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Sermon. Lent 4. Year C. March 14, 2010
Joshua (4:19-24); 5:9-12
Psalm 34 or 34:1-8
2 Corinthians 5:17-21
Luke 15:11-32
*****
I once sat in on a panel of scientists and philosophers who were discussing whether Faith in God was relevant anymore. One of the scientists, a lapsed Episcopalian, was a biologist, known for his studies in the behavior of ant colonies. A student in the audience asked him if he had seen any evidence in his research that God existed. He answered no. What I wanted to ask was, “Dr. K, which do think more likely, that we would find God in your ant colony or that you would find ants in our campus religious center?”
We as a culture have fallen away from our spiritual inheritance and are looking for some coherent principle of meaning for our lives, some living spirituality. In some sense we are like the prodigal son who went to his father and said, “Father, give me all that falls to me.” And God has done so. And we have taken it and forgotten where we got it.
What an interesting phrase, ‘all that falls to me’? From whom did it fall? From his father, and we should say in our less paternalistic time, his mother. And how did his father and mother get it. Well, it fell to them also. It was earned only in the sense that he was born to it.
And so, if we follow back to the beginning of time, to the Big Bang, we are astounded that all that we work with today, fell from that one explosion. We have inherited the cosmos, the galaxy, the Solar System, this planet earth, our island home, this country and this village. And like the prodigal, we claim our right to use it as we want.
I like to read books about science and religion. I belonged once to a group that discussed these books one Sunday night a month. I tried without success to persuade this group to read God, Chance, and Necessity, by Keith Ward, Regius Professor of Divinity at Oxford University.
Ward chooses to focus on a book written by an Oxford chemist named Peter Atkins (Not to be confused with he of the Atkins diet!) and the claim of Richard Dawkins, author of the God Delusion, that there is no meaningful purpose to the universe or to life. The evolution of life is simply the gradual working out over millennia of what Dawkins calls The Selfish Gene, the title of another of his books. Let me assure you that I find the theory of evolution to be the most sensible way of accounting for the facts. If you should every hear me use the word Intelligent Design in describing the universe, be assured I do not mean Creationism.
When young children ask where the world came from, Ward suggests there are only three answers. 1. It arrived by chance and continues to develop by chance. 2. It is the only world we could have, the laws of physics make it necessary to have this world. 3. God gave it to us and continues to maintain it in being. I won’t insult Ward by trying to summarize a whole book in a few sentences. In the end, he says, the hypothesis of God, while it won’t prove anything, especially to a predisposed skeptic, at least offers the best explanation for things as they are. At a telling point he says, we use our own God-given reason to reason that God isn’t necessary.
Now, isn’t that just the story of the Prodigal Son? Please Father, give me what is mine, which by the way comes from you, so that I can go off and live as though I don’t need you, though it is precisely the inheritance that makes my venture possible?
The founder of Medtronic, the world’s largest medical device manufacturer, built a meditation room in the main gathering area of the new headquarters, many years back. He was not pushing any particular religion. He was just suggesting that our very scientific enterprise in the company had deeper roots in mysteries of life that we would not solve, but must respect and take time to remember.
 He knew that we must admit that we are working off our inheritance. And, when we do come to our senses do we not realize that the Heavenly Father has been waiting patiently for us to return, and that He comes running to meet us in order to rejoice at our homecoming?
In our brief reading from Corinthians this morning we are told that in Christ we shall become a new creation. It is a theme that Paul works on in other letters. In Galatians he put it this way. Neither circumcision nor un-circumcision is anything, only a new creation.
Our first reading today, from Joshua, is a split reading. The end of chapter 4 tells how the people of Israel followed the Tent of the Presence across the Jordan River. The carriers of the tent stopped in the middle until the people had crossed, the Tent of God’s Presence holding back the waters, much like in the Red Sea crossing. Later in chapter five we were told how they celebrated their first Passover in the Promised Land, no longer needing the manna that had sustained them in the wilderness. The part left out of our reading was that all the males had to be circumcised before they could continue in the Promised land, that not having been done during their sojourn in the wilderness. It gives you some idea of the importance of this ritual in their story of redemption.
So then, what a bombshell that Paul would say that neither circumcision nor un-circumcision counts for anything. It amounts to saying that religion as a system of rites and practices, however helpful to many, is not our reason for being. The 20th century theologian, Paul Tillich, a self-initiated exile from Nazi Germany published a book of sermons called The New Being. In the title sermon Tillich asks us what St. Paul’s bombshell means for our time. He notes that we have rituals and practices also. And he notes that other religions have their rites and rituals, and even secular movements have their calendars and celebrations and rites of passage and holy spots of significant origin. We were in Washington DC last weekend, which is full of political temples honoring our national saints, and documents that are our national scripture. The ceiling of the capital rotunda is entitled “The apotheosis of George Washington”, a depiction of Washington rising to heaven surrounded by 13 maidens representing the original states. At the tomb of the unknown soldier, solemn ritual marks a holy remembrance.
It seems like we are there just to go through the tourist experience of awe and wonder at what others have done, much as we do our rites and rituals to recall what Jesus and the early disciples and saints of the church have done. Tillich reminds us that none of this is our message. We are not here to say, exchange your rites and ceremonies for our rites and ceremonies and you will be fine. No, we are to tell the world that when a person or a culture or a church or any institution rediscovers its roots in the Divine purpose it will be like homecoming and it will become a New Being, reconciled to God and each other, thus becoming part of a new world.
I grew up in Pipestone, MN where about the only difference between the Methodists and the Episcopalians was that the former couldn’t drink in public. Our worship rituals were almost identical. Last Sunday I went to church at St. Paul’s K street in Washington where they do some very elaborate ritual. I doubt that I will ever feel as comfortable in more ritual as I do in less ritual, but I have learned that each can hold great meaning for its adherents. St. Paul and Paul Tillich would also have us understand that neither is of ultimate significance. More ritual – less ritual, circumcision – un-circumcision, what does it matter?. What does count is that we come home to God and are reconciled one to another and to Him.
For a brief moment. Let us return to that story in Joshua. It is the culmination of all the content of the first five books of the Hebrew Bible. This long narrative assumes that the world came to be in order that God might lead them to this moment of destiny. You may recall that early in our national history we felt a manifest destiny to conquer the west. Just as the people of Israel did their best to wipe out the Hittites, and the Amorites, and the Jebusites, believing always that they did so under God’s command, so did we to the natives of this land, also believing we were just in forcing them to give up their religion and often to die.
I would never argue that God has no destiny for us. I would argue that we have a hard time understanding what it is. And we do so because we have been given our inheritance and have misused it in to pursue our own kinds of riotous living, often in the name of religion.
In Luke’s Gospel, before the stories of the lost sheep and the lost coin and the lost prodigal we are told that the Pharisees were grumbling because Jesus was eating with sinners and outcasts. All these stories have in that context a simple message, God is eager for the lost to be found. When he sees the lost return, he runs to meet them. The theology of the early church re: Jesus as God’s sacrifice for us, was driven by the sense of the early disciples that while they were pursuing Jesus for their own spiritual quests, he was patiently pursuing them to show them the Kingdom of God already in their midst if they would just turn from their blind ways.
When he meets us, he rejoices that we have returned, that we are reconciled to him and to others and to our selves. As persons, as congregations, as communities and nations, our Easter will be full of joy and festivity, to the extent that we seek a destiny with divine love in it rather than just our own pursuit of pleasure, that we see that our rituals are merely signs of something greater, not ends in themselves, and that we find purpose and meaning in our living rather than simply drifting through our lives as if the world was here only by chance or by some gradually evolved laws that have no moral end beyond themselves.
Proper 27, the Sunday closest to November 9.
In 2009, 23 Pentecost.
BCP:
I Kings 17:8-16.
Psalm 146 or 146:4-9.
Hebrews 9:24-28.
Mark 12:38-44.
The hook that holds three of our four readings together is the reference to widows in each. Psalm 46 says that the Lord sustains the orphan and widow but frustrates the ways of the wicked. The reading from I Kings is about the poor widow from Zarephath who feeds the prophet Elijah with cakes that she makes from the last of her resources, a small amount of meal and oil. Her fear is that she and her child will then die, since they have nothing left. And the Gospel reading from Mark tells of a poor widow who gave her last coins to the temple treasury. The focus is, explicitly in Kings and Mark, implicitly in the psalm, not on all widows, just on poor widows.
 The poor widows in Kings and Mark may share the fear that if they give away the last of their resources they will die. The Markan story doesn’t say that but it is easy for us to think it might be the case. If you have ever lost your means of income, whether from work or inheritance or through death of a supporting spouse, you know the fear that comes with that loss. It happened to me once and I genuinely feared that I would be begging in the streets before many months passed. But on the face of it the widow of Zarephath’s trust in her last meal and oil is a thin thread. It could at most give her and her child one more meal, and yet it was all she had to cling to. When people come to food shelves, it is often the case that their greatest problem is not immediate hunger but a fear that they will ultimately have nothing to cling to. The gift of a bag of groceries is a pittance in their total life picture, but it may be a lifeline on which to hang their hope.
Like the story of Abraham being asked to sacrifice Isaac, his only son, one point of this story is to contrast dependance on the passing things of this world with dependence on God. Ancient stories, not just those in the Bible often express on first glance, values that offend us. Why would God’s prophet take from a suffering widow the last meal that keeps her and her son alive? Why would God ask Abraham to sacrifice his only son? What a cruel thing? We forget that earlier on God had told Abraham that Sarah would give birth so that their descendants would outnumber the stars. Readers of the story in the days of old would have known this also and so they would have known the outcome. they would have said, “This is just a parable of total faith, not a real occurance where God made a demand that was cruel.” The lesson would have been clear. the Lord will provide. Take no thought for what you shall wear or for what you shall eat, etc. the lesson may offend our sense of responsibility but it is a lesson, none-the-less, not a historical story in which there was some chance that Abraham might not take up the knife, or that God might not provide the ram. So we know from the start, especially if we have read it many times, as would have been the case at Israelite festivals, that Elijah’s request is meant, not to heighten our disgust at such a cruel request, but to remind us all that sometime, somewhere, we will all face our last bit of meal and oil and learn that our dependence on things of this world is ended. We turn the parable into an aphorism when we say, “You can’t take it with you.” And it uncovers the fear by which we cling to even the least of these things.
It is tempting, in turning to the widow in Mark’s Gospel, especially with Stewardship Sunday just a week away to find in it a similar lesson, and it is there. The poor widow gives her last farthing, and has nothing left. The rich pharisees give much more but have plenty left. We miss the point if we get into an argument about tithing, for instance. After all, the widow didn’t give ten percent, she gave one hundred. And we have no idea what percentage the rich gave. The emphasis in the story is not on what was given but on what was left, much versus nothing. Andrew Carnegie built libraries around the country, but his generosity never threatened to bankrupt him. One reason we would all like to be philanthropists is that we could do good for others without doing bad to ourselves.
One scholar has classified all the various interpretations of this parable into about five categories. One of those categories is that Jesus points to the widows spirit of generosity. A spirit of generosity is wonderful, but there isn’t a word in the story about the widow’s motives. We have to read that into it. All the parable says is that her gift was greater because it left her with nothing. Jesus might be asking those around him what they fear, what they hope to cling to if they, in following him, risk losing everything. We could make a brief sermon out of that. It would go like this. When you consider following Jesus, what do you worry about having to give up? I was baptised by a man who later became bishop of New Jersey. He became an Episcopalian because he thought it ridiculous to have to give up dancing and card playing, both of which were required by the denomination he had belonged to. In one of Jesus’ parables, which we read earlier this year, a rich young man is asked to sell his assets and give it to the poor. With very good logic, we might note that if he gives up his wealth creating capacity, there will come an end to his ability to give in the future. We try to manage our resources for long term effectiveness, but in Jesus’ time many thought such an attitude was foolish because the end of the world was in view. When we think about our church pledge, it is inevitable that we worry about what will be left. For, it seems, no matter how much we have, we worry that at some time it won’t be enough.
But look at the context of the story. It is preceded by Jesus denunciation of the rich for devouring widow’s houses while making long prayers in the temple for the sake of appearances. And it is followed by his forecast of the destruction of the very temple itself. Could Jesus be saying, the religious authorities see to it that everyone comes into the temple to pay the treasury tax, and always in front of others. It is an obligation. For the widow it is a deadly obligation, after all, one cannot cut the smallest coin up into little worthless pieces. that would be no contribution at all. The widow faces exposure. A person of any means would have known they were to contribute coins made of silver. By putting in a copper coin, which it was, she was exposing her poverty and thus her social class. She has to be seen in public giving away her last coin which means she is disobeying the law that her first obligation is to her family, not the temple. All this humiliation is being forced on her by this practice endorsed and supported by these rich people who will expose their silver, thus their high social status. In this view, the coming destruction of the temple ends the entire practice and system by which piety is a greater measure of the spirit than justice. It is not an attack on all piety, only on that piety which is used to distract attention from our willingness to overlook, or even exploit injustice.
I received one of those emails recently, the kind that we all get when some hot political issue is afoot in the land. This one was a complaint that a current tax proposal was going to put a greater burden on the wealthy, but it cleverly focused on the question of why even the lowest income people shouldn’t pay some tax. The argument was that everyone should have some part in paying for whatever it is that we use taxes for. How else can they feel ownership of this country? It is a flawless argument. Of course the widow should pay her part and she may have wanted to, the story doesn’t say. But the real purpose of asking this question in this email was to take my mind off the real issue, which was the writer’s concern about his own taxes. Had he said, “The country is in deep trouble. We should all help out, even the poorest, for we are dumping our problems on our grandchildren and their children. And, by the way, I am willing to give more, after all, I will still have plenty left. We must correct this growing injustice of borrowing from our descendants to pay for our expenses.” Ah, then I might have said, you have a good point. But if you just want the poor to give some so you can keep more, how is that not devouring the houses of the widows? How is that not using what appears to be patriotism as a facade for wanting to keep one’s own riches, already more than you can use.
Mark is telling us that Jesus knows that he is seen by those in power as a revolutionary. He knows that a confrontation is to take place in Jerusalem. And it will be a confrontation between the values of the entrenched establishment and those expressed in the beatitudes that we heard last week.
Lest we get too critical though, of the values of the email I described, we should not forget that we are all capable of such an attitude when we fear that we won’t have enough left over.
The wardens, vestry and I received a letter this week about tithing. The ten percent issue could be discussed in great enough detail to make another whole sermon or several of them. But the writer understood the basic issue. He said the bottom line is “God knows your every need and He cares.” To the extent that we trust that, our fear diminishes, and our concern for what is left over retreats and our need to cover our fear with piety disappears and our support for the poor widows and for justice for the oppressed grows.
Proper 26, the Sunday closest to November 2.
In 2009, The Pentecost readings give way to All Saints Day.
BCP:
Ecclesiasticus 44:1-10,13-14.
Psalm 149.
Revelation 7:2-4,9-17.
Matthew 5:1-12.
Mark McIntosh, a Scottish born theologian, ask us, “Suppose you invite me to your house for a dinner party. I arrive and later, as we enjoy one another’s company, the appetizers and meal itself become a wonderfully delicious sign, a sacrament, of our fellowship, a means of being with each other in mutual delight. But what if instead I arrive at your house and grab up your food and drink, gulping it down in a corner by myself, and slip back out? In that case, the gift of your hospitality can no longer be a basis for fellowship because I have debased it. It is important to remember that by inviting me, you are implicitly allowing me this option. My communion with you must be freely and joyfully desired, a celebration of fellowship with you.”
McIntosh goes on to tell us that God is the host and the universe is his lavish party and we are created for communion with each other in thanksgiving but we are free to doubt that such communion will happen and free to decide that it would be better to grab what we can while here, preferring biological survival, to communion and fellowship.
 On all Saints Day we might wonder if the dinner invitation analogy is rich enough if limited to one occasion. We have all been guests at someone’s home more than once. On later visits we may recall the earlier occasions and perhaps guests who were there then but are not present this time, thus expanding the community of communion. In some cases we recall Aunt Hazel’s steam pudding, or Grandma Duffus’s cranberry frappe long after both have died, thus further expanding the community of communion.
When someone says, he looks just like my Dad or your uncle Ben or Great Grandpa Johnson they are witnessing to at least the genetic transfer of some characteristic through several generations. While the mentioning of ancestral names does not bring them across time physically enlivens the communion by recalling previous fellowship dinners. Whenever you eat and drink this, do it in remembrance of me.
And the swiss psychoanalyst, Carl Jung, suggested that our brains not only store physical characteristics, but psychic memories, not just of things we have experienced, but of experiences of our ancestors. Thus our dreams bring up images that we could never have experienced and cultures that have never met each other have similar stories of their origin, purpose and destiny. It is as if every one of us carries forward the gift of the first banquet to which anyone was invited.
Think today of those who have died, perhaps your parents, grandparents, heaven-forbid your children, aunts, uncles, great-grandparents, great aunts, not only those you recall but those you have only heard of or even farther back, have only read about in the family genealogy. And think of friends with whom you once played or studied or argued, who are no longer alive, but attended some mutual dinner party, or at least some bar-b-cue or college beer bust with you, or fought beside you in some terrible war. Are they not in some way still a part of you and are you not in some way still in fellowship with them? I refer here, not to memory but to the fact that our association with them has helped make us who we are, though we cannot detail just how in most cases.
Nor am I just referring to those of whom you were and are fond. We are also made up of gifts from those who persecuted us, made fun of us, humiliated us, abused us, fought against us in those wars. Some have come to the dinner with great promise and made our lives miserable, and perhaps we theirs? Life in this world is a mix of good and evil in which we often differ with each other about which is which. Blood is shed by my good against your evil and the opposite. It has been that way for millennia and so those whom we recall today as having gone before us in life may all in God’s mind be those who have, as our second reading tells us, come out of the great tribulation, and have washed their robes in the blood of the lamb and now stand before the throne of grace in new garments, sheltered by the sheer presence of he who sits upon the throne. When we are in our darkest times, we seek not necessarily words of comfort and enlightenment but the sheer presence of someone who abides our darkness with us.
The writer of Ecclesiasticus was aware of something we all know and that is that most of us will never be to public history a Queen Elizabeth or President Washington. We will pass relatively unnoticed out of general public awareness.
I heard a speaker say yesterday that God knew us from the moment of our birth. Plato said that the gods knew us well before that, though when we were born we forgot them. Ecclesiasticus, in a more pastoral moment, after reminding us that some are well remembered in history, says, “And there are some who have no memorial, who have perished as though they had not lived; they have become as though they had not been born, and so have their children after them. But these were men of mercy, whose righteous deeds have not been forgotten. Their posterity will continue forever, and their glory will not be blotted out. Their bodies were buried in peace, and their name lives to all generations.
Last night I walked the streets of Rhinebeck for a few minutes. Large groups of young people and families with children passed behind and in front of the church, on their way from house to house. I wondered how many of them knew that the origin of their happy evening was in the celebration of our communion with our ancestors, familial and otherwise. The Eve of all Hallows or All Saints, eventually to be called halloween, has in the course of time, lost much of its original meaning, as is often the case with cultural change. Smaller and smaller numbers of people in our society recall with any depth the meaning of Christmas, Easter (itself originally a celebration of the nature goddess Oester) Labor Day, Memorial Day. I do not begrudge the families or the children their enjoyment together last night. In fact, it was the occasion of many fellowship meals together and will provide material for many a recollection in the future. But I was also reminded how easily present enjoyment can obscure gratitude for the past and hope for the future, and what a daunting task it is for parents and teachers and ourselves to find ways to give each new generation the language and the story by which they too can be guests at this awesome banquet, grateful for the opportunity for communion and fellowship with past and future generations, and not just seekers after biological survival.
Sermon, Church of the Messiah, Rhinebeck, New York
July 5, 2009
The Rev. Jay Hanson
As acolytes in a small church in Southwestern Minnesota we carried a cross and two flags during the processional and the recessional hymns. We learned that no flag can cross in front of the American flag in a procession. A couple of decades later, hardly any Episcopal church carried the flags in procession and you can sometimes find these flags tucked away in a storage closet on the church property. The practice of carrying the flags represented one relationship between church and state, and the elimination of the procession represented another. The latter relationship, eliminating the flags. represented a statement that the Church is independent of the state. As I recall, this statement was, at least in part, a response to the Vietnam War.
On this weekend in which we recall the Declaration of Independence, leading thirteen years later to the writing of the Federal Constitution, it is instructive to look briefly at the relationship between church and state, including from a biblical perspective.
Our first reading this morning was the call of Ezekiel, the prophet, one of three major prophets in the Hebrew tradition, the two others being Isaiah and Jeremiah. Ezekiel is confronted by God in a vision. The vision would take too long to describe here, but you can read it at home in the first chapter of the book of Ezekiel. It gave rise to the well known Gospel song, Ezekiel saw the wheel. In our reading Ezekiel is called by God to speak on his behalf and not care how people respond. God doesn’t expect Ezekiel to be well received because the people to whom he is speaking, the Israelites, are a rebellious house. To the point of our reflection here, note that Israel is a nation, admittedly a nation in disarray, many of whose leading citizens have been dispersed by conquering powers to live in surrounding countries not their own. Ezekiel’s home away from home is part of what is called the Babylonian Exile. It is one part of several centuries of dispersing Jews to other parts of the world, by the Assyrians, the Babylonians, the Egyptians and later, the Romans. The overall movement is often called the Diaspora. North of town on 308 is a restaurant by that name, reflecting the fact that its Greek owners have made their home here away from their home of homes in Greece.
So for Ezekiel, Yahweh was the God of the nation of Israel. He may have been thought of by some as the only God, the God of the universe, but this nation felt called to be especially obedient. More was expected of it and the standards to which God held it were higher than for other nations. Many Americans feel that way also.
Stephen Fisher brought to my attention yesterday a reviewer’s comment on a book about Samuel Adams, American patriot from Boston, instrumental in the Revolution, the Boston Tea Party and the drafting of the Declaration of Independence. According to Wikipedia, the sometimes untrustworthy on-line encyclopedia, he also came from a long line of puritans who were makers of malt for use in making beer. The quote reads, “The idea that inspired Adams was religious in nature. He believed that God had intervened on behalf of the United States and would do so as long as its citizens maintained civic virtue, ‘We shall never be abandoned by Heaven while we act worthy of its aid and protection,’ he said.”
Our Pledge of Allegiance includes the phrase ‘under God’. The pledge it’s self actually dates to a Columbus Day ceremony in 1892 and the phrase under God was inserted at the request of President Eisenhower in 1954, partially in response to a sermon he had heard at the New York Avenue Presbyterian Church, in which the pastor referred to Lincoln’s use of the phrase ‘under God’ in the Gettysburg Address and suggested to congress that it be incorporated into the Pledge of Allegiance. The original Pledge was written by the Rev. Francis Bellamy, a Baptist minister who was also a Christian socialist.
There is, of course, a fundamental theological problem with associating God too closely with a country. In the time of Ezekiel, people felt that if a country was having trouble, its God must be weak. Strong country, strong God, weak country, weak God. Ezekiel’s counter was to assert that Israel’s weakness was because God was using the other nations, to punish Israel, hence God remained strong while Israel was weak.
A more substantive way of getting to the same point is to point out that countries and empires come and go. Everything that comes and goes is secular, secular referring to that which passes away. We are seeing around the world today what happens when nations identify with their majority religion and try to make the country into a theocracy, a place where the religious leaders try to make everyone behave according to their interpretation of their religious documents.
The pharisees tried to entrap Jesus by asking him if it was okay to pay taxes to the emperor? The trap was that if he said yes, he was in trouble with the pharisees who opposed the tax. If he said no he was in trouble with the Romans who levied the tax. His answer was to give to Caesar that which is Caesar’s and to God that which is God’s. The text says they were amazed at his answer. The reason they were amazed is that he had turned the tables on them, for they knew that everything that belonged to Caesar belonged to God. That text is often misused in support of separation of church and state, when its real point is that everything is God’s and you can’t separate some out and claim it for someone else.
None-the-less, the idea of not having the state endorse a particular religion was indeed a revolutionary idea. The Quakers, understanding Jesus’ point precisely, claim a hierarchy of values in refusing military service of any nation. Having to make decisions of conscience like that makes any of us nervous.
I have no trouble with believing that we owe a greater allegiance to God than to the country. What I am grateful to the founders for is that they knew that none of us knows the will of God so perfectly as to use it to rule others. Also, both Ezekiel and Adams had to come to terms with the fact that rain falls on the just and the unjust. The good do not always benefit and the bad are not always punished. And, in a politically polarized world like ours, the will of God too often turns out to be the will of the liberals or the conservatives.
I and others, have erroneously asserted in the past that the writers of the Declaration and the constitution were also the writers of the Episcopal Church Constitution. That is an oversimplification, but the ideas of one were invested in the other as the two were written at the same time.
I was a volunteer at the convention in Minneapolis when the Church voted to approve the consecration of Gene Robinson as Bishop. My volunteer job was to be a page in the House of Bishops press area. As we waited for the bishops to spend their hour in prayer before their vote, some reporters from CNN came to get in line. They had just interviewed two delegates, one for Robinson’s consecration, and one against. One reporter said, “I never heard of the Episcopal Church until now, but this has been an amazing experience. These two delegates argued clearly but respectfully with each other in front of our cameras and then, off camera, genuinely wished each other well and hugged before going off to cast their votes. He said, I don’t go to church but if I did, it would be this one.
We are now involved in a similar dispute about the newly elected bishop of Northern Michigan, but around a completely different issue. The issues don’t matter that much. What matters is that we Episcopalians are structured, like the country, out of a fear of centralized power, especially a centralized power in league with the ecclesiastical power. Because our early leadership wanted neither the English King nor domination by the English church, it chose democracy over the temptations of theocracy.
Democracy is a fragile and imperfect solution to the problem of earthly power. But, however imperfect a solution, it is worthy of more than a few fireworks.
Sermon, Church of the Messiah, Rhinebeck, NY
June 23, 2009
The Rev. Jay Hanson
Once again this week, we the listeners to St. Mark’s portrayal of the meaning of events, note that Jesus ‘strictly ordered them that no one should know this.’ this being that he had healed the 12 year old daughter of Jairus, one of the leaders of the synagogue. We are reading our way through Mark’s gospel this year and we will encounter this strange injunction many times. Of course, someone must have told the story to someone, since it is here written down. Or, is this simply a clever literary device by which Mark is, for some reason letting us in on something that the characters in the story don’t know?
First of all, he takes only an inner circle of disciples to Jairus’ house, Peter, James and John. There turn out to be others present, enough loud mourners to make a commotion. When Jesus tells them the child is only asleep, they laugh at him, so he puts them all outside and takes only the father, mother and the three disciples with him. Taking the girl by the hand he asks her to get up, she does and the five with him are amazed and get the injunction to silence from Jesus, plus the order to give her something to eat.
Also, again, we moderns can hardly tear ourselves away from wondering how Jesus did this, if he did it, why we don’t see such things happening any more, and so on. We easily forget that at that time, as we said last week, such possession of greater powers than normal belonged to others in addition to Jesus. So the focus of the story was not the miracle, but the setting of the miracle and its place in the narrative.
It happens that this is one of four stories grouped together at this point by Mark, all of which illustrate that power flows to people who have faith. In addition all of these stories are about women, who were according to the standards of the world, powerless and weak, though one of the women in these stories, Herod’s daughter Herodius, was powerful by virtue of being a schemer.
 The Daughter of Jairus (La fille de Zäire) And Jairus is a powerful leader of the synagogue, who is reduced to fear and pleading by his daughter’s impending death. He refers to her as his little daughter, but then we are told she is twelve years old, so we know that she is not an infant. The phrase ‘little daughter’ it turns out is an expression of parental affection. Twelve year olds in those days were deemed old enough to marry and become mothers. So, just at the point where she can live the full maternal life, she is on the point of death and her father is moved to plead for help, realizing that, as powerful as he is in the institutional sense, he is powerless in the face of death, as we all seem to be.
It would seem that a point of the story is that we can be moved to trust or faith when we are at the limit of our own power and need help and that such need often happens when someone we love is at risk. Let me emphasize again that the point is not that if we have faith, people won’t die. Neither Jairus nor his daughter are alive today, after all. Nor is Lazarus, whose story of resurrection is told in John’s gospel. Death will overtake all of us. And it may be that part of Mark’s message is that the disciples had a hard time facing that. Peter, after all, rejects Jesus for suggesting that the Messiah must die.
But, I think Mark had more in mind. Even though these three disciples were let in on things where others were excluded, they had difficulty becoming courageous enough to face the powers of this world. They were with Jesus on the Mount of transfiguration but couldn’t stay awake and pray. And Peter, on whose reminiscences parts of this Gospel probably depend, when faced for the first time with fear for his own future in the Garden, claimed not to know Jesus.
Remember, if you will, that in this gospel, the theme is introduced very early by Jesus statement that the Kingdom of God has come near. It is at hand. Repent, change your ways, become courageous now, for the battle between that Kingdom and the kingdoms of this world is enjoined in the present moment.
Two years ago, while briefly in Edinburgh, Scotland, we visited St. Giles’ church, home congregation in his later years of John Knox, founder of Scottish Presbyterianism. We entered expecting only to see some beautiful stained glass windows and recall some important church history. but, prominently displayed in the side aisle were pictures and maps describing the international transport of young girls from poor countries of the world to rich countries to be used by prostitution rings. It was ugly. What a contrast to the care for his daughter displayed by the ruler of the synagogue in our story. The time for action based on faith, said the displays, was now.
The ugly truth also is that these same rich countries supply the market for international trade in drugs. The powers of this world are ugly and aggressive. They cannot be turned back by the timid.
We had some relatives by marriage in town this week and they wanted to visit the Roosevelt complex at Hyde Park. They were particularly impressed by Eleanor’s leadership in so many areas. And around the world, women are still fighting against powerful odds for their very survival, as we have seen, for example, in the aftermath of the Iranian election. I suppose that the Roosevelts had many second thoughts about stepping forth to leadership. The disciples, according to Mark, were very cautious and afraid at first. At least one of the meanings of the injunction to silence in this gospel is that the world is not ready for Jesus and neither was his inner circle.
Sometimes the powers of this world are so strong that we must zip up our hearts to keep from seeing the pain they are causing in the world. We find rationalizations for ignoring these hurts. Until, like the ruler of the synagogue, the pain comes unbearably close. In my last interim assignment, I had an assistant who was gay. He came from a very conservative midwestern family. They had all the usual arguments for resisting the full inclusion of gay persons into the society, until their own son was involved. But when her own son came out, his mother, like the ruler of the synagogue was moved by her natural love and compassion to seek help in understanding her newfound situation. She eventually organized the statewide parental organization in support of gay persons in her very conservative state. Having been healed by her growing faith, she now helps others with their fears by the power of her courage.
According to Mark, life is a battle between faith and fear. The disciples were a fearful bunch through most of his Gospel. They could only be courageous when they saw that Jesus was the embodiment of the struggle between the kingdom of heaven and the kingdoms of this world. His personal struggle on their behalf unzipped their hearts and gave them courage.
So the reading asks us, since there is no secret from us, we know the outcome of the story, to look at our own fears and gauge our own faith or lack of it and seek help for ourselves and others. We, like the leader of the synagogue come to the community of Christ’s followers for personal reasons; we want to be married in the church, we want our child baptised, we need some counseling, our grandfather needs to be buried, we want our children to be exposed to Jesus and to the values he represents, and so on. So it was with the girls father, so it was with all these who sought Jesus for their own need, including the disciples. And, I suppose, Mark would say we shouldn’t advertise that so much, not because it wouldn’t bring folks in, but because it might not carry a warning label.
The warning label should read that you too may discover, as they did, that Jesus is still alive and powerful and through your faith can move mountains, advance causes, bring peace and healing. The disciples weren’t ready for that, says Mark. But, when they saw Jesus alive again, they became ready. We are all in a sense, getting ready and perhaps unknowingly, inviting others to join us in getting ready to find the day when our own faith will grow and our courage be emboldened and thus Jesus be allowed to continue changing the world.
Sermon by the Rev. Jay Hanson
Rhinebeck, NY, May 10, 2009
College chaplains are familiar with those cases in which parents bring their children to college as freshmen, and hoping to exercise some last influence, escort them to the local episcopal congregation or the campus Canterbury Chapel, to introduce them to the chaplain. I don’t know what it is like now, but in the 60s we chaplains used to say, “Well, we’ll not see that student again until the parents visit next time.”
Of course, the problem was that the student wasn’t driven by his own spiritual quest, but by someone else’s desire that he have a spiritual quest. My focus here is not on the parents making a mistake. They didn’t. They did what they thought best. And, generally speaking, the students didn’t stay away just because their parents had tried to influence them, though a few might have. They stayed away because they were surrounded by a whole new world and were trying to find their way in it, including finding friends, dealing with unlikeable room-mates, a new sense of independence about their schedule, classes that were more demanding and less personal than in their past experience, and so on.
 In due time, they would begin to search for meaning in dormitory discussions, classroom dialogues, campus forums and even church meetings. And when that time came, the quest was becoming internal. A new journey was beginning. Just then, they might find themselves somewhat like the Ethiopian eunuch in this morning’s reading from the book of Acts.
Here was a man of some influence and wealth, riding in a chariot either to or from Jerusalem, reading from the Jewish scriptures, specifically, the book of Isaiah. He was from what was then called Ethiopia, perhaps closer to what we now call northern Sudan. Some scholars think that because he needed help with understanding the scriptures, he may have been studying to become a Jew or may have been a recently converted Jew or a Jew who was just getting around to studying his scriptures. In any case he is reading because he is interested and he is open to teaching because he really wants to know. Such people are likely to learn. They are teacher ready. Educators have a saying, “When the student is ready, the teacher will appear.”
Thus it is with each of us. It is hard, if not impossible to rush us along on some standard schedule. I am not saying we should not have age related classes in our schools, though there are schools that try to individualize their teaching and some home schooling parents are motivated by such goals. Oldtimers here perhaps recall the adage that the best classroom is a student on one end of a log and Mark Hopkins on the other. There are a lot of Mark Hopkins’s in our schools today who do a marvelous job even though the other end of the log is crowded.
Nor am I suggesting that we shouldn’t have some standardizations of curriculum and testing. But we might note more frequently than we do that when a student is ahead of or behind that norm, we would do well not to label them a genius or slow-learner.
Actually, I am not even talking firstly about education. I am sneaking up on religion. I am just saying that you might have gone to church every Sunday of your life and still only recently, perhaps even just now, have decided that you want to know or experience something more deeply, have some previous mystery explored more meaningfully. And so, you are now or have been at some time, on your road from Gaza to Jerusalem, and thinking about something puzzling.
And then, along comes your Philip, an interpreter who is enthusiastic about telling you about his experience such that it might be helpful to you, and thus your quest, perhaps in its infancy, gets a jump start.
This spiritual questing is not necessarily confirmation class stuff. I’ll never forget the first confirmation class I taught, with about 15 or 20 ninth graders. (As a side note, we keep changing the age at which we think such teaching should occur, the Ethiopian servant of the queen would not have felt comfortable in that class of mine) At the end of that first year I told the students that I wanted to talk with them individually to see if they really wanted to be confirmed and to share my judgment as to whether they should be. My boss, the rector of the church was horrified that I might not recommend some of them for confirmation and there were some that I wouldn’t have. But the real surprise was from the kids. I asked them if they were all ready and they all said yes. I said, now really, be honest with me and one particularly mature young student said, well, Mr. Hanson, if you really want to know, all my friends are being confirmed and it would be humiliating if I weren’t, and besides, if I don’t, then I’ll have to go through this class all over again!
You might even say that my making judgements about how ready they were was hypocritical. After all, at age 12 I was confirmed without so much as a single confirmation class. The bishop was visiting and I was the only candidate of age and so I had to memorize quickly the Ten Commandments and the Lord’s Prayer in case the Bishop asked me to recite them, which I don’t recall him doing.
So, what was the traveler reading? He was reading a section of Isaiah that spoke of the role to be played either by the expected Messiah or by Israel in its future. It is a section that speaks of suffering, humiliation, of a man wounded for our transgressions, crushed for our iniquities, upon whom was the punishment that made us whole and by whose bruises we are healed. It is the first known written association of Jesus with this poem from Isaiah, a poem which many of you have heard, perhaps many times in Handel’s Messiah.
We don’t know just what Philip said. Luke, who very likely also put together the Book of Acts, only tells us that he told him about Jesus in the light of Isaiah’s poem. And the story tells us that it was the perfect match of student and teacher. When they saw some water, the Ethiopian asked to be baptized.
We can well imagine that Philip interpreted Jesus’ death as sacrificial, not in the sense of some weird sense of self-destruction or some protest against civil injustice, but as the most radical instance of love centered completely on others, especially to those who were by their own admission undeserving.
In the Episcopal Church we keep rethinking the right age for baptism and whether confirmation should wait till an age of understanding and at what age children should be given communion. I don’t mean to discuss those issues here. Sometimes I feel like the Eastern Orthodox churches where infants receive baptism, confirmation and communion via a spoon all at one time. Sometimes I feel like some level of understanding is certainly helpful, if not necessary.
But of this I am fairly clear, that the understanding that helps is about love, not romantic love as in feeling the vibes for that person across the room, but love in the sense of noticing others, being more interested in what is on their mind than what is on yours, being ready to take action to help them in times of need, and even sometimes, without feeling you are the Messiah being ready to take drastic and perhaps costly action on behalf of others. This can be described in a sermon or a confirmation class, but it is learned by example and experience. If I can risk a homely example, one which in my day was pretty much left to mothers, but these days is done by many fathers, it is hard not to love someone who changes your diapers.
We want to offer to any parents here who wonder about their children being ready to receive communion, whatever help we can. But you parents and other family and friends can’t get out from under it, whatever words and stories we tell will take root in whatever setting you have prepared. You are at one time the Ethiopian questor and at another, Philip the bearer of good news, and sometimes both at the same time.
It might feel like a burden to you to have such a role but you are ready. You may feel unable to deal with deeper spiritual things. In our Gospel reading, Jesus is giving his last talk to his disciples. They are no doubt nervous about his words implying an impending departure. They gave up good businesses fishing and collecting taxes to go with him. His words, intended to respond to their fear are that he would leave them a companion, to whom he gave the title Advocate or Helper or Comforter, referring to the Holy Spirit. He tells them he will not leave them orphans.
It is hard for us to trust that the Spirit will make something helpful out of our deepest beliefs and most meaningful experiences. It is easier to say, let’s do baptism on these five great significant Sundays, let’s do confirmation at the great cathedral, let’s leave all the spiritual teaching to the Sunday School teachers who have an approved curriculum. Al these are wonderful practices of the church, none of which were available to the this Ethiopian traveler. We live in a world in which we think we can name every personality difference with some diagnostic moniker and discover the cause of every effect we experience, and I am deeply grateful to those inquirer’s who give their lives t such investigation. But we can’t schedule when the student is ready, when the trip from Gaza to Jerusalem begins, when your Philip will appear or when you will be the Philip. We can trust that at any of these unscheduled moments, you will be well served to expect help from the Spirit.
One of the now retired Bishops of our church, Sandy Hampton, a very outgoing, optimistic man with a great sense of humor, on his parish visitations, followed his sermons with the very un-Episcopal habit of an altar call. He, would, I am not kidding, with seriousness, ask if anyone in the congregation wanted to come forward to be baptized. I don’t know whether anyone ever did. I didn’t see it. I did see him throw his arms up in a great gesture and fall into great laughter as his robes crumpled to the floor. I asked him why he kept on using this altar call with staid, sophisticated Episcopalians. He said, you never know when the Spirit will move someone. He was always ready for the possible appearance of a high ranking servant of the queen of Ethiopia, or anyone else who may have been on the road or surfing the net, wondering about the meaning of something that might open up her heart.
Easter Sunday, April 12, 2009
*****
Acts 10:34-43 or Isaiah 25:6-9
Psalm 118:14-17,22-24
Colossians 3:1-4 or Acts 10:34-43
Mark 16:1-8
*****
Come Holy Spirit. Take our minds and think with them. Take our hearts and set them on fire with your love.
I have often gazed on summer evenings at the Milky Way, what our third Eucharistic Prayer calls “…the vast expanse of interstellar space…” and wondered with the Psalmist, “What is man that thou art mindful of him?”
Some such a notion of God providentially caring for each of us is at the heart of the major monotheistic faiths of our world. And, responding to such a God is a personal challenge in each of our lives.
John Polkinghorne is an English particle physicist and ordained priest in the Church of England. He writes often of matters both scientific and spiritual, contending that both disciplines are, as he puts it, “faith seeking understanding.”
In leading into his discussion of the Resurrection of Christ, Polkinghorne discusses what we know of the universe.
The history of the universe is a giant tug of war between the expansive force of the big bang, driving galaxies apart, and the contractive force of gravity, pulling them together. These two effects are so evenly balanced that we cannot tell which will win. If expansion prevails, the galaxies now [growing further apart from each other] will continue to do so forever, eventually decaying slowly with the universe ending in a whimper. If, on the other hand, gravity prevails, the present expansion of the galaxies will one day be halted and reversed. What began with the big bang will end in the big crunch, as the whole universe collapses back into a singular melting pot.
Most of you, like me, have no idea how to picture a black hole, much less how to envision the entire universe collapsing back into nothing. We are inclined to just drop the subject and let these bright folk figure that out while we get on with fixing the garbage disposal, which just ate part of a measuring spoon.
But Polkinghorne comes a little closer to us when he notes that this sense of futility about the fate of the universe is not different from the sense of futility that we can feel sometimes about our own lives.
In both cases he points out that what is at issue is the faithfulness of God to his creation and to its individual creatures. He also says that how we think about our own destiny impacts how we live.
 This issue of our response to the challenges of life is put clearly at the end of Mark’s Gospel. We are told there that, upon arriving at the tomb to anoint Jesus’ body with oil the women find his body gone and are told that they will find him in Galilee. The women ran from the scene and said nothing to anyone for they were afraid. We, the readers, know of course, that that is not true. The women are bid by the man in white raiment to follow his directions in order to see Jesus, but they are inclined by their own inner fears to say nothing to anyone.
And so are we. Just as the scientists are uncertain whether to trust the forces of expansion or the forces of gravity, so we are uncertain whether to flee from fear or to follow in trust.
This, it seems to me is not just a theological issue for us. It is a lifetime dilemma.
Parents who have accompanied their young child to school or to the bus on the first day of kindergarden know that they can see in their child’s face both eagerness and uncertainty. Perhaps more unsettling is their awareness that their child’s face reflects their own, in that the parent is eager for the child to move on and, at the same time, uncertain about whether to let go. Paul Tillich, defined faith as the Courage to Be. The parent at the steps of the bus or school has a gut level understanding of that definition.
You at the Church of the Messiah face uncertainty and can be excused if at times it scares you and at times excites you.
So the women at the tomb represent us all. And the gospel story ends with the reader understanding that if the disciples and the women want to see Jesus in Galilee they will once more have to renew their faith and follow rather than fleeing in the face of their fear. They went simply to perform an ancient and treasured role and found their day and their lives were to be changed. What it would be was uncertain.
One of those uncertainties, for them and for us, is the simple meaning of the Resurrection. So, in chapter 9, Mark reports to us that the disciples themselves, despite their long association with Jesus, discussed among themselves, “What is the meaning of the Resurrection of the Dead?” I guess that if they could take that liberty we can also.
Surely it does not mean that we each go on living at whatever age we were at death, some only three, others thirty, others still three times thirty.
It also does not mean that some apparition, some spirit without form, floats around the universe checking in on a galaxy here and living room there. I cannot say that wouldn’t be exciting, or that there aren’t such ghostly spirits, only that such is not what we mean by the resurrection of the dead.
I cannot even say much about the nature of the time and space to be occupied by whatever the new creation is. After all, I don’t really understand our own very well. About six years ago I visited an exhibit about Albert Einstein’s work at the Museum of Natural History in New York City. There I began to glimpse for the first time what he meant by relativity.
It is perhaps enough to tell you that when a clock travels faster, time moves slower. The difference in small increments of time, like the difference between the speed of a clock on a train and that of a clock on a plane is too small for us to measure, so if you are late for an appointment don’t trow your clock out the window to slow down time. But if a clock could move at the speed of light, the time it is measuring would indeed stand still, and thus the oft-repeated implication that if we could move at the speed of light we would not age. If I could leave now at the speed of light and return in ten years, you would all have aged ten years and I would still be 71.
Assuming God may move at at least the speed of light, if God so chooses, are not the past, the present and the future all one with God? Indeed, Einstein, in writing words of comfort to the wife of a friend who preceded him by a few weeks in death, said, “I will join him soon, when I finish with this fiction of past, present and future.” I do not claim that Einstein believed in a personal God, he said he didn’t. But it would be fun to ask him where he expected to join his friend. It might shed new light on Jesus’ reported words to the thief who hung beside him, “Today you will be with me in paradise.”
Now, this brief recitation of the relativity of time is meant only to show how little we know about what will happen after our own death. It is futile for us to try to figure out how complex the universe may be or where and how we might be in some way reconstituted. It is equally futile to build a case against resurrection on whatever little we know about the mechanics of carbon based life in this universe.
So, we are back to what we trust. Our statement of faith in the Resurrection is fundamentally a trust that God did not make the universe, or us, in order to throw it, or us, away.
Others before Jesus believed in life after death. But what energized the disciples was that He returned to be with them when they had so obviously deserted him. Thus they understood what St. John means when he reports that Jesus prayed to the Father that none of these be lost.
Just as the women and the disciples faced a choice between following and fleeing so do we face the twin roads of fear and courage at every point; in deciding on a career, in choosing a school, in deciding whether to marry, and if so, whom, in joining or not joining a church, in choosing to fight or to protest.
In fear, which we all have, we postpone these choices, waiting for more evidence, or we choose casually, thinking there will always be a way out.
But with courage we make commitments to we follow unknown roads trusting that we can follow where they lead.
Polkinghorne, who was addressing the issue of believing or not believing in the Resurrection, asks, “are the deep order of the world, and the fruitfulness of its history, hints of its being a creation , or are they just happy accidents in a meaningless process? Are human intuitions of hope windows into a divine reality, or are they comforting illusions that offer us delusive support as we battle to survive?”
In another place he refers to the philospher, John Hick, who told a parable of two men on a journey together. One believes that they are going to the celestial city, the other has no such belief. On their way, their experiences are similar. “And yet, when they turn the last corner, it will be apparent that one of them was right and the other wrong.” Polkinghorne asserts his belief in the celestial city, but adds, that “those who are seeking a homeland” to quote the book of Hebrews, will tend to conduct themselves in the present in a manner different from those without such a hope. So that even on the way there will be a difference between the two travelers. The one will endure privations for the sake of the prospect before him; the other will be tempted to paths of ease, even if they deflect him from his journey. It will be easier for the one than the other to honour the sometimes painful obligations that loyalty and faithfulness impose upon us.”
It was so for the women. It was so for the disciples. And when we deeply trust that a place is prepared for us, it is so for us.
And now unto God, in whose mysterious creation we seek both our present joy and our ultimate destiny, may be ascribed as is most justly due, all might, majesty and glory, now and forevermore.
–The Rev. Jay Hanson
Good Friday Meditation, 4/10/09
Last night, after our Maundy Thursday service, we went out to eat. I was wearing my collar, which I rarely do. I noticed that it drew some attention when I entered, which is why I usually don’t wear it. Shortly after we sat down, a man sitting near us said, tomorrow is Good Friday isn’t it? The other responded, “Yes, I guess it is, though there is no reason for me to know that.” The implication seemed to be that he had nothing to do with church and should not be expected to know about Good Friday. I had the sense that he was speaking so I could hear, making a kind of statement of his own, a contrast to the statement my collar had made. But, I might have been overly sensitive.
Then, when I turned on my computer this morning, after checking the weather and looking for email messages, I scrolled down to see what news there was and who was leading in the Masters tournament and how my Minnesota Twins had done against Seattle, (they lost) and then to check on the Markets. Of course, there was no news about the markets as they are closed on Good Friday. I don’t know how long it will be before the markets are open on Good Friday, but that time will come. That man who seemed to want to distance himself from my collar is increasingly symptomatic of our age, and probably an indicator that the markets will be open 24/7/365 in the not too distant future.
Most of us have seen someone on an urban street corner holding up a picture of the crucifixion, or a small cross and asking by way of an attached sign, “Is it nothing to you who pass by?” Increasingly it seems, it is nothing and raises for us the question, “Why is it something for us?” If we do stop by the church on this day and meditate on the cross, what does it mean to us?
Clearly it means something, since many meanings are written into our liturgy. Our creed says that “For our sake he was crucified…”
After the Absolution in Rite 1, the minister may say some of what in the 1928 Prayer Book were called the comfortable words.
- God so loved the world that he gave his only begotten son…John 3:16
- If any man sin, we have an Advocate with the Father, Jesus christ the righteous; and he is the perfect offering for our sins, and not only ours, but for the sins of the whole world.”…1 John 2:1-2.
From the Great thanksgiving in rite 1, “…for that thou of thy tender mercy didst give thine only son Jesus Christ to suffer death upon the cross for our redemption….” “…a full, perfect and sufficient sacrifice, oblation and satisfaction, for the sins of the whole world”
The celebrant may deliver the bread to the communicant with these words, “The Body of our Lord Jesus Christ, which was given for thee, preserve thy body and soul unto everlasting life. Take and eat this in remembrance that Christ died for thee…”
In Eucharistic Prayer A of Rite 2 the celebrant prays, “He stretched out his arms upon the cross, and offered himself, in obedience to your will, a perfect sacrifice for the whole world.”
We could find many more examples. A couple of years ago, a friend of mine who began his ministry as a Catholic Priest and then became an Episcopal priest renounced his ordination because he said he could no longer make sense of this theology of sacrifice. His dilemma is the subject of much theological writing these days and more and more do I hear from everyday Christians who puzzle over it. Some just flatly reject it, others just wonder what it might mean for them, for after all the central theme is that he did something for us.
That clue is key, if it is for us, how so? I would think that if we can figure it out for ourselves, then the part about for the whole world becomes easier. We simply have to assume there is something like us about others.
The earliest christian writings offer several different theological insights into this so-called atonement theology.
St. Paul put it most classically, perhaps. In summary, if God is just and has made us for love and we have used our freedom not to love but to seek personal reward, then God, in judging us, must either regret giving us freedom or, in the face of our sins, impose the death penalty. God, however is merciful, and so, being unwilling to see us all die, he substitutes his own Son, a story which calls to mind the aborted sacrifice of Isaac by Abraham, except that this one is not interrupted. Jesus does indeed become the lamb.
Further, Paul seems to have believed that it freed him and others from death, even from literal earthly death, as they expected shortly to meet the Lord. I think the notion has made sense to those of us who, like Peter and some of the other disciples, have seen ourselves clearly as failing to carry out the command of love. We will have more to say on that at Easter, but it still may seem odd to imagine that God had to make such an offering in order to carry out his mercy. And, we still wait, hopefully, but wonderingly, for that time when Christ will return. And we are not, at least I am not, persuaded by the Tim LaHays of the world that that time is anytime soon.
Furthermore. Paul saw this as making the whole world new, a new creation. One searches vainly for any notion that the 20th century was any better than its predecessors; it is, seemingly, very much the same old creation.
But the core of Paul’s idea, that we certainly deserve a harsh judgement at times, while not grounds for a penal code, is grounds for genuine confession and openness to becoming for however short a time, a new creation in some small way.
St. Mark, wrote later than Paul, and his Jesus speaks of giving up his life as a ransom for many, supporting the Pauline theory, but he adds a new note. Speaking to his disciples, Jesus asks them to take up their crosses and follow him. So, we now have many crosses rather than just one. And so, there is a new layer of meaning in this Gospel. In the same way that Jesus did this for us, we might do it for those who come after us. The Dietrich Bonhoeffers and Martin Luther Kings and Joan of Arcs of the world carry on the highest ethical tradition of humankind, by which there is no greater love than to give up one’s life for others. Such willing sacrifice is perhaps the greatest of the good works that we thank God for “preparing us to walk in” as our Post-communion prayer of Thanksgiving puts it.
Of course, as Canon William Donovan, to whom I am indebted for calling this to my attention says, our temptation is to refer to any little inconvenience as our cross to bear, thus cheapening the idea. But he also points out that while we don’t all carry the ultimate cross of painful, lingering death, we do all see that as a possibility and that such painful lingering death becomes ever more possible in our medically sophisticated society. And, so the example of courage may be added to the idea of unworthiness as a meaning of the cross, for us.
Matthew adds yet another, that we know that a time will come when we will die and if we see that as a time of judgement, we have fair warning to get ready. I doubt that this moves many people today. Perhaps it should, but it doesn’t. As a young man I felt some of that fear, enough to keep me off the golf course on Sunday mornings and in church. But the golf courses seem increasingly filled on Sunday, only limited these days by the price of the sport, not the fear of God. In retrospect, I may have been much more frightened of my mothers rebuke, had I suggested that someone else might acolyte while I played a round of golf. But, in short, Matthew, who wrote even later than Mark, knew that there would be time because time had passed and so he added an ethical dimension to the purpose of Christ’s death.
Luke, who is almost universally thought to have written the book of Acts also, extends the “for us” notion even farther into the future. For Luke, time was divided into three periods, the time up to the cross, then the time from the cross to the receipt of the Holy spirit at Pentecost, a time for them to reflect on the meaning of what they had seen, and finally a time when they went on mission to carry out Christ’s work in the world. For Luke the reflection seems to explain the period when the disciples were in some kind of hiding, before regaining their own sense of resurrection and meaning. That makes a certain amount of sense.
We can personalize that also. We take for granted the presence of those with whom we live. We eat and play and argue and work alongside them mostly unconsciously, until they are gone from us. Then we come to realize what their real meaning was to us. The fullest assessment seems to come in their absence rather than their presence. And so Jesus, by his absence, made it possible for them and us to see him in each other and to anticipate the time of grief, thus increasing the possibility of earthly joy by the best use of this time.
We could discuss the Gospel of John and the Epistle to the Hebrews and the later works of Anselm and Abelard and Aquinas and modern day theologians, but the essential point, again drawing from Canon Donovan is this, the cross is a profound mystery, open to many meanings and much discovery.
Each of us can take a few minutes to sit and look at it and wonder. It is not the only harsh death in the history of the world. Why has it such a hold, even, at least so far, on the stock market? And why is it losing its hold for some, perhaps many, in our world? Perhaps the answer to that lies within us, each of us? Perhaps we see but don’t really see, as St. John would say. Perhaps the problem is not that we cannot agree completely with Paul or Mark or Matthew or Luke or John or the writer to the Hebrews, because we don’t see ourselves as clearly as they saw themselves. Perhaps what the cross exposes is not only morally and intellectually difficult but personally challenging. In any case, there is just that symbol and then there is us. And how the two meet is indeed a mystery.
–The Rev. Jay Hanson
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