an absolute commitment to the one God who created all the world. And they did that!
They were baptized!
And through that symbol – baptism – those who had faith that the world is a good place, that everything that God has made is in essence a good thing, and that human beings – you and me, my friends – we have the right to use everything God has provided in order to make the world a place without violence, and where equality, justice, peace, and love are the hallmarks of all interpersonal relationships. And this is true whether we are speaking of individuals, of local communities, of cities and towns, of counties and states, of businesses and governments, and all international relationships.
You see, the other part of what the second criminal said is the truest part: “We get what we deserve.”
This, my friends, is the primary reason why the General Convention of the Episcopal Church authorized the 1979 Book of Common Prayer. This was intended to be a missionary document. Its purpose was to fire-up all those baptized people who call themselves Episcopalians. And we wanted them all to be fired up, because we who believe what the Gospels tell us, know without any doubt, that violence, and super large standing militaries is not the way to complete God’s creation and bring equality, justice, peace, and love to the entire planet. It just will not work.
Therefore, as a sign of your commitment, four times per year we who are the baptized, stand and proclaim our commitment to the message of equality, justice, peace, and love that reigned from the cross, washed the blood of Jesus.
I have been told that in order to make your commitment powerful, you should be able to hear your own voice in your own ears to be as loud as you hear my voice in your own ears. (I might add, the same goes for singing.)
Please take the form home with you and plan to read it every day between now and Christmas.
St. John the Baptist, Milton, Proper 26, Pent 24 2013
Today is salvation day in this home! Here he is, Zacchaeus, son of Abraham! For the Son of Man came to find and restore the lost.” Luke 19:9-10
When I first came here, in September, I spoke about our culture’s fascination with Christmass – that is, the parts that have to do with our culture’s equal fascination with money and getting things. Many people, including me, think that this has come about through an incorrect interweaving of what we now call “government and religion.” When ever that has happened in history, religion becomes subservient to government. And when that happens, God, who made it all, also becomes subservient to government. This is not a new problem: Luke’s gospel – we have been listening to it for a whole year now – is absolutely opposed to that combination. Luke’s absolute opposition makes this very point very clear at the time of the birth of Jesus.
You recall that the Gospel at the Midnight Mass begins “Caesar Augustus ordered a census to be taken throughout the Empire. . . . Everyone had to travel to his own ancestral home to be accounted for. So Joseph went from the Galilean town of Nazareth up to Bethlehem in Judah, David’s town, for the census. As a descendant of David, he had to go there. He went with Mary, his finacée, who was pregnant.”
The people who first heard Luke’s telling the story knew perfectly well that this was a highly charged political statement. Caesar Augustus had just declared himself to be a god, the god to whom all his subjects were subservient. He, Caesar Augustus, because he was a god, had absolute control over all the people in his empire. If they did not obey the rules and regulations – laws, we call them – they were subject to imprisonment or death. This is called “Pax Romana.” It sounds wonderful – it means simply law and order – maintained by violence of every sort. Thus when the Emperor said, Go to your hometown for the first census, people did it – that way they remained alive.
So it is not in the least bit surprising that Joseph, even though he lives in Galilee, had to go back a suburb of Jerusalem, called “Bethlehem” – it means “house of bread” – because his ancestral family went back to David, who was accounted as the first (and perhaps only) Messiah-King of the Hebrews who was approved by the great creator God . But Joseph was not alone; and this is no casual trip; hundreds of thousands of people were doing exactly the same thing as was Joseph – going back to their ancestral home. They were doing it at the command of the Emperor/god Caesar Augustus. You can imagine that this was bringing about lots of anger from the vast majority of the people. But they did it!
Luke’s story of the birth of Jesus is his political comment on all this. (Yes, this is not all there was in what Luke wrote; but this is the first thing that was heard by those who first heard this.)
There are two further important points in Luke’s story. First, there are shepherds. Shepherds at that time, were rather like our minds here in Milton tell us it’s like in Wilmington – where there are “wandering” gangs all over the place. Shepherds were both the scum of society, and a great danger to everybody. But somehow a messenger gets to them that contains a message that God has acted – the Messiah (the Savior) – had just been born! BornS in that stupid little town called Bethlehem. So all these wicked and evil people – the shepherds – run off to have a look.
I really want you to understand that the whole thing is rather like we’re here in the midst of our church service and whole gang of strange people comes in rushing and shouting and screaming – perhaps they were even drunk – shouting political slogans against the Emperor! That’s what the shepherds would be doing! That’s the kind of presence they would have!
And then Luke throws in his bombshell against the Emperor.
A huge angelic choir was singing God’s praises:
Glory to God in the heavenly heights!
Peace to all men and women on earth –
those who truly want to make God’s message
of equality, justice, freedom, and love, Reality.
You see, says Luke, Caesar Augustus has to pronounce it, and send soldiers and other officials all over to tell his subjects about his order. God, on the other hand, not only needs no force, but God shows his total love for all people by using shepherds to begin the spreading of the message.
Luke is writing his gospel probably 65 or more years after the resurrection. The vast majority of the first Christians were Jews. They saw in Jesus and his followers the fulfillment of the Creation, and the Covenant with Abraham, and the coming of the Messiah, the new David.
Now if you sit down and read Luke’s Gospel, and his second book, Acts of Apostles, and try to understand them the way the first readers did, then you will see what Luke’s purpose really is. Really quite simple: the kingdom of God is not some “coming event.” The kingdom of God is, in fact, exactly, and fully, and completely – here! Right now!
And the reason this is so is because those who truly believe in the Creator-God are busy living the life of equality, justice, freedom, and love. It shines spectacularly in everything that the followers of Jesus did. They lived lives of care, concern,
and love. And they did it with no resort to violence. And this continued for several hundred years after Luke.
What in fact did these first followers of Jesus do? Well, they did two things. The first thing they did was to live loving lives. The second thing they did was to refuse to allow the worship of any one or thing other than the great Creator-God. For this to happen, sometimes they had to give up their very lives.
You see, the Resurrection of Jesus tells us many things. I want to talk about just one of those things right now.
Luke places a different picture in front of us. You remember that in Luke’s version of the Passion, Jesus is crucified between two criminals. One of them makes fun of Jesus: “Some Messiah you are! You save others --save us and yourself.” The other criminal sees the truth. And so he says “We are getting what we deserve; he did nothing to deserve this treatment – his death!”
Two things in this little bit of dialogue. First, Luke reminds us that there is nothing special about this execution – it’s the same kind of thing that happens to any criminal. And everyone knows that when the dead bodies are taken down from the crosses, the Romans just throw them away. But the second criminal notes that Jesus did nothing to deserve this treatment. And he says, “When your kingdom is fulfilled, please don’t forget me.” And that truth is why we are here today!
The second criminal believed! He knew that when his body was thrown away and that of the other criminal, no one is going to be sorry – probably there is no one at all who might even mourn. But that bright life, born in the cattle shed, hanging on the cross of death, will never be extinguished. No matter how many are killed in the name of Jesus, the message of equality, justice, peace, and love can never be extinguished. It will live forever; the bodies of his followers will radiate the message in every thing they do. The resurrected Jesus is alive!
And that is why the Roman Empire, with the most massive military the world had ever seen could not destroy the message of Jesus. The Empire was brought to its knees; not by armies, not by condemnations, not by courts of law, not by persecution, not by any form of violence.
It was the faith of the first Christians and their utter trust in God that fundamentally changed the Roman Empire.
How did all this happen? It really was very simple! Our patron, John the Baptist, came into the world to show that each adult needs to make an absolute commitment to the one God who created all the world. And they did that!
They were baptized!
And through that symbol – baptism – those who had faith that the world is a good place, that everything that God has made is in essence a good thing, and that human beings – you and me, my friends – we have the right to use everything God has provided in order to make the world a place without violence, and where equality, justice, peace, and love are the hallmarks of all interpersonal relationships. And this is true whether we are speaking of individuals, of local communities, of cities and towns, of counties and states, of businesses and governments, and all international relationships.
You see, the other part of what the second criminal said is the truest part: “We get what we deserve.”
This, my friends, is the primary reason why the General Convention of the Episcopal Church authorized the 1979 Book of Common Prayer. This was intended to be a missionary document. Its purpose was to fire-up all those baptized people who call themselves Episcopalians. And we wanted them all to be fired up, because we who believe what the Gospels tell us, know without any doubt, that violence, and super large standing militaries is not the way to complete God’s creation and bring equality, justice, peace, and love to the entire planet. It just will not work.
Therefore, as a sign of your commitment, four times per year we who are the baptized, stand and proclaim our commitment to the message of equality, justice, peace, and love that reigned from the cross, washed the blood of Jesus.
I have been told that in order to make your commitment powerful, you should be able to hear your own voice in your own ears to be as loud as you hear my voice in your own ears. (I might add, the same goes for singing.)
Please take the form home with you and plan to read it every day between now and Christmas.
Friday, November 1, 2013
A Spirituality for Now
This is old, but it is still useful.
A Spirituality for Now
A Spirituality for Now
#1 - How Prayer and Daily Life Coalesce
First, what to expect, and how we shall proceed. I generally like to have questions asked when they arise. So interrupt me at will. If I am right in the middle of something, I may wait a moment, but please note the word, may.
What to expect? I’m not sure. I have been asked many questions, been told many things; somehow, I believe that I can make a small contribution to some of these things. Yet, I certainly do not hold myself out as any great expert in prayer. I do it, of course, and so, like anyone who does something, I have both some ideas and some practical experiences that have been helpful to me. I also have enough ego (some may think I have way too much!) - tempered, to be sure, with temerity - to want to put forth my ideas with the intent of helping others. Hence, I succumbed to pressures to do this presentation. If, however, anything I say makes you want to make a radical change in your prayer life, please speak to me or some other spiritual director before making such a change.
I want to add one more thing. Since 1971 I have lived in a situation not in a parish Church. There has been no office next to the Church with the blessed Sacrament reserved; there has been no schedule of daily announced services; there have been no conferences with parishioners who needed help with various things; there have been no meetings with other clergy; no conferences provided by the Diocese; nothing to keep me close to the prayer life; as there had been previously, when I worked full time in parish work. Like most of you, I have to get up every day to do a job; I had a schedule of business activities and conferences and meetings to attend to; sometimes I had employees to deal with; sometimes I had a superior to hold off. In addition to this, my wife and I raised St. Bernard dogs professionally. We seldom had fewer than five dogs, often as many as ten, and, once, for what seemed an interminable time, we had nearly 25! Generally, I took care of feeding, cleaning and exercising the dogs. With all of this, I still maintained my Rule with the Order of the Holy Cross, kept up my prayer life and, from 1971 until 1978, regular preaching, week by week in the little mission congregation I cared for. When, in 1978 the Bishop wanted me to do more at the mission, I could not, and reluctantly resigned, became almost immediately an interim in a parish, remaining to assist there until I went to South Carolina in 1983, where my church work was much less. Through it all, I persevered. That series of experiences also makes me think that I might have a somewhat different spin on prayer in daily life. We shall see if it is also helpful to you.
The Subject for today is, How Prayer and Daily life coalesce? There are three things involved in this topic - at least, there are three I wish to talk about. Each of these things needs to be defined, and in that process we shall discover the things I think might be useful to busy modern people. The three subjects are God, Prayer and Praying.
I was born into a family of practicing Episcopalians. My mother and Father taught in Sunday School, and participated in other ways in the life of the parish to which we belonged. We always said grace before meals - all meals. Although we belonged to what some of you might call a Low Church or Protestant kind of Episcopal Church - there were five or six others like it among the 187 parishes of the Diocese of Albany - we also always ate fish on Friday. At home in addition to grace, once in a while my parents would read to us from the Bible: especially at Christmass (my brother and I could look down the stairs in our house on Christmass morning, but could not go down until we had heard the reading of the Christmass Story from St. Luke’s gospel.) When I entered the fourth grade, I also began to sing in the Boy’s Choir. I will never forget my mother’s reaction when I came home one day and said “Mommy, when I grow up I want to be just like Mr. Findlay” who was the rector of the parish. Her reaction was “Good God, no!” However, both my younger brother and I ended up in the priesthood. Before World War 2, we were not permitted to play outside, nor inside on Sundays after Church. When the Episcopal Young Churchmen - which also included girls and please note, it was the ONLY activity girls could take part in except to attend Sunday School - when the EYC met on Sunday evenings, someone brought a record player and some 78 rpm records: and there was dancing. I would not be eligible for EYC for one more year when this happened. Many of the older people got very, very angry about this dancing, and when the Bishop came for Confirmation, they met with him and raised, if you will, Holy Hell. Bishop Barry - who had just come to be Coadjutor Bishop from St. Luke’s Parish in Evanston Illinois (a parish much like St. Paul’s) - took the complainers out to the front door of the Church. He pointed diagonally across the street to a local bar and nightclub, and said, “Would rather have them dance there?” That ended that issue.
During all of this time, however, because of all these kinds of rules and ways of looking at things, one tended to get a very specific idea of God. He was an old man with a long white beard, who sat on a high backed black throne, surrounded by people who looked somewhat like policemen. God also had a table, on which was a large book, in which everybody’s name was paced when they were born. There were two columns, one for faults or sins, and another for good things done. If you were a protestant, my protestant friends told me, the two columns got added up and the larger number won. For Catholics and Episcopalians, God did a kind of double entry bookkeeping that helped wipe out some of the bad things by good things. Also, Jesus and the saints sometimes stood in the way of the bad column so you got more credit for good than you really deserved.
However, when all was said and done the relationship with God had more to do with accounting than anything else.
Many people today have much the same relationship with God.
Now. If that is the way one sees God - and it isn’t, because I have deliberately caricatured it - but if it is somewhat vaguely like your idea of God - it tells us something about the way you see God.
The very first thing it does is to tell us that God is exactly like us. Further, he is vengeful; he is inflexible; and he expects us to be perfect. Further, if we do the right things and live the right way we will earn the right to enter heaven. In addition, God’s major concern is with us human beings, and little or nothing else is of any great importance to him. And he is not only concerned about us individually, but he is careful to provide us with his assistants, to keep us in line: parents, teachers, policemen, nuns and priests. The most important part about all this is that God wants to keep us obedient and unquestioning; simply accepting what others tell us is the way to live: (psychologically keeping us as 10 year olds) - the tradition of the Church not only cannot change, but moral law cannot and never has changed. All moral questions are always answered either ‘right’ or ‘wrong’; or ‘yes’ or ‘no’; or ‘good’ or ‘bad’; or ‘black’ or ‘white.’
If your concept of God in any way touches this caricature - which for some people is not a caricature - then your prayer life (if you have one) is largely petition and penitence, individualistic and very self centered, even if you do not recognize it as such.
Now I’ll be the first to admit that it is relatively easy to get this kind of idea from the Bible. This is especially true the way we teach the Bible in most of our Sunday Schools: which is very often the source of this caricature of God. (I speak with authority: for 17 years I was part of the Department of Christian Education in the Diocese of New York at a time when we had a Suffragan Bishop whose primary work was the Department, and three professional staff members [two priests and a token woman DRE]; for 12 of those years I was part of the Executive Committee of the Department, and for 5 years I was Chairman of the Department: and we were involved in virtually every parish in the diocese. Although my references and experts are now old fashioned, the principals we worked on are fundamental to the education process of the Church:- which, when all is said and done, is to teach people how to pray.)
To understand who God is, we need to read again and again and yet again the first chapter of Genesis. And when we read it, we must try to put aside any previous ideas we may have had about it. We need to see it as a poem to explain that which cannot be explained: How God acts and works. As Christians, we must read it and see in this first chapter of Genesis the operation of the Holy Trinity; and along with this we need to see the place of scientific examination of the universe that is poetically described in Genesis 1 and 2. We need to see that it is impossible for us to be fully human without association with others. We need to read Genesis 3 and see that pain and inequities and domination of one sex by another is the result of the fall; it is NOT the way God made or intends it. If our minds bend that way, we need to read scientific writers, like Stephen Hawkings - BECAUSE THERE IS ONLY ONE TRUTH, AND THE NAME OF THAT TRUTH IS WHO/WHAT WE CALL GOD. There is no such thing as truth of science and truth of religion in any sense that implies any conflict between them. Read Isaiah, especially chapters 40 - 55
Above all else, God has made us moral beings. He made us not only able to make decisions (again Genesis 2 and 3); he EXPECTS us to make decisions and judgements on everything that affects how we live and how we relate to others - indeed to the entire creation. Read Amos: see how the compilers of the book (as we now have it) wanted to be sure that the hearer (or reader) sees that Amos’s moral imperatives are part of the divine process; they are part of the very fabric of creation: Thus, He who made the Pleiades and Orion, etc in the middle of the book. Read Hosea where Love comes into the picture along with the matter of the decision process.
Now these were people who did not have the advantages we have. They didn’t know about gravity, and atoms and positrons, and viruses and computers, and interstellar space and all the rest of the vast body of knowledge that science has brought us. And every bit of what science shows us, brings with it a bit more of a glimpse of who God really is.
It is important for us to realize that we cannot even begin to make the slightest dent in really understanding who God is. The very concept of God is far, far beyond our most complete comprehenting capabilities. Everything we say about God - and I am going out on a limb here - everything anybody says in any part of God’s creation, will teach us something about God: but we will never catch the true reality now. Even the sacred doctrine of the Holy Trinity is merely an attempt (albeit the best attempt possible) to help us begin to understand who this God is whom we worship. We need to expand our concept of God to the nth degree, recognizing that all concepts, images, pictures, ideas, doctrines and so forth are imperfect, incomplete, and just guide posts to each of us as we pursue our quest to know God. To some degree what I have just said is true of any theist, Christian or not.
However, we who are Christians have an additional aid in this matter of knowing God. We have Jesus. Jesus, we believe, is the incarnation of God, the enfleshment of what we mean by God. All of the above concepts and ideas, together with the incredible number I have not talked about, all of these ideas that give us some kind of idea about who God is. THIS God whom we cannot fully know at this time, THIS GOD took our flesh of the Virgin Mary, and became fully and completely in every respect one of us - except he did not sin. Yet he did indeed bear the burden of Sin, and receive its pain. And our sin, yesterday and this morning, our sin is part of the pain he bore. In order to show us that we are indeed moral beings, who are fit to make choices, Jesus, as the epistle to the Philippians tells us, Jesus is a human being. And in perceiving him, we perceive him as a human being, BECAUSE he emptied himself of his divine nature, so that we would NOT know him as God, but, rather, know him as one of us. The reason, we believe, is that God is Love. If God is love (another word which we can only dimly comprehend), then we need to know him in the only way we can: as a human being, a human being whom we recognize to be one of us, yet who is in his essential being Love. By becoming one of us, he shows his essential Love, and he expects us to respond to him as he has shown himself to us, with that Love which is ALSO THE ESSENTIAL nature of each of us, even though it has been overlaid by sin. We are, in fact, love recognizing love. And, as we love Jesus the human being, we begin to see him in the others who also love Jesus the human being; then we love them as Jesus. From there we move on to love all that Love has created., and we will make our own personal moral choices based on this perception of Love, the Creator and Love, our associates, and Love, the created creation. This does not mean that we will make lock-step choices as Christians; what it does mean is that we will try not to make choices based on self interest. This is why it is impossible to be a single Christian. Even the hermits cannot be alone. Because Love became one of us, and we see Love in others and in Creation, the Love that we are, expresses itself in love of others, of creation, of God - all of which is summed up in our Worship at the Eucharist, which is a topic for another series.
I think that it is because of her perception of this, that my favorite Julian of Norwich tells us that “Because we are so ignorant and inexperienced in the ways of love that we spend so much of our time on petition.” (Remember that at the beginning of this I said we keep asking for self.) She goes on “ IN HIS GOODNESS is included all that one can want, without exception. To know the goodness of God is the highest prayer of all, and it is a prayer that accommodates itself to our most lowly needs.” And she ends “He does not despise the work of his hands (recall, I said to read Genesis 1), nor does he disdain to serve us (he emptied himself)... He loves the soul he has made in his own likeness.”
Basically, we need to expand our idea and concept of God. And science has opened to us an incredible vista, all of which increases our knowledge of God, learned through the grandeur of that which He created. Open your eyes; expand your mind; see new knowledge and new inventions not as threats, but as further examples of the splendor of God. Even if some new idea or invention has come into being and there are no immediately obvious uses for what most of us would call good, remember that it came from the mind of a man/woman made in the image of God. Therefore this new thing participates in the creative activity of God:- because evil has no essential reality. We need therefore, prayerfully to seek to find out how this new thing fits into God’s work in this world. This is not always going to be easy, and often makes us rethink other concepts we have had. But - as we shall see- God is not beyond challenging our minds, which, after all, are in his image. (I might add here, that one of the major, major differences between catholic theology and protestant theology over the centuries is on this matter. For protestants, the Fall destroyed the image of God in us; for Catholics, however, the Fall marred, but did not destroy that image, and it is because of that image in us that we are able to recognize God when he acts to reveal himself to us.)
Thus, if we are to have a spirituality for NOW, we must begin with a meaningful concept of God. For that vast majority of us, that means vastly expanding our ideas about God.
At the beginning of this, I said there are three things I want to cover today. The other two, Prayer and Praying, now that we have done the bit about God, will not take too long. But if you want, let’s take a brief break now.
Prayer is the first of the two remaining topics for this morning.
We have all heard of prayer described as talking with God, or some such language, and that’s a pretty good definition. The real problem for most of us is that because of our funny idea of God, our prayer becomes both funny and even peculiar, if it doesn’t stop completely sometime between the time we enter puberty and the time we leave high school.
Let’s go back to the first part of Genesis. It is stated there, in this incredibly beautiful poem trying to explain the inexplicable, that God made humanity in his own image, in the image and likeness of God he made them (and then, as a parenthetical explanation of what is meant by image and likeness) , male and female he made them. Two things come from this: First, what we call sexuality, is in fact the essential nature of God: in one sense, God is neither male nor female: God is the creative power found in sexuality, all sexuality. God himself is community (that is part of the meaning of the Trinity); thus human participation in creativity is expressed through sexuality. This is true whether we are speaking of the sexual energy that brings forth children, or the sexual energy that creates music, poetry, painting, scientific research etc. This is why sex is of such a crucial matter in the lives of all human beings; it is how we participate in the creative activity of God. And when that is not clear in our minds, we rape, we pillage, we wage war, we execute, we oppress, we hate, we kill unnecessarily (that is, we hunt for fun, not for food), we destroy, we upset the balance of nature, we mock, we do all kinds of things that are not loving. (And in connection with this, when you each make your own individual response to the question of the ordination of women to the priesthood, remember two things: 1. God is everything that is meant by sex and sexuality 2. the rôle of women as child bearers and homemakers only, is the punishment resulting from the fall. - There is more to be considered but remember this much at least.) It is this participation in the creativity of God that allows us some sort of say over our own destiny.
But the image and likeness of God in us includes more than participation in the creative activity of God. It also includes what we call intellect, or mind. We are able to examine, explore, question, rationalize (in the good meaning of the word), observe, contemplate, investigate, inquire, deliberate, justify and many, many more words that combine to give an insight into what we might possibly mean when we say we think. But to think (in all its meanings) is to participate in the nature of God himself; just as is sex.
Prayer then, in my opinion, is the utilizing of all of the image of God in us, sexuality (or creativity) and thinking, in our goal to communicate with God. AND we are going to communicate with God in the same way in which he chose to communicate with us: through other human beings, most especially through Jesus, whom we know in the blessed sacrament, in the Word of God and above all, in the persons whom we know and love. And all of this is expressed in our worship of God. It all boils down to remembering that whenever we are thinking or being creative or caring, we are communicating with God. This is what we call prayer: using our entire being to communicate with God: Creator, Redeemer and Sanctifier, Father, Son and Holy Spirit.
Finally the topic is Praying. In a very real sense, if prayer is defined as I just defined it, then in a very real sense, we pray whenever we do most of the things we do daily. Eating, for example, is a holy event. It is taking a portion of God’s creation - a part of what God has given us as a sample of his care and concern for us - and using our minds to make a moral decision - choose this, prepare it that way, eat it as the sacrament of life that God has given to us - and caring for ourselves as children of God. When we do this, then we are recognizing that our Body is the Temple of the Holy Spirit as St. Paul tells us, and we are taking proper care of it. We do not over indulge, we do not waste, we do not eat that which is harmful to the temple of the Holy Spirit. Thus we are praying. As conscious children of God, if we trust in the Goodness of God - as Julian tells us - whatever we do will be done trusting in his goodness. As St. Benedict tells us, to work is to pray, to pray is to work. However we are involved, it is all prayer.
So praying is simply another word for living: which means for most of us that sometimes we pray well and sometimes we pray not so well. Thus we often set apart specific times when we can really concentrate on praying. This is not time at worship, such as the Daily Office, or the Eucharist - which we fit into our lives as best we can, considering the other kinds of prayer we are doing daily. This is prayer when we sit or kneel or even lie down quietly and silently be with God; call him/her (I feel I have to say it that way) into our mind, and then relax. We may pray petition, we may pray intercession (which is simply petition for others) we may pray adoration, we may just be still and know God. We may use words or pictures or music or anything that assists us to become open to the reality of God all around us, in creation, in other persons, in Jesus.
How do prayer and daily life coalesce? For the Christian, whatever we do in daily life is prayer, and all of life is an oblation to the goodness of God. Whether it be cleaning up the kennel in the morning, arguing with a customer, explaining a report to our superior, writing our congressperson, bringing food out on the Grate Patrol, serving at Solemn Mass, receiving communion at a quiet weekday mass, or going to confession, or, as Julian says in very graphic terms which I shall not use, even going to the john (Bathroom) - all human activity is prayer. We who are baptized into his very Body and live his very life, all life is prayer and, therefore, what we do in our life is praying. All we need to do is see it that way, and, as St. Paul shows us so many times, live according to our belief.
Sunday, October 13, 2013
Inbox (176) - kypieeleison@gmail.com - Gmail
Inbox (176) - kypieeleison@gmail.com - Gmail:
'via Blog this'
St. John the Baptist Parish, 20 Pentecost C 10/13/13
Concentrate on doing your best for God, work you won’t be ashamed of, . . . Pray for Babylon’s well being. If things go well for Babylon, things will go well for you. . . . He couldn’t thank him enough.
Well, this is the last sermon that talks about Caesar Augustus, and how he left the world on a path that leads directly to a whole package of disasters in which we – as Americans – find ourselves. Our present problems here in America find strong support from some – shall we say, “unusual,” – forms of religion, but we need to pick up from where we left off last week.
You remember, :-) of course, that last week we noted that the first Christians for more than 200 years became increasingly a powerful contradiction to Caesar Augustus. Just as the Nativity story says it IS. The Pax Romana Peace of Rome existed – the word “Peace”was defined as being equal to “law and order.” This Roman Peace was enforced with the vicious violence for which the Roman military was well known. The troops were well disciplined, and had been trained in many ways how to kill humans. But even when these disciplined troops were ordered by the Emperor himself to destroy the members of this new religion, they failed – abysmally! Why? Because the first Christians didn’t belong to a religion; they lived their lives by faith. And faith, as we learned last week – even if it’s only the size of a poppyseed – is more powerful than the vicious violence of highly disciplined troops.
When the last of these persecutions again failed – I think it was the Diocletian persecution – when it failed, the Imperial authorities were at a loss of what to do. Not only was failure perfectly clear to the Emperor, but the failure was crystal-clear to the military. Furthermore, the “inauthentic” Western half of the Empire – that is, the Latin part – was beginning to separate from the eastern half with its ancient Greek and Semitic origins. You may remember that I mentioned last week that the only major “contribution” Latin culture had added to human knowledge was the use of violence to maintain a superficial law and order – speciously called “Pax Romana” – Roman Peace. In fact, the young man who was due to become the Emperor Constantine began to worry that all the power that should be his inheritance might fail to come his way.
And the Christian movement was a major problem for Constantine. You see, his mother – her name was Helena – had become a Christian! A very devout Christian. So much so, that she has become a saint on the Christian lists. Constantine’s path to the throne therefore had to involve some way which would both guarantee that he got the throne and that the Christian practice of his saintly mother would not be destroyed.
His solution? Unite church and state!
What a genius of an idea!
When church and state are united, Constantine apparently thought, then both sides would be united for the “care of the people.” The government would provide security for the society, and the church could deal with questions and justice and law – and record-keeping. The word “diocese” is, to this very day, used by the “new” church re-created by Constantine, called the Catholic Church. And Romans, Greeks, Anglicans, and Russians – the continuing examples of that same Catholic church – use that title, “diocese,” to this very day.
You know, it really might have worked! But it couldn’t, because the church – for whatever reason – allowed itself to become the only expression of “faith” in the Empire. And by doing that, the church sullied the word “freedom.”
Because of this change: freedom was restricted: inequality replaced equality; injustice replaced justice; thought control replaced thinking; and caring, and sharing, and other expressions of communal love were weakend, and ultimately society was dehumanized as classes of people were created.
Now, you all know that this did not happen in just a few days. But, it should be noted, that very shortly after Constantine became Emperor he got the Church to call the Council of Nicaea – the first “Great Council” of the Catholic Church. And, when I’m finished here, we will all stand up, and proclaim our “faith” by reciting the Nicene Creed. (There were 17 – I believe – “canons”, or “statements” from the Council of Nicaea that were “to be accepted” by all, under penalty of being declared “anathema.” That word, although it is Greek, is a Latin-type thought: – it means “as if s/he had never existed.” Among the canons are these: “Let the Bishop who changes his Diocese be anathema;” “Let the person who kneels at the Liturgy be anathema;” “Let the person does not confess this symbol of faith be anathema.” The church has managed – somehow or other – to allow bishops to change their diocese; to permit people to kneel at the liturgy; and even, without a full Council, to add words to the Nicene Symbol.)
Now, this combination of church and state caused many things to happen– over many years/centuries. The friction between the East and West sections of the Empire increased sharply; Germanic invasions from the North and West nearly destroyed Rome. The Bishop of Rome – not yet called the Pope – acted as a mediator and as a stand-in for the Emperor. And there were more continuing things – the loss of learning because of the invasions; the dark ages – which weren’t so dark in the East; the black death; the Renaissance; the Protestant Reformation, which merely changed one Authority source for another Authority source. The re-establishment of the validity of physical science – called the Enlightenment by some – grew and developed primarily in what was the Western Empire. It existed in fact until the end of World War I and, I’m not sure, there may still be some small remnant of it somewhere! It should be noted that when “Columbus sailed the ocean blue” the steel wall that surrounded Western Europe opened up slightly to devour North and South America.
When the steel wall tried to clamp down again, the monster of united church and state reared to control both the Americas. In South America,, it seemed to succeed , largely because of corruption, purchased with gold, and the slaughter and destruction of the Native population.
In North America things were different. We must never forget that the pilgrims wanted exactly the kind of church-state-controlled society that Constantine wanted. But the New England pilgrims came largely from South-east England, from the mission sent from Rome, by St. Gregory in 599. Gregory was a strong part of the Constantine concepts.
But most of what became the 13 colonies in fact came from the rest of Britain. They were not the pilgrims; they came from the places in England where the Roman Mission was more conformity than conviction. There, it seems, there were hold-overs from the pre-Roman mission days – perhaps even from christians in the Roman army. Ancient Freedom bubbled to the surface as early as Whitby in the 8th century. Freedom for nobility and Church is protected in the Magna Carta, in 1215. Because of these Magna Carta protections, freedom for all continued to ferment among the developing middle class that became so important for England.
The founders of our nation seem to have perceived this.
And it is sumed up in that spectacular phrase composed by Thomas Jefferson: “All men are created equal and have certain unalienable rights to life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness.” We then fought the Revolutionary War and the War of 1812, to protect those rights from the tyranny of George III. Included among the explanation for the war of freedom, by the way, was the complaint of the huge expense of maintaining a large standing army.
While this is very interesting, you might well be asking yourself, “What has this got to do with Sunday worship?”
Well, that depends how you understand God’s act of creation.
Most of the world’s communities, whether with one or more gods, had a kind of similar understanding. These gods have little or nothing to do with creating the creation: these gods are in charge of making it operate – in ways beneficial to the gods. Stories about these gods usually include ways in which humans are used in one way or another for the amusement of the gods. Without some sort of major effort, humans could only suffer, or be laughed at, or played with – all for the amusement of the gods.
When our Jewish ancestors were exiled to Babylon (582 BC), and when they ran into the Babylonian story of creation, they were absolutely horrified. This, they quickly saw, has nothing to do with the true meaning of the Great Creation God of the Hebrews. The God of the Hebrews is, as the Book of Common Prayer puts it, is “without body, parts, or passions.” I suppose you could say that the Hebrew God is pure intellect. And, of course, that means we too are primarily intellect. You see, my friends, the Hebrew God, according to the Bible, made you and me and all other humans – ever – in the image/likeness of the Hebrew God. Our purpose in being created is to bring Creation itself to fulfillment, and completion – the creation originally produced by the Great Creator God. In our understanding of the world/universe in which we are placed, we are here with a very substantial part to play.
Our task is, simply, to enable the whole of Creation to function together with equality, justice, freedom, caring and peace. That is why throughout the course of every year we renew our Baptismal Covenant several times. This identifies both our task and our activity.
And our worship is set up to remind us that the only goal we have is to live – right now – as part of the process that the evolution that is the very nature of Creation – the fulfillment that it freely can develop – because of the way God created it.
The first part of our liturgy, the readings, tell about history, and how easy it is for people to get wrong ideas. We learn that there are somethings that only our faith can assist with:- and so we recite a statement of that faith.
Then, we join ourselves intimately with the Son of God, as we ask for for an understanding of how our actions and faith can lead us on the path that fulfills the meaning of the Creation. (The general confession that follows in the Book of Common Prayer, comes to us as part of the law and order concept of faith.)
And then, having claimed our unity individually with the Son of God, we then continue to evolve into our new relationship with the same Son of God.
Just as Jesus entered a new kind of human relationship with Creator-God by creating a new family for God while hanging on the cross, so we – with our carefully thought out offertory gift – pledge our lives, our works and our belongings to the service of the Creator by accepting the life of Jesus as our own.
When we do this, we bind ourselves to Jesus, and so are set free in the life blood of Jesus. Then, Jesus, Creator, and each other, all are wrapped together in the warm compulsion of the Holy Spirit.
We are each now committed to devote every aspect of our lives – the way in which we live, the way in which we relate, the way in which we work – every aspect of our lives to helping bring fruition and completion to Creation.
That’s why we come here.
That’s why we leave here – satisfied that we can do our part in fulfilling God’s plan
in evolving Creation.
Go!
Do it!
'via Blog this'
St. John the Baptist Parish, 20 Pentecost C 10/13/13
Concentrate on doing your best for God, work you won’t be ashamed of, . . . Pray for Babylon’s well being. If things go well for Babylon, things will go well for you. . . . He couldn’t thank him enough.
Well, this is the last sermon that talks about Caesar Augustus, and how he left the world on a path that leads directly to a whole package of disasters in which we – as Americans – find ourselves. Our present problems here in America find strong support from some – shall we say, “unusual,” – forms of religion, but we need to pick up from where we left off last week.
You remember, :-) of course, that last week we noted that the first Christians for more than 200 years became increasingly a powerful contradiction to Caesar Augustus. Just as the Nativity story says it IS. The Pax Romana Peace of Rome existed – the word “Peace”was defined as being equal to “law and order.” This Roman Peace was enforced with the vicious violence for which the Roman military was well known. The troops were well disciplined, and had been trained in many ways how to kill humans. But even when these disciplined troops were ordered by the Emperor himself to destroy the members of this new religion, they failed – abysmally! Why? Because the first Christians didn’t belong to a religion; they lived their lives by faith. And faith, as we learned last week – even if it’s only the size of a poppyseed – is more powerful than the vicious violence of highly disciplined troops.
When the last of these persecutions again failed – I think it was the Diocletian persecution – when it failed, the Imperial authorities were at a loss of what to do. Not only was failure perfectly clear to the Emperor, but the failure was crystal-clear to the military. Furthermore, the “inauthentic” Western half of the Empire – that is, the Latin part – was beginning to separate from the eastern half with its ancient Greek and Semitic origins. You may remember that I mentioned last week that the only major “contribution” Latin culture had added to human knowledge was the use of violence to maintain a superficial law and order – speciously called “Pax Romana” – Roman Peace. In fact, the young man who was due to become the Emperor Constantine began to worry that all the power that should be his inheritance might fail to come his way.
And the Christian movement was a major problem for Constantine. You see, his mother – her name was Helena – had become a Christian! A very devout Christian. So much so, that she has become a saint on the Christian lists. Constantine’s path to the throne therefore had to involve some way which would both guarantee that he got the throne and that the Christian practice of his saintly mother would not be destroyed.
His solution? Unite church and state!
What a genius of an idea!
When church and state are united, Constantine apparently thought, then both sides would be united for the “care of the people.” The government would provide security for the society, and the church could deal with questions and justice and law – and record-keeping. The word “diocese” is, to this very day, used by the “new” church re-created by Constantine, called the Catholic Church. And Romans, Greeks, Anglicans, and Russians – the continuing examples of that same Catholic church – use that title, “diocese,” to this very day.
You know, it really might have worked! But it couldn’t, because the church – for whatever reason – allowed itself to become the only expression of “faith” in the Empire. And by doing that, the church sullied the word “freedom.”
Because of this change: freedom was restricted: inequality replaced equality; injustice replaced justice; thought control replaced thinking; and caring, and sharing, and other expressions of communal love were weakend, and ultimately society was dehumanized as classes of people were created.
Now, you all know that this did not happen in just a few days. But, it should be noted, that very shortly after Constantine became Emperor he got the Church to call the Council of Nicaea – the first “Great Council” of the Catholic Church. And, when I’m finished here, we will all stand up, and proclaim our “faith” by reciting the Nicene Creed. (There were 17 – I believe – “canons”, or “statements” from the Council of Nicaea that were “to be accepted” by all, under penalty of being declared “anathema.” That word, although it is Greek, is a Latin-type thought: – it means “as if s/he had never existed.” Among the canons are these: “Let the Bishop who changes his Diocese be anathema;” “Let the person who kneels at the Liturgy be anathema;” “Let the person does not confess this symbol of faith be anathema.” The church has managed – somehow or other – to allow bishops to change their diocese; to permit people to kneel at the liturgy; and even, without a full Council, to add words to the Nicene Symbol.)
Now, this combination of church and state caused many things to happen– over many years/centuries. The friction between the East and West sections of the Empire increased sharply; Germanic invasions from the North and West nearly destroyed Rome. The Bishop of Rome – not yet called the Pope – acted as a mediator and as a stand-in for the Emperor. And there were more continuing things – the loss of learning because of the invasions; the dark ages – which weren’t so dark in the East; the black death; the Renaissance; the Protestant Reformation, which merely changed one Authority source for another Authority source. The re-establishment of the validity of physical science – called the Enlightenment by some – grew and developed primarily in what was the Western Empire. It existed in fact until the end of World War I and, I’m not sure, there may still be some small remnant of it somewhere! It should be noted that when “Columbus sailed the ocean blue” the steel wall that surrounded Western Europe opened up slightly to devour North and South America.
When the steel wall tried to clamp down again, the monster of united church and state reared to control both the Americas. In South America,, it seemed to succeed , largely because of corruption, purchased with gold, and the slaughter and destruction of the Native population.
In North America things were different. We must never forget that the pilgrims wanted exactly the kind of church-state-controlled society that Constantine wanted. But the New England pilgrims came largely from South-east England, from the mission sent from Rome, by St. Gregory in 599. Gregory was a strong part of the Constantine concepts.
But most of what became the 13 colonies in fact came from the rest of Britain. They were not the pilgrims; they came from the places in England where the Roman Mission was more conformity than conviction. There, it seems, there were hold-overs from the pre-Roman mission days – perhaps even from christians in the Roman army. Ancient Freedom bubbled to the surface as early as Whitby in the 8th century. Freedom for nobility and Church is protected in the Magna Carta, in 1215. Because of these Magna Carta protections, freedom for all continued to ferment among the developing middle class that became so important for England.
The founders of our nation seem to have perceived this.
And it is sumed up in that spectacular phrase composed by Thomas Jefferson: “All men are created equal and have certain unalienable rights to life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness.” We then fought the Revolutionary War and the War of 1812, to protect those rights from the tyranny of George III. Included among the explanation for the war of freedom, by the way, was the complaint of the huge expense of maintaining a large standing army.
While this is very interesting, you might well be asking yourself, “What has this got to do with Sunday worship?”
Well, that depends how you understand God’s act of creation.
Most of the world’s communities, whether with one or more gods, had a kind of similar understanding. These gods have little or nothing to do with creating the creation: these gods are in charge of making it operate – in ways beneficial to the gods. Stories about these gods usually include ways in which humans are used in one way or another for the amusement of the gods. Without some sort of major effort, humans could only suffer, or be laughed at, or played with – all for the amusement of the gods.
When our Jewish ancestors were exiled to Babylon (582 BC), and when they ran into the Babylonian story of creation, they were absolutely horrified. This, they quickly saw, has nothing to do with the true meaning of the Great Creation God of the Hebrews. The God of the Hebrews is, as the Book of Common Prayer puts it, is “without body, parts, or passions.” I suppose you could say that the Hebrew God is pure intellect. And, of course, that means we too are primarily intellect. You see, my friends, the Hebrew God, according to the Bible, made you and me and all other humans – ever – in the image/likeness of the Hebrew God. Our purpose in being created is to bring Creation itself to fulfillment, and completion – the creation originally produced by the Great Creator God. In our understanding of the world/universe in which we are placed, we are here with a very substantial part to play.
Our task is, simply, to enable the whole of Creation to function together with equality, justice, freedom, caring and peace. That is why throughout the course of every year we renew our Baptismal Covenant several times. This identifies both our task and our activity.
And our worship is set up to remind us that the only goal we have is to live – right now – as part of the process that the evolution that is the very nature of Creation – the fulfillment that it freely can develop – because of the way God created it.
The first part of our liturgy, the readings, tell about history, and how easy it is for people to get wrong ideas. We learn that there are somethings that only our faith can assist with:- and so we recite a statement of that faith.
Then, we join ourselves intimately with the Son of God, as we ask for for an understanding of how our actions and faith can lead us on the path that fulfills the meaning of the Creation. (The general confession that follows in the Book of Common Prayer, comes to us as part of the law and order concept of faith.)
And then, having claimed our unity individually with the Son of God, we then continue to evolve into our new relationship with the same Son of God.
Just as Jesus entered a new kind of human relationship with Creator-God by creating a new family for God while hanging on the cross, so we – with our carefully thought out offertory gift – pledge our lives, our works and our belongings to the service of the Creator by accepting the life of Jesus as our own.
When we do this, we bind ourselves to Jesus, and so are set free in the life blood of Jesus. Then, Jesus, Creator, and each other, all are wrapped together in the warm compulsion of the Holy Spirit.
We are each now committed to devote every aspect of our lives – the way in which we live, the way in which we relate, the way in which we work – every aspect of our lives to helping bring fruition and completion to Creation.
That’s why we come here.
That’s why we leave here – satisfied that we can do our part in fulfilling God’s plan
in evolving Creation.
Go!
Do it!
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