Mary and Elizabeth (Luke 1)

“And blessed is she who believed that there would be a fulfillment of what was spoken to her by the Lord.” From the Gospel according to Luke, the Gospel for today, chapter 1, verse 45.

In the name of God, Father, Son, and Holy Spirit. Amen.

     Here we are on the last Sunday of the Advent season, on the brink of another Nativity. We realize that in the secular world, “the holiday season,” has been going full blast since Thanksgiving at least. There has been a lot of advertising online and on television and radio, there have been office parties, people are visiting, or are about to visit, relatives and friends in distant places, and so on and on. It seems as though the arrival of the actual holiday, Christmas Day, will be almost an anti-climax, a perhaps not-quite-relevant addition to a party season that has been going on for some time. And, of course, Christmas introduces that seven-day pause, when many employers shut down, and others slow down, almost as if they are breathlessly awaiting the New Year, an occasion for another big party, after which work resumes its normal pace, and “the holidays” are quickly forgotten and left behind.

      There are two themes in the secular holiday season, from Thanksgiving through New Year’s Eve: food, and light. Food, in that we celebrate the fruits of the earth, and light, in that we do our best to keep our surroundings cheerfully lit as the darkness lengthens each day. Of course, these themes overlap with Christian themes and celebrations as well. But these two themes aren’t a complete summary of the real message of the season, and in fact, they distract from it.

     But the Christian holiday season, if I can call it that, is on a different schedule, and has at least one new theme. The Advent period is not a holiday season at all, but a period of preparation for the real holiday season, Nativity, and its continuation, Epiphany.  In Advent we liturgically and spiritually prepare for the coming of the Lord, and in Nativity and Epiphany we celebrate his arrival. And the theme, as it says in verse 45, is fulfillment. “And blessed is she who believed that there would be a fulfillment of what was spoken to her by the Lord.”

     “What was spoken to her [that is, to Mary] by the Lord,” is stated earlier in chapter 1, before today’s reading. “The Holy Spirit will come upon you, and the power of the Most High will overshadow you; therefore the child to be born will be holy; he will be called Son of God.” Mary, as we know, accepted this announcement, and awaited its fulfillment, which Elizabeth proclaims when the two women meet. The fulfillment, for each of them, is the approaching birth of their children. Neither of them expected children, and yet, they will have them. The Holy Spirit has taken charge of their lives, and given them roles which neither imagined, roles which will change their individual lives completely, and which, eventually, will change the history of the entire world.

     Elizabeth, remember, earlier in chapter 1, said of her conception, “This is what the Lord has done for me when he looked favorably on me and took away the disgrace I have endured among my people.” In other words, there is no suggestion at that moment, that she has any awareness of any greater meaning of the approaching birth, than the mere fact that she has been favored with a child. There is no hint, yet, of anything greater. Zechariah, we remember, had been rendered mute by the angel of the Lord, so it was unlikely that he was able to pass on the angel’s message about who the child was to be. Elizabeth, in other words, does not yet know of the prophetic vocation of her child. She has no concept of a future fulfillment beyond the birth itself.

     Mary, on the other hand, does have a concept of a future fulfillment, an extraordinary fulfillment, beyond the birth of her son. Mary has heard and accepted the message of the angel, “he will be great, he will be Son of the Most High, he will reign over the house of Jacob, he will have the throne of David,” and so on. Elizabeth, presumably, knows about this, likely from Mary herself, for Elizabeth says, “blessed is she who believed that there would be a fulfillment of what was spoken to her by the Lord.” I hear in this a slight hint of regret, of wistfulness, in Elizabeth’s voice, that suggests to me that perhaps Elizabeth thinks that there is more to the approaching birth of her son, but she does not know what.

     And how does Mary reply? With that great song of praise which we call the Magnificat. In it, Mary thanks God not only for present fulfillment, if I can put it that way, in the approaching birth of her son, but also for the fulfillment of past promises to Abraham and his descendants forever, and for future fulfillment, of things which haven’t happened yet, bringing down the powerful from their thrones, lifting up the lowly, filling the hungry, sending away the rich. The world and the Church have got a short way towards this  future fulfillment, even though there is still much to be done. But one future fulfillment has come to pass. Mary says, “Surely, from now on all generations will call me blessed.” And all generations since the Annunciation have done so, honoring Mary for her great work, in bringing the Incarnate Lord into the world.

     Who are we, and where are we, in this story? Are we like Elizabeth, certainly pleased in her natural human way that she would have a child, but with no greater awareness of the true nature and meaning of that fulfillment, than that? Do we find ourselves, like Elizabeth, in a situation where we are surrounded by people who don’t allow us to hear the promises, because those people don’t really believe them? Do we perhaps have a sense, like Elizabeth does, that something greater is happening, but we aren’t sure what it is? The situation of Elizabeth, it seems to me, is a rather contemporary one. I suspect that most people, even a lot of Christian people, are rather like Elizabeth, unknowing and unsure, but still desiring to know the will of God and to recognize His work in others.

     Or are we more like Mary, confident in the promises of God, and able and willing to say so, in anything like the grand, exultant words of the Magnificat? Mary is allowing God to fulfill in her his will for the whole world. Her words are full of her awareness of this great work. Perhaps such an awareness seems to great for us, too lofty, or, too deep, way beyond our ordinary capabilities. Can we, like Mary, find that point of contact between our ordinary selves and the greatness of God? We know that we can do this, because, as Mary says, God “has looked with favor on the lowliness of his servant.” We usually take this to mean that it is only Mary’s lowliness which God has looked on. But, in fact, it is also the lowliness, the ordinariness, of every single human being, on which God looks with favor. God is coming upon every single one of us with his Holy Spirit, with his power. He does this endlessly, all the time. God is bringing himself to birth in each one of us. Our task is to accept that, to believe that, to allow that to happen. What is being born in us is a glimpse of our true nature, and our vocation, our task which God is giving us to do in the world.

    Mary’s visit to Elizabeth is another step in the revelation to Elizabeth, of her vocation. Mary has embraced Elizabeth’s lowliness, her ordinary understanding of the approaching birth of her son, and enabled Elizabeth to have a glimpse of the greater meaning of what they both are going through. Elizabeth is enabled to recognize the Mother of the Lord, another step in learning what her son’s vocation is to be.

     Do we, like Mary, in our relations with others, enable others to have a glimpse of what their true vocation is? What their real nature is? For, in the end, that is what we are all doing, all the time. We are all bringing God to birth in ourselves and others, if we allow ourselves to do that. This gives our ordinariness, our lowliness, an eternal meaning.

     So, in our celebrations of food, of light, and of fulfillment, all those themes of this special time of the year, we are blessed, as Mary and Elizabeth are, “who believed that there would be a fulfillment of what was spoken…by the Lord.”

In the name of God, Father, Son, and Holy Spirit. Amen.

         

The Marcan Apocalypse (Mark 13)

Then Jesus began to say, “Beware that no one leads you astray…when you hear of wars and rumors of wars, do not be alarmed; this must take place, but the end is still to come.” From the Gospel according to Mark, chapter 13, verses 5 and 7.

     In the name of God, Father, Son, and Holy Spirit. Amen.
     A few weeks ago I heard a new word, ‘collapsarian.’ Collapsarians are people, and there are many of them, who believe that our society, our civilization, our world, face the imminent collapse of all systems: ecological, economic, social, political. According to collapsarians, the oil is going to run out soon, the climate is being wrecked by carbon dioxide, the ice is melting, the seas are rising, climate change will destroy agriculture, there will be no water, the economy will be ruined by excessive debt, political systems will fail, and the world will return to a previous state of being, frequently characterized as ‘a new Dark Age.’ Some of these propositions contradict each other. There are many books in print with world collapse as their theme, and there are even more websites which tell us when and how the world will end, usually quite soon and rather unpleasantly. They also tell us what to take with us to our underground shelters, supplies that they’re eager to sell us, by the way, so that we can survive the collapse.

     Today’s Gospel, and indeed the whole of the 13^th chapter of Mark’s Gospel, reads like a collapsarian menu of destructive possibilities. In today’s few verses, the Temple will collapse, there will be false Messiahs, there will be wars and rumors of wars, and (especially for us in California!) there will be earthquakes, and famines too. The rest of the chapter lists yet more possibilities: persecutions, betrayals, hatred, sacrilege in the Temple, refugee migrations. There is more, but we get the idea.

     Since we hear today’s Gospel in the context of the familiar collapsarian narrative so widespread today, it is possible to be tempted by the idea that Jesus’s narrative is no different, that it is just an old version of the same idea, a precursor, if you will. But we don’t need to hear it this way.

     Scholars tell us that because Jesus is talking about the collapse of the Temple, this passage must have been composed after the historical Temple was destroyed by the Romans – in other words, decades after the time of the historical Jesus. This is possible, but the assumption here is that such an idea could not have occurred to Jesus. There is no reason to suppose that this is so. In the world that Jesus and his hearers knew, warfare was frequent, if not constant, and invading armies were not necessarily respectful of temples or any other buildings. The Temple was built and renovated and destroyed and rebuilt many times before Herod’s Temple (which is the Temple that Jesus knew). So the idea of the Temple’s destruction was likely not foreign to Jesus or anybody else.

     In reality, the world that the historical Jesus knew is the world that we know. Destruction, war, famine, earthquakes, and all the rest, are common, daily events. Jesus is not so much prophesying a future world as he is describing the present world, and saying in plain words that he expects the future world to be no different.

     What, then, is the point of today’s Gospel, if it is telling us things which we already know to be true? And Gospel, as we know, means Good News, so, where is the Good News in this woeful description? Is it Good News at all?

     Prophecy does not have to be about the future. A true prophet sees the present clearly, and describes it clearly. This, Jesus is doing in today’s Gospel.  Remember what Jesus says, in addition to his description of the world: “Beware that no one leads you astray…when you hear of wars and rumors of wars, do not be alarmed; this must take place, but the end is still to come.”

     Beware. That is, Be Aware. We hear Beware as an expression of alarm, a signal that we should be afraid of something. Beware of the Dog, for example. But Be Aware means just that. Be Attentive. Be Awake. Keep our ears open for the news. Keep our ears open, so that we can detect false prophets. Jesus is taking for granted that we can do this, that we can be aware without fear, that we can avoid being led astray. All he is doing is reminding us of what we can do already. He goes on to say, “Do not be alarmed.” In other words, all the bad news, the fearful events he is describing, need not carry us away. If we are aware, attentive, there is no need for alarm, no need to run after false prophets, no need to believe that there is no more to the story than one calamity after another, with no way out.

     “Do not be alarmed; this must take place, but the end is still to come.” In other words, we are not to be alarmed, because there is an end yet to come, an end beyond the apparent ends achieved by destruction and war and falsehood. We are to be aware that bad news is not all the news, that there is Good News. “The end is still to come,” Jesus says. Later in chapter 13, after today’s reading, Jesus promises that we will see “the Son of Man coming in clouds with great power and glory…he will gather his elect from the four winds, from the ends of the earth to the ends of heaven.” In other words, the world that we know, which Jesus describes so well, is not the whole story. “The end is still to come.”

     We can think of the end as a future event, and, at first hearing,  this seems to be the plain meaning of the teaching. But we can also think of it as the end of our usual state of mind, in which we are limited by fearful speculations about all the dreadful things that can happen to us and to the world. Be aware, Jesus says. Do not be alarmed. When we are aware, when we let our perpetual state of alarm drop away, then we have a glimpse of the ‘end’ that Jesus is talking about. The ‘end’ is a glimpse of the world in full awareness, as it really is, free of the clouds of fear, anxiety, alarm which we bring to it.  The world that we think we know is not the whole story, and we can bring that world to an ‘end,’ so to speak,  by awareness and fearlessness.  We know that this is possible, because Our Lord says, “the end is still to come.” “The coming of the Son of Man in clouds with great power and glory,” is another way of describing, hinting at, what this new awareness may be like.

     When we bring this new awareness back to the collapsarian narrative that we hear so much today, the narrative of the likely collapse of absolutely everything, we can understand it differently. To begin with, we need full awareness of the true nature of the situation we are in. And we must drop all alarm, all fear, or we will be unable to see things clearly. Then we begin to see the world, dare I say it, as Our Lord sees it, full of potential for its, and our, transformation. Then it becomes possible for us to do what needs to be done, for then we will know what that is.

     Not that this will be easy, or quick. The last line of today’s Gospel reminds us of where we are in the work which Jesus has put before us. It is easy to say, Be Aware, Do Not Be Alarmed. In prayer and meditation, we attain the required awareness. But, as Our Lord says, it is only the beginning. Verse 8 says, “This is but the beginning of the birth pangs.” But, of course, it is a beginning.

     Then Jesus began to say, “Beware that no one leads you astray…when you hear of wars and rumors of wars, do not be alarmed; this must take place, but the end is still to come.” From the Gospel according to Mark, verses 5 and 7.

In the name of God, Father, Son, and Holy Spirit. Amen.

      

    

The Letter of James. (James 5)

From the Letter of James, chapter 5, verse 13, “Are any among you suffering? They should pray. Are any cheerful? They should sing songs of praise.”
 

In the name of God, Father, Son, and Holy Spirit. Amen.   
 

     On the Sundays in September, we have been reading from the Letter of James, that most practical of letters in the New Testament. Allow me to recite some of the section headings which the editor of our translation has given us: Faith and Wisdom, Poverty and Riches, Trial and Temptation, Hearing and Doing the Word, Warning against Partiality, Faith without Works is dead, Taming the Tongue, Warning against Judging Another, Warning to Rich Oppressors, Patience in Suffering, and, lastly, the Prayer of Faith, the section in which we find today’s reading.

     If we had this letter alone, it would serve very well as a summary and guide to Christian living, to a faithful, loving way of life. Rather than restrict myself to the few verses of today’s reading, I would like to go through the letter,  and comment on a few of the sections, and show how today’s reading summarizes the entire letter.

     James writes, “My brothers and sisters, whenever you face trials of any kind, consider it nothing but joy.” Nothing but joy! Because trials strengthen endurance and faith. Suffering and joy are never far from each other in this letter, as they are never far from each other in life. In today’s reading, suffering and cheerfulness are placed side by side. Trials are tests of faith, and opportunities for prayer. The trials are not only our own of course; we face not only our own trials, but the trials of others. In this time of open and obvious suffering on our own streets, and in the world, the trials of others are constantly on display. They give us plenty of opportunities for prayer, and for good works too, as James points out.

     James extends this combination of trials and joy when he writes, “Blessed is anyone who endures temptation. Such a one has stood the test and will receive the crown of life.” Temptation is a blessing? We may not think so when perhaps we are regretting some embarrassing episode in which we did not behave as well as we might have! But we have the word of James that there is a blessing in it, when we endure. That is, when we don’t give up on ourselves or God when we imagine that we have not got through some trial, some temptation, in a way that we think we should have. Temptation is a blessing when we see it for what it is. It is better to see it before rather than after, of course, but even afterwards the case is not hopeless, as James makes clear in today’s reading when he writes, “The prayer of faith will save…and anyone who has committed sins will be forgiven.”

     “But be doers of the word, and not merely hearers who deceive themselves.” This is James’s great theme, of course. Just as suffering entails joy, so faith entails works. The terms have meaning in relation to each other. James has arranged his teaching around these pairs. And James clearly defines what it is to be doers of the word: “to care for orphans and widows in their distress, and to keep oneself unstained by the world.” We don’t restrict ourselves to widows and orphans, of course; they are only the beginning of the work that we are called to do. But work we must. 

     James adds warnings against favoritism, which our translator calls partiality. He contrasts it with true belief in Jesus Christ. Favoritism here is bias toward the rich, toward the important, at the expense of the poor, the unimportant. This is a violation of what James calls the royal law: “You shall love your neighbor as yourself.” There is no partiality, no favoritism in this law. In our own society, we are drenched in a constant downpour of praise, admiration, and envy of celebrity and wealth. In this deluge of nonsense, we hardly have time to notice the ordinary, the not-famous, the not-important, the poor. But to love our neighbor is, at least, to regard all persons equally, without favoritism, with equal attention. This is how God regards us, with equal attention. God does not rank people according to their wealth or their importance. “They will wither away,” as James writes near the beginning of his letter.

     And now a few words about my favorite section of the letter, ‘Taming the Tongue.’ “How great a forest is set ablaze by a small fire!” writes James. “And the tongue is a fire!...With it we bless…and with it we curse…My brothers and sisters,” writes James, “this ought not to be so!” Indeed, it ought not. James wants us to cultivate “gentleness born of wisdom…[which is] pure, peaceable, gentle, willing to yield, full of mercy and good fruits, without a trace of partiality or hypocrisy.” We do this by submitting to God. “Resist the devil, and he will flee from you. Draw near to God, and he will draw near to you.” We submit to God, we draw near to him in prayer. Prayer is the technique, if I dare call it that, by which we cultivate gentleness, control our tongues, and learn to love our neighbors as ourselves, without partiality. When we pray, we place ourselves near to God, and when we pray, he draws near to us. That nearness makes it possible for us to practice the virtues which James is commending to us.

     Before James reaches his concluding verses about prayer, however, he adds a few more admonitions. “Do not speak evil against one another.” He reminds us of the transitoriness of life when he writes, “For you are a mist that appears for a little while and then vanishes.” He goes on to add some rather sharp remarks about the rich who exploit laborers and the righteous. These sharp remarks are not irrelevant today, even in our own society. But James does not dwell on them. He returns to his admonitions and encouragements, advocating patience and anticipation of the coming of the Lord.

     And so James concludes as he begins, “Are any among you suffering? They should pray. Are any cheerful? They should sing songs of praise.” Prayer and praise, patient acceptance of trials, and hopeful anticipation, are the features of Christian life, both of the individual and of the community, the Church. In today’s reading, there is a strong emphasis on community prayer, for the sick, and for anyone who has committed sins. “The prayer of the righteous is powerful and effective,” says James. It can heal, it can forgive, it can lead through suffering, into joy, and find blessing in temptation.
 

“Are any among you suffering? They should pray. Are any cheerful? They should sing songs of praise.”

In the name of God, Father, Son, and Holy Spirit. Amen.

Paul's Gospel (Ephesians 1)

In the name of God, Father, Son, and Holy Spirit. Amen.

“He has made known to us the mystery of his will, according to his good pleasure that he set forth in Christ, as a plan for the fullness of time, to gather up all things in him, things in heaven and things on earth.” From the epistle for today, Paul’s Letter to the Ephesians, chapter 1, verses 9 and 10.

      This selection from the Letter to the Ephesians reads like a creedal statement, a presentation of the nature and work of Jesus Christ, in language full, almost grandiloquent, which leaves no doubt about who Jesus is and what he is doing. The Nicene Creed, which we sing in our liturgy, is a very bare summary, compared to this chapter in Ephesians, and, indeed, about half the entire letter. The first three chapters of Ephesians summarize Paul’s Gospel, Paul’s Creed, and the remainder of the letter works out the consequences of his Creed. But, let’s get back to today’s reading from chapter 1.
      Paul begins, “Blessed be the God and Father of our Lord Jesus Christ.” These words alone could be the outline of an entire sermon, but I choose just one, Christ. I think that for a lot of people today, ‘Christ’ sounds like a name, a surname almost, rather than what it actually is, an adjective or title. As we know, it comes from the Greek ‘Christos,’ meaning ‘Anointed,’ and is a translation of the Hebrew ‘mashiakh,’ (I hope that I have pronounced it correctly!) also meaning ‘anointed.’ We have all heard that it refers to the expected king and deliverer of the Jews, a deliverer from foreign rule. It can mean at least that, but it has another, older and deeper meaning. We remember that the Letter to the Hebrews refers to Jesus as the Melchizedek high priest, Melchizedek meaning ‘righteous king,’ an anointed priest-king of a very early Hebrew kingdom and its temple. Paul has this association in mind when he titles Jesus the ‘Christ.’ Jesus the priest-king in his temple is blessing us “with every spiritual blessing in the heavenly places.” In various places in the Letter to the Ephesians, Paul mentions what the spiritual blessings are, beginning, in fact, with the very next phrase: “he chose us…to be holy and blameless before him in love.” In other words, the first blessing he confers on us is to be present before him in his temple, “in love;” his love for “us” makes it possible for us to be present in his temple in heaven. So Paul is spelling out what ‘Christ’ means in action, and the first action is the Christ’s inclusion of “us” in his temple. Paul goes on to say that Jesus “destined us for adoption as his children.” Not only are we present in the temple, we are adopted children. The anointed priest-king is including “us,” not only in his people, but in his family. We are becoming, in other words, members of the royal priestly family itself, anointed ones ourselves. We remember that that is what ‘Christian’ means: anointed, included in the body of Christ. The First Letter of Peter makes the same point: “But you are a chosen race, a royal priesthood, a holy nation, God’s own people, in order that you may proclaim the mighty acts of him who called you out of darkness into his marvelous light.” The ‘marvelous light’ here is the light of the temple, actually the light of the Holy of Holies; Peter and Paul are making the same point about the Christ and his work, bringing “us” into his family and people, to be present before him in his temple.
       In verse 7, Paul writes, “In him we have redemption through his blood, the forgiveness of our trespasses, according to the riches of his grace.” It seems to me that this concept, redemption through blood, makes many people uneasy these days. The animal sacrifices may appear to us as uncivilized, barbaric, remote from any idea we have of ourselves and our relationship with God. We tend to think of God in a way removed from the harsher aspects of ancient and modern life. In any case, very likely we could not tolerate anything like ancient temple worship. But we remember that, according to the Letter to the Hebrews, Christians think of Jesus as the Melchizedek high priest. One of the duties of the high priest was the annual atonement, that is, the cleansing and re-consecration of the people and the creation to God, by the sprinkling of blood in the Holy of Holies. Blood, the symbol of life, reestablished the right relationship of God and creation, in the annual rites of atonement, in which the people acknowledged their sin before God. Sin damaged the people and the creation. People today are becoming more aware of this damage, as our recklessness does more and more harm to the creation. Unfortunately these days, not everyone is ready to reestablish a right relationship to creation; not everyone is ready to atone, not everyone is ready to redeem himself or herself, to bring themselves before God in repentance for the damage done, to avail themselves of the “riches of his grace” that Jesus has made available.
      Jesus makes this grace available, so to speak, when he puts before us the offering of the bread and wine, the same bread and wine which Melchizedek, king and high priest of Salem, put before Abraham, in the 14th chapter of Genesis. By identifying himself and his sacrifice with the ancient priesthood, and by including us in it, Jesus is making it clear that a right relationship with God and creation is possible, and that we can avail ourselves of it. Every time we present ourselves at the altar for communion, we are availing ourselves of it, and we are indicating our willingness to each other and to God to be in a right relationship with God and creation. This is one meaning of Paul’s phrase “redemption through his blood.” There is realism here, an ancient realism, which we can bring into our reality, by accepting the grace, which really means the ability, to live rightly in creation, as the ancients did each year in the atonement rites.
      Paul writes in verse 9, “He has made known to us the mystery of his will.” We have already heard some elements of that mystery, that will: inclusion of the people before him in the heavenly places, inclusion in the royal priesthood, re-establishment of right relations among God, humans, and creation. There is more, as we hear: “to gather up all things in him, things in heaven and things on earth;” “obtaining an inheritance.” ‘Gathering up all things in heaven and earth’ reminds us of the ‘new heaven and the new earth’ which we hear about in the Revelation to John. There will be a transformation of heaven and earth into something new. We see the beginning of it before us, in the community which Jesus has brought into being, the Church, and in the means of grace he has put before us, which enable the transformation.
      “Obtaining an inheritance.” We have heard already that we are adopted children of Christ; that is what makes us heirs. We are not outside the family, and so we are not outside the estate, so to speak. Later on in the letter, in chapter 3, Paul spells out what this means. It means that Gentiles, non-Jews, are included in the adoptive family of Jesus. Paul writes, “Gentiles have become fellow heirs, members of the same body, and sharers in the promise in Christ Jesus through the Gospel.” There is, in other words, no longer any distinction between chosen people and not chosen, natural and adopted heirs. That is the mystery of Christ that Paul reveals in the Letter to the Ephesians, that Gentiles have become fellow heirs. This idea may not sound remarkable to us now, since it has been circulating in our civilization for centuries, but at the time it was a shocking notion. We recall that the apostle Peter had to struggle to accept it, and even now many people would exclude others from the love of Jesus Christ. But we have the word of Paul the apostle that Christ chose all “before the foundation of the world to be holy and blameless before him.” May we pray with Paul that we “set our hope on Christ,” and “live for the praise of his glory.” Amen.

Family dynamics (Mark 3)

“Whoever does the will of God is my brother and sister and mother.” From today’s Gospel, the Gospel according to Mark, chapter 3, verse 25.
     In the name of God, Father, Son, and Holy Spirit. Amen.
     There are some interesting family dynamics in today’s Gospel story. To begin with, we have Jesus’s family dragging him away from a crowd, admittedly, in this case, probably to protect him, since people were saying that “He has gone out of his mind.” And it seems to me that someone (perhaps someone in the family?) also called in the authorities, the scribes, to have him officially declared demon-possessed, to what end, exactly, is not clear, but probably to have Jesus locked up somewhere. After all, he is giving the family a bad name, and endangering himself and them. And to round out the summary of family conflict, we have the final scene, in which Jesus refuses to acknowledge his blood relatives, when they come to extract him from his encounter with the scribes. All in all, we have a story full of tension and dispute and anxiety. But my brief summary is only a surface reading of the story. How Jesus manages these tensions, what he says about them, and how he resolves them, is one theme of today’s Gospel. Another theme is: Jesus’s power over the demons, and the argument he has with the scribes about it.
     Let’s put the story in context. In the first half of chapter 3, Jesus, on the Sabbath, heals a man with a withered hand. This prompts the Pharisees to begin plotting against him. He continues to heal and drive out demons, and spends some time in a boat, likely teaching the crowds on the shore who are following him. The demons recognize him as Son of God. Then Jesus goes up a mountain, where he appoints the twelve apostles, and gives them authority to proclaim the message of the Kingdom, and to cast out demons.
     So, at the beginning of today’s reading, the crowd is still following Jesus, and they prevent Jesus and the Twelve even from having a meal. It is at this point that the family tries to stop Jesus. They go so far, as I have surmised already, to call in the scribes to help them. And the scribes say, “He has Beelzebul, and by the ruler of the demons he casts out demons.”
     Jesus is having none of it. “And he called them to him, and spoke to them in parables.” Notice that Jesus takes his authority over the scribes for granted, just as he takes his authority over the demons for granted. Apparently the scribes don’t protest, so Jesus is able to continue with his teaching. He points out that the reasoning of the scribes is contradictory. Satan can’t cast out Satan, and so on. Jesus goes on to say that Satan “cannot stand, but his end has come.” This is not just a clever bit of argument, but is a proclamation of the end of Satan’s power. It seems that this statement is just slipped into the discussion obliquely, but I think that it is a clue to the meaning of the whole reading.
     The verse about plundering the strong man’s house after tying him up is also rather curious. It appears to have been dropped into this reading from somewhere else, taken from some other narrative. But it fits into our story fairly well, I think. The “strong man” of course is Satan; Jesus is saying that he is tying him up, and plundering his property – that is, he is driving out the demons, who, of course, are Satan’s “property.” This is another way of saying that the end of Satan’s power has come.
     “Whoever blasphemes against the Holy Spirit can never have forgiveness, but is guilty of an eternal sin.” When I was in my first parish in Newfoundland, people would occasionally ask me, “So, what is the sin against the Holy Spirit?” Either they had never heard an answer to this question, or they were trying to expose my ignorance, or they had some answer of their own that they were waiting to spring on me. In fact, there was a Pentecostal preacher in the community, who was determined to show that he and his following knew the Scriptures far better than I did, and so one or another of them would set me this question as an opener to a debate in which their superiority would be revealed. But, alas, it was not that easy. Today’s Gospel makes it clear what the eternal sin against the Holy Spirit is, at least in today’s reading: the scribes are plainly ascribing Jesus’s healing power to Satan, to an “unclean spirit,” as the text says. Jesus has already shown that this is impossible, and that such an idea, that Satan and the demons can overcome their own evil, is blasphemy, since it makes Satan more powerful than God, and claims that it is really Satan, and not God, who heals. This is contrary to the known truth, which the scribes know full well. While no sin is beyond the reach of the saving power of God, to persist deliberately in stating an obvious falsehood about Satan, as the scribes are apparently doing, is to put them at risk of putting themselves outside the reach of God’s power (if I may dare such a statement), and so making their sin “eternal,” making it the sin against the Holy Spirit. I realize that this could be the beginning of a long and rather technical discussion of sin and God’s power over it, but I will save that discussion for Lent or some other appropriate time. We remember that in the first chapter of Mark’s Gospel, the Spirit descends upon Jesus at his baptism in the Jordan, so Mark is making a clear identification between the power of Jesus over the demons, and the presence of the Holy Spirit in him. Mark is suggesting that to question the power of Jesus over the demons is to question the power of the Holy Spirit, which of course is blasphemy.
      “Your mother and your brothers and sisters are outside, asking for you.” The family is back again, looking for Jesus and trying to get him out of the way of the crowd. It says in verse 19, that Jesus is at home. I take this to mean Nazareth, so Jesus is in or near his family home. The passage seems to be saying that the crowd is in the house, and that the family is outside, where they went at the beginning of the reading, “to restrain him,” as it says. The crowd is reminding Jesus that his family is still outside, asking for him. So the family, and the crowd, have heard and seen Jesus’s interaction with the scribes, and his teaching about Satan and the Holy Spirit. I dare to suggest that Mark is making a distinction between the family and the crowd: the crowd are sitting and listening to Jesus, apparently not arguing with him as the scribes are, but the family, while not siding with the scribes, is at least very nervous about what he is saying to them, and want to get him out of the way. This reminds me of something I have said in other talks, about the obtuseness of those closest to Jesus, in understanding him and his mission. The family, who, you would think, know him best and have been with him the longest, are actually slower to get the point about Jesus and his teaching than the crowd is. The crowd is listening and watching and learning; the family is wandering around “outside,” that is, they are not really listening and watching and learning…they are stumbling around trying to find a way to get Jesus away from the crowd and the scribes. That is, the family wants him back safe with them. They want him for themselves alone.
     Jesus, of course, sees this and does not allow himself to be carried off by his family. Rather, in true rabbinical fashion, he asks a question: “Who are my mother and my brothers?” Apparently he doesn’t get an answer, so he goes on to say, “Here are my mother and my brothers! Whoever does the will of God is my brother and sister and mother.” His family is not merely his blood relations, but the whole community of those who are listening and watching and learning from him. And we are in that community, that family which Jesus has brought into being.
     So Jesus refuses to allow himself to be limited by his immediate family. Rather, he extends the meaning of family to include everyone who does the will of God. This is addressed to the people around him, including his blood relatives, but it is not limited to those present at the time.
     So now we see how the two themes of the Gospel come together: the family of Jesus is that crowd, that community, which does the will of God. That will includes recognizing God’s power over Satan and the demons. We are reminded, by the behavior of Jesus’s immediate family, that we are not to allow our supposed closeness to Jesus to blind us to the power of the Holy Spirit in him. Jesus’s family are inadvertently putting themselves on the side of Satan and the scribes. This can happen to us too, when we think we know what is best for our family members, in this case, the Church, and we cease to listen and watch and learn from Jesus, when perhaps we deny the power of the Spirit, when we cease to be attentive to the will of God. Which family do we belong to? We can, if we don’t watch ourselves, find ourselves acting like obtuse close relatives, and fail to see what God is requiring of us.
     “Whoever does the will of God is my brother and sister and mother.”
     In the name of God, Father, Son, and Holy Spirit. Amen.

Abide in my love (John 15)

“As the Father has loved me, so I have loved you. Abide in my love.” From the Gospel according to John, chapter 15, verse 9.
     In the name of God, Father, Son, and Holy Spirit. Amen.
     Today’s Gospel is all about Love. Love. We all have some idea what the word means. Most of us at one time or another have felt love for another, or have felt the love of another for us. We all recognize when love is present, and when it is absent. The yearning for love pervades a lot of popular entertainment, songs, movies, television, stories, and so on. I went to my Webster’s Ninth New Collegiate Dictionary and found some definitions: strong affection for another arising out of kinship or personal ties; attraction based on desire; affection based on admiration, benevolence, or common interests; warm attachment, enthusiasm, or devotion; unselfish loyal and benevolent concern for the good of another; the (fatherly) concern of God for humanity. These definitions are not all of the ones listed in Webster’s, but they are a good sample, and include the range of possibilities.
      When we Christians think of love, at least publicly, and in church, we probably think of the Webster’s explicitly religious definition: the concern of God for humanity. This is a nice, safe, general, nonspecific, easy-to-say kind of definition. The “concern of God for humanity” can be extended to the “life, work, and teachings of Jesus.” And there it can end, without being spelled out in any more detail than that.
     But today’s Gospel begins to spell it out. And it points in the direction of details, if I can use that word, which take love into an area of specifics, requirements, possibilities, which encompass all of life, and beyond.
     In verse 10, the Gospel says, “If you keep my commandments, you will abide in my love.” We all know what our Lord’s commandments are: feed the hungry, clothe the naked, visit (and care for) the sick and the prisoner and the orphan and the widow, love our neighbors as ourselves. To do these things willingly is to “abide in love.” They are not dependent necessarily on feeling a particular kind of affection or desire, which our dictionary definitions suggest, although there can be special feelings involved.
     Jesus compares our keeping his commandments, to his keeping his Father’s commandments. There is a parallel, and a direct connection, between our work in the world, and God’s work in Jesus. In the Our Father we pray, “your will be done, on earth as in heaven.” It is not too much to say, that our work in the world, our following the commandments of Jesus, IS God’s work. We are Christ’s body in the world, and we are, in a sense, bringing heaven to earth, and bringing earth to heaven, when we perform the straightforward, easy-to-understand actions which our Lord requires of us. Just as God becomes incarnate in Jesus, so Jesus’s work becomes incarnate, as it were, in the world, through our work, through our love for him.
      “I have said these things to you so that my joy may be in you, and that your joy may be complete.” This verse, verse 11 of today’s Gospel, is a strong indicator of something special which our Lord is pointing out to us. The important word is joy. JOY. Up to now, it has perhaps seemed that the love of Jesus is a dry performance of simple duties, without any emotion being attached to them. And there is a certain wisdom in being free from emotion, so that we don’t imagine that we have to feel a certain way when we are doing what Jesus requires us to do. There is nothing worse than pretending to a happiness which we do not feel, when acting in the name of our Lord. That pretense is nothing more than hypocrisy, and it is easy to recognize. Our Lord is not telling us to pretend to be joyful, or, by implication, telling us that we are missing something if we are not feeling joyful. No, he is telling us something else entirely
     Jesus is talking about his joy in us. Generally, it should be enough for us that Jesus is pleased with what we are doing in his name. “I have said these things to you…that your joy may be complete,” is a promise, not necessarily that we will feel “complete” all the time, but that we are on the way to our completion, the fulfillment of our lives in him, in this world and the next. It is an anticipation of our future, resurrected state, of which we have a taste in this life. Earthly joys are types, models, anticipations of the joys of heaven.
     There were, and are, many Christian mystics who speak of their experience of the presence of God in terms like this. We must keep this in mind, when we hear Jesus talking about ‘joy’ and ‘love.’ These are powerful, archetypal words, which draw on the fullness of human experience. They are not merely casual, offhand chatter, a convenient way of talking about shallow feelings.
     And what does this lead to? In verse 11, today’s Gospel says, “No one has greater love than this, to lay down one’s life for one’s friends.” Of course we think of the literal meaning of this text, that Jesus will die for his friends. But the text reminds us of the self-forgetfulness of love, the devotion of love, which confers the ultimate freedom, that of giving up life, a narrow, self-centered, ego-based life, for a life of union with another, a life in true community, in union with the ultimate other, which is God.
     For, in the end, that is what this is about, life in God. The Christian understanding of God as Trinity, is a way of saying that God has an inner life, in which He invites us to share, and that sharing is love. We become participants in his life, by love, by the love which he extends to us in Jesus, and in which he includes us. This is what Jesus is getting at, when he says, “I have called you friends, because I have made known to you everything that I have heard from my Father.” The love extends from the Father to Jesus to us, in the Spirit, and back again. This double movement, this eternal dance, is the love in which we are called to participate, and to which the deepest human feelings and desires direct us. This is our Christian vocation, this is the purpose of our Christian lives.
     “As the Father has loved me, so I have loved you. Abide in my love.”
     In the name of God, Father, Son, and Holy Spirit. Amen.

Witnesses of the Resurrection (Luke 24)

From the Gospel according to Luke, chapter 24, verse 48: You are witnesses of these things.

In the name of God, Father, Son, and Holy Spirit. Amen.

     “You are witnesses of these things.” Jesus, in today’s Gospel, speaks these words to his disciples and the Eleven, just before his Ascension. They are almost the last words he speaks on earth, after his Resurrection. It is interesting that Jesus has to announce to his disciples that they are, in fact, witnesses, and he summarizes just what they are witnesses of: the fulfillment of everything written about him in the Scriptures (that is, the Torah, the prophets, and the psalms), that the Messiah is to suffer and rise from the dead, and that repentance and forgiveness are to be proclaimed to all nations. Jesus repeats this to the disciples, because, only a few minutes before, they were “disbelieving and still wondering,” when he appeared among them, so he has to prod them into understanding, into remembering, what has happened, and what is happening before their eyes.

     The whole of the 24th chapter of Luke is about the reality of the risen Jesus, his reality to the women, to the disciples, and to the Eleven. At the beginning, the women who come to the tomb are told, apparently by angels, that Jesus has risen. They carry the message back to the Eleven and the other disciples, who don’t believe them. Peter apparently begins to believe. Then Jesus accompanies two disciples on the road to Emmaus, who recognize him late in the encounter, over a meal. Then Jesus appears to the Eleven in Jerusalem, who are slow to see what is happening.

     “They were startled and terrified, and thought that they were seeing a ghost.” In our daily, commonsense understanding of how the world works, no one comes back from the dead, and in our imaginations, only zombies and ghosts come back, and we generally suppose that seeing them would be a terrifying experience. There are many movies and television shows, as we know, that play on this terror. (I think that our reaction to stories like this is beginning to wear off. I’ve noticed a commercial on television that makes fun of the zombie idea. We’ll have to start scaring ourselves with something else, probably.) So the reaction of the Eleven is totally under-standable.

     Jesus responds to this in good rabbinical fashion, by asking the obvious ques-tions: “Why are you frightened? Why do doubts arise in your hearts?” Why, indeed, do we often react to the new, to the totally unexpected, with doubt or fear? The old Adam, the old humanity, can’t let go, even when Jesus is present, or so it seems in our story. So Jesus makes himself known in a very physical way, to clear away their doubt and fear.   
     We remember that in the story of Jesus’s appearance on the road to Emmaus, he made himself known in the breaking of the bread. “Then their eyes were opened, and they recognized him; and he vanished from their sight,” the Gospel says. This can be taken to mean that Jesus made himself disappear, but I wonder whether it can also mean that some uncertainty overtook the disciples, even at the very moment of recognition, so that they lost their spiritual sight, so to speak. It can also mean something quite different, of course, namely that once the disciples had recognized him in the breaking of the bread, they did not need to recognize him in any other way. In any case, some doubt persisted, because when the two took the story of their experience to the Eleven in Jerusalem, the Eleven were not convinced, and Jesus once more had to intervene, physically this time, in as unmistakeable a manner as possible.

     “Look at my hands and my feet; see that it is I myself. Touch me and see.” I’ve mentioned before, in another sermon, the oddity of this remark. Usually, we recognize people by their faces, or, if we see someone we know from a distance, by their profile or way of walking. But here is Jesus, standing before the disciples, saying, “look at my hands and my feet!” and, “touch me and see!” The hands and the feet we can understand, of course, as referring to his wounds. But “touch me and see?” I mentioned a minute ago that perhaps the disciples on the road to Emmaus had “lost their spiritual sight” at the moment of recognition. It is possible that the spiritual sight of the Eleven and the others in Jerusalem, while not exactly lost, was weak, and needed strengthening. Jesus, we know, heals sometimes by touch; it seems to me that perhaps there is a momentary spiritual blindness here, brought on by doubt or fear, which Jesus heals by inviting the disciples to touch him.

     In verse 41 it says, “While in their joy they were disbelieving and still wondering, he said to them, ‘Have you anything here to eat?’” This line shows the disciples finding their way out of their doubt and fear, but the change in them is not complete. They give Jesus a piece of broiled fish, which he eats. This completes their transition out of doubt and fear into belief, into confidence that they are seeing the real Jesus before their spiritually-opened eyes. The physical reality of a broiled fish brings them fully to themselves, to experience Jesus’s presence, free of doubt. The fish, we remember, was and is a common symbol for Christianity, since the word ‘fish’ in Greek, ‘ichthus’, is an acronym for the name and titles of Jesus: Iesous Christos, Theou Huios Soter, Jesus Christ, Son of God, Savior. So the disciples act out their new-found awareness and acceptance of the reality before them, by handing Jesus a piece of fish, acknowledging, as it were, his name and role in salvation.

     So the disciples have got past their doubt and fear, and are now able to see Jesus for who he really is. But there is still more for them to do. “Then,” it says in verse 45, “he opened their mind to understand the Scriptures.” We remember that Jesus has done this before, on the road to Emmaus, with two of his disciples. It is interesting that the Gospel does not say who the two were. Evidently, they were not among the Eleven, who, we remember, are in Jerusalem. Jesus is letting out the full revelation of his role in salvation, in stages, first to those outside the Eleven. The angels reveal it first to the women at the tomb, then Jesus reveals it to the two on the road to Emmaus, and, finally, he reveals it to the Eleven. The Eleven, presumably, are his inner circle, yet they hear the revelation last. They have been with him from the beginning, and still they don’t fully grasp what he has been saying and doing for the past three years or so. So, for the last time, he reveals his nature and role in salvation, and, finally, there is no more uncertainty on the part of the disciples and the Eleven.

     The teaching here is that revelation is not the sole possession of the inner circle of Jesus. They hear the news last, and they are slow to grasp it when they do hear it. The news reaches the inner circle in stages, and even when Jesus appears among them, the news takes a while to penetrate their fear and doubt. This reminds us never to be too sure that we have the whole story, that we understand the whole story, no matter how much time we have spent with it or how much we think we understand. Jesus can always appear among us, and open our minds to understand the Scriptures, in ways that we don’t expect. Those of us who think that we have the whole story, that there is nothing new to learn, need to keep this in mind.

     This step-by-step revelation all through the 24th chapter, and its repetition in today’s reading, is not accidental. It is significant that the angels reveal it first to women, who act as their messengers to the apostles, as it says in verse 10. The plain teaching here is that women are important in the salvation of the world, and they may even be more important than men, since it is plainly true that in the Gospel, men are often rather slower to get the point than women are. This is an unmistakeable teaching to people of any time and place, who would subordinate women in the community of believers.

     “You are witnesses of these things.” Today’s Gospel is about the physical reality of the risen Jesus. The fact that the Gospel writer makes a point of emphasizing physical details, and the changing emotional states and receptivity of the disciples to the appearances of Jesus, all testify to the reality of these events for the people who witnessed them and recorded them. There is a tendency in our time to turn the story into a metaphor of nothing more than a new awareness of the power of Jesus’s teaching and his impact on people during his earthly life. But the Gospel writer is not presenting a metaphor, but a story about real people in a real place, recollecting actual events. The challenge for us, nearly two thousand years later, is to open ourselves to the reality of that experience. We do that by remaining open to the message of the Gospel writer, to respect what he is saying, without bringing presuppositions to it, about what is possible or not possible.

      “Thus it is written, that the Messiah is to suffer and to rise from the dead on the third day. You are witnesses of these things.”

In the name of God, Father, Son, and Holy Spirit. Amen.

John 3:16

 

     In Nomine etc..

     Not so long ago, it used to be the case that, during a sports event seen on television, as a camera panned the spectators, it came upon at least one person holding up a sign that read "John 3:16." This refers, as we know, to today's Gospel, chapter 3, verse 16: "For God so loved the world, that he gave his only Son, so that everyone who believes in him may not perish but have eternal life." Perhaps some of us have actually been at events, where we have seen people holding up this sign.
     This behavior, holding up a sign like this, showing only an abbreviated Scripture reference, has always seemed odd to me. The person holding up such a sign apparently assumes that anyone who sees it will understand the reference. After all, the sign displays only a common name and three numbers. What can such a sign possibly mean, to anyone not a Christian? Nothing, perhaps, except possibly the unsurprising thought that the sign holder is just another attention seeker, of which there are many at such events. I was personally reminded, some time ago, that "John 3:16" doesn't communicate much on its own. I was talking with an acquaintance about the reference, and it became clear that my acquaintance did not know what I was talking about. I took it for granted that my meaning was clear, but it was not. And I suspect that stadium sign bearers take its meaning for granted too.
     Another question that comes to mind is, what can such a sign mean to anyone who does understand the reference? Does the sign bearer think that anyone seeing it, definitely needs to be reminded in this way? What is the point of such a reminder? Whom does the sign bearer think he is communicating with, and what is his message?
    By now the drift of my questions is becoming clear. I'm interested in what the reference may mean to the sender, and to the receiver. I'm also concerned, of course, with what the reference means to us.
     The person holding up this sign at the ballpark probably thinks that he is evangelizing, proclaiming the Gospel to all who can see the abbreviated reference. The verse has, indeed, been called the "Gospel in a nutshell." But it is no Gospel at all, to anyone who does not already know what it means, and so it becomes, it seems to me, a kind of passive-aggressive behavior, a kind of bullying, where the recipient of the message is expected to chase down the meaning of the message, and supposedly adopt a new behavior or opinion to conform to it, while the sender of the message does not have to take any responsibility for the consequences. This kind of behavior is not evangelizing; it is not even Christian.
     On the other hand, to the person who does know what the sign means, who sees it, whether on television or in the ballpark or wherever, it may be a useful and necessary reminder of the message of the Gospel. It may be a reminder that we Christians need to proclaim the Gospel, in season and out of season. I've thought for years that the real liturgies of our world are sports events and rock concerts and similar events. The message at these events is not usually Christian, although there is occasionally a religious component to them. So it is not surprising, perhaps, that someone will attempt to insert a Christian reference, to balance or contradict the other messages being sent out.
     "For God so loved the world, that he gave his only Son, so that everyone who believes in him may not perish but may have eternal life." The surface meaning of this text is clear: believing in the Son of God is necessary to attain eternal life. For centuries Christians have understood its meaning in exactly this way, as exclusive, and, furthermore, as explicitly condemnatory of any other theological claim. Indeed, the rest of today's Gospel reading rather emphatically reinforces the point. The reading says, "those who do not believe are condemned already." It is clear that we have a very challenging text before us.
     What are we to do with this, in this time of ecumenical and inter-faith endeavors, when many people are working hard to ensure peace between, and within, religions? Our text appears to reject such efforts, and yet we all sense that there is something not right about such an attitude. We are all aware that there is something universal, something non-exclusive, in our religion and in our Scriptures, that contradicts any such exclusiveness. What is it, and how are we to understand it?
     In today's reading itself, there are texts which warn us away from understanding the whole text exclusively. Verse 17 says, "God did not send the Son into the world to condemn the world." We must keep this statement in mind as a counterbalance to the texts which appear to state the opposite view. And we remember what it says in the Prologue to John's Gospel, that "the true light, which enlightens everyone, was coming into the world." And of course, our text says "for God so loved the world." That alone undermines the suggestion of judgement and exclusiveness.
     We can also balance our text with the words of the Apostle Paul, who wrote, in his Letter to the Romans, that "God shows no partiality." He goes on to write, "For it is not the hearers of the Law who are righteous in God's sight, but the doers of the Law." I take Law to mean Christ's command to Love. And we have the letter of James, who wrote in plain words that "faith by itself, if it has no works, is dead." Works, of course, are works of Love. These texts and others warn us not to take John 3:16 too literally or too exclusively. The great privilege we have as Christian believers does not exclude others from God's love and from the light and salvation he is bringing into the world.
      So it is not enough simply to flash "John 3:16" at an anonymous crowd, and imagine that the Gospel has been proclaimed. It is not enough to recognize the meaning of John 3:16 when we see it, and to suppose that nothing more is required of us than mere belief. Rather, it is our privilege, and our challenge, to live out the tensions, and, dare I say it, the ambiguities that our text presents, in a time when there are many competing religions, philosophies, and atheist critiques of belief. This is the will of God for us in our time, strengthened by the belief that he has graced us to have, to keep "the true light, which enlightens everyone," shining in our world.

In the name of God, Father, Son, and Holy Spirit. Amen.