Marsh Chapel Sermon Archive

By Marsh Chapel

Our texts from Isaiah and Luke are two of the famous calling and sending passages in scripture. One thinks also of the calling of Moses at the burning bush and the calling of Paul on the road to Damascus. In a vision Isaiah was called into the divine throne room, so vast that the whole of Solomon’s temple was the floor level, completely filled with the hem of God’s robe. God was attended by flying seraphim and spoke directly to Isaiah himself. Isaiah saw God directly, and was commissioned to deliver God’s message to the people.

Luke’s text tells of Jesus calling Peter, James, and John at the seaside to be his disciples and then to go out in the world as apostles of his Way. I don’t know whether Peter and the others really were fishermen, or whether the whole scene is an elaborate set-up for the wonderful line: “from now on you will be catching people,” or as the older familiar translation had it, “you shall be fishers of men.” The Gospel of John places the calling of Peter, James and John in a suburb of Jerusalem, and puts the incident of Jesus telling them where to cast their nets for an overwhelming catch in a post-resurrection appearance. At any rate, when the disciples were called, they left everything and their lives were transformed with a mission, as was Isaiah.

These two texts have something special in common. Both Isaiah and Peter were totally thunderstruck at the divine glory, something Peter recognized only when he saw the miraculous catch of fish. The first response of both of them was to bewail their own sin. Isaiah said, “Woe is me! I am lost, for I am a man of unclean lips, and I live among a people of unclean lips; yet my eyes have seen the King, the Lord of Hosts!” Remember the biblical tradition that you cannot see God and live. (Exodus 33:20) Peter fell at Jesus’ knees and said, “Go away from me, Lord, for I am a sinful man!” John Calvin, the great reformer and theologian, began his Institutes of the Christian Religion with the observation that if you reflect on the glory of God, your attention immediately will be called to the fallen estate of human beings. And if you begin by considering the wretchedness of the human soul, your attention immediately will be drawn by contrast to the divine glory.

In the cases of Isaiah and the disciples, the divine encounter revealed to them not only God, but also their own true identity as sinners. We don’t know whether this was the first time they realized their sinful identity—I rather doubt it because they were all quick to identify themselves accurately before God. The point, however, is that confrontation with divinity immediately delivers the imperative to present yourself honestly before God. In doing so, you may find out who you really are if you don’t know already.

The great twentieth century theologian, Paul Tillich, said that everyone has an ultimate concern. The object of our ultimate concern ought to be God, of course, although most of us put other things first—our comfort, money, power, the needs of our ego. I think that Tillich was wrong in his claim that everyone has an actual ultimate concern, however misguided. Don’t we all know people who aren’t concerned about anything in an ultimate sense? Don’t we have friends and acquaintances that flit from one concern to another, taking nothing very seriously? Don’t we know people who are everlastingly “finding” themselves and, then not liking much what they find, abandon that identity and hunt for another? Doesn’t the fact that we live in a consumerist society teach us subliminally to be concerned only about the next acquisition, which, as soon as we have acquired it, is not enough? We ourselves, of course, you and I, the Marsh Chapel crowd, are indeed concerned to acquire deep meaning in life, but many of those other people are concerned only with the acquisition of the next thing. Surely you and I have ultimate concerns: but most of those others don’t. We live in a society of proximate concerns. The passionate commitment to proximate concerns, to the acquisitions and little things, is a flight from the terrors of ultimate life.

The reason Paul Tillich believed, however naively, that everyone has an ultimate concern is that everyone, he said, is grounded by and in touch with the ultimate. Even when we don’t know what the ultimate is, and flit from one thing to another, the grounding presence of God in our lives drives us, he thought, to a passionate search for something about which it would be worth being ultimately concerned. He followed St. Augustine in understanding the depths of each human soul to reach into the vastness of God; Augustine said that God is closer to us than we are to ourselves. Augustine said his soul was restless until it finds its rest in God, because that is its natural place (see Augustine’s Confessions). In fact, the restlessness of Augustine’s soul was the divinity in the soul seeking its proper place. But Augustine himself from his youth was a driven man, earnestly seeking something to love ultimately. When he was young, he said, he was in love with love itself, with the idea of being a lover, and only as he tried out things to love, people and religions, did he mature. His conversion to Christianity was the choice of the right way of life, the Christian, through which he could acknowledge his soul’s true home in God, and this was the fulfillment of his ultimate concern. Not many of us are like Augustine, with the passion of ultimacy driving us from our earliest days. Most of us don’t take anything with ultimate seriousness. Or should I say, although you and I surely are ultimately serious, most of the others are not.

I agree with Tillich and Augustine that God lies deep in our souls. But we, or those others rather, are asleep to that divinity. People are under a deep anaesthesia to those frantic stirrings of ultimacy that drove the saints before they encountered God’s call. Hence we need a shocking encounter with the ultimate to wake us up. We don’t know much about Isaiah or Peter before their encounters with God and their special calls. They seem to have been successful, functional people. The events of their callings, however, brought them face to face with the ultimate and they were changed people.

Alas, I doubt that we would be much impressed with the ultimate encounters Isaiah and Peter had. If a contemporary person were to experience Isaiah’s vision of God in the throne room with the flying seraphim the likely response would not be “woe is me” but “way cool—is this a video projection or was there something in those brownies?” The same with Peter’s inference from the huge catch of fish that Jesus was the Lord whom the unclean could not approach: we would treat it as a scientific question about how Jesus knew where the fish were. Neither Isaiah’s vision nor Jesus’ dramatic catch would give us “ontological shock,” as Tillich called it, the shock of encountering something ultimate when we had thought only proximately important things were there.

If we have the ontological shock of encountering God, it might be in some sublimely beautiful thing, a sunset, a song, or a smile that reduces us to tears. More commonly we come up against ultimacy when suddenly faced with the ruination of our career, or the death of someone we love, or the immanent prospect of our own death. Or maybe we stumble on ultimacy not in external events but in a sudden recognition of our own abject failing, when the ultimate appears as a divine judge. Or maybe we find God as a creative power deep within our soul that we had not recognized before, a power wild and perpendicular to whom
we thought we were. But if we are asleep, we defend ourselves against the ontological shock of the ultimate in front of us. We do not attend carefully to what is beautiful. We deny or trivialize death. We lie to ourselves about our failings, always saying we can and will do better. And we tame the God within with the ropes of conventional expectations. I say, my friends, that we need to take down these defenses and wake up to ultimate reality. Creation abounds with opportunities for the divine encounter.

The price we pay for such an encounter, however, is the humbling admission of our own identity. No matter how good we are in comparative terms, in absolute terms we are bums. Please don’t think that I am demeaning human virtues, of which you and I have many even if those others don’t do so well. It’s just that with us the virtues are so mixed with harms and vices that our identity is ambiguous, a mixture of good and bad. The encounter with the divine does not make us merely lament our sorry state. It makes us admit that state, to be honest. To test yourself for spiritual honesty, imagine yourself presented before God who sees and knows all things, face to face (as I quoted Paul last week). To live before God is to live naked of any excuses and cover-ups. Encountering God strips us naked of all the shams by which we try to present a good face to the world or to ourselves. Even a sunset, observed with ultimate seriousness, does that.

Sometimes it seems to work the other way. Without any conscious encounter with God or anything ultimate, we interrogate ourselves about our personal identity and find nothing we like. We admit to ourselves our ambiguous morality, our self-deceptions, our flights from seriousness into a round of petty proximate concerns. We had been so proud of ourselves, so much in love with ourselves, that when we come to the shocking and unwelcome admission of moral vacuity we turn against ourselves with the condemnation and spiteful hate of a spurned lover. For a while we can take perverse pleasure in the ironic righteousness of our self-condemnation, but sooner or later that evaporates and we have just despair. No hope. Nothing. Nothing worthwhile is in the soul at all. Abandon hope, all ye who enter honest into the soul. But if you admit to absolute despair you will have found God. What is it that propels this internal examination but ultimate concern itself? Honesty that goes to the end finds the object of ultimate concern, the God whose creative power rushes through us like a mighty river. It’s like John Calvin said: starting without God but with only the human soul we immediately find God.

The result of the divine encounter and the turn to absolute honesty is a mission, a meaning for life. When Isaiah and Peter came to know who they were, they knew what they had to do. Of course they didn’t know the details. God had to instruct Isaiah what to say, and Jesus had to shape the ministries of those who gave up their nets to follow him. Nevertheless, Isaiah and the disciples knew who they were relative to God, to the ultimate. Whatever confusions they later had, and the disciples had many, they lived through those confusions before God. They kept their proximate concerns in perspective, and lived for those things that were of ultimate importance.

Let me tell you now that we all have been called. The simple gospel is enough for that. We have a mission to live before God as lovers, to create communities and human relationships that make love possible, and to pursue careers whose real meanings, whatever the job, is to extend Jesus’ ministry of recreating the world in love. The exact content of your life and mine is dictated by the particular contexts in which each of us lives before God. We each must discern what our destiny of living in ultimate perspective is, and that depends a lot on the needs of the world around us. We are thrown into our particular situation and need to learn how to live ultimately in that world. The discernment of spirits, so as to detect the Holy Spirit, the Spirit that identifies precisely what is ultimate in our lives, is a gift devoutly to be prayed for.

Before that prayer for discernment, however, is my fervent prayer for you today, that you encounter the God who shows you who you really are, who allows you to shuffle off your petty identity and take up an identity powered by ultimacy. You can fly to sublime beauty and God is there. You can suffer deep tragedy and God is there. You can sink to despair and God is there. You can encounter the wild creativity of our cosmos in the deepest recesses of your heart and God is there. I invite you to wake up to the divinity that is before and behind you, to your right and left, above and below, and deep within. When you come awake, you will know who you are and will be called to what to do. You will bear God’s creative love in the shape and substance of your life. Without the resonance of ultimacy your life is as a sounding brass or a clanging cymbal. With the ontological shock of the divine face to face comes honest life before God and an ultimate direction for life. Come, Holy Spirit, and reveal yourself, and us. Amen.

posted in Uncategorized on 02.8.2004 at 11:00 am

By Marsh Chapel

Psalm 71:1-6

1 Corinthians 13:1-13

Luke 4:21-30

First Corinthians 13 is one of the most lyrical passages in all of scripture, equal to the 23^rd Psalm as a beloved text etched in the memory of Christians. To hear it afresh we must slightly dislocate it. In Paul’s first letter to the Corinthians, it comes immediately after a discussion of spiritual gifts such as preaching, teaching ,prophecy, faith, and speaking in tongues. Not only does Paul say that love is a more excellent way than all those other gifts, he says that without love, speaking in tongues is just noise. Without love, prophetic powers, mystical understanding, and theological knowledge are nothing. Faith powerful enough to move mountains is nothing without love. Even sacrificing all one’s worldly goods, and giving one’s life in martyrdom, gain nothing without love.

What astonishing logic! When Paul talked about the other spiritual gifts, he ranked them. Speaking in tongues is good, but not of much use unless someone else has the gift of interpreting them, which is a higher gift. Helping others is even a higher spiritual gift, but not as good as teaching, having a prophetic voice, or preaching in an apostolic way. Faith and hope are at the top of the ranking of spiritual gifts along with love, and love is the greatest. Nevertheless, none of those other spiritual virtues count for anything unless one also has love. Although we might struggle for those other virtues all our lives, attempt to teach them to our children, and take joy in slow steps forward, Paul says they do not count without love. Love has a unique place in Christian holiness, as the condition that makes all the other spiritual gifts or virtues worth having.

The beauty of 1 Corinthians 13 therefore masks terrifying news. For love, so seemingly humble, is so very difficult. “Love is patient; love is kind; love is not envious or boastful or arrogant or rude. It does not insist on its own way; it is not irritable or resentful; it does not rejoice in wrongdoing, but rejoices in the truth. It bears all things, believes all things, hopes all things, endures all things.” Who can live up to this? Aren’t we all sometimes impatient, sometimes unkind? Don’t we all have limits to what we can endure? Which of us is perfect in this love, even when described in Paul’s humble way?

When 1 Corinthians 13 is used at weddings, most people interpret it as setting forth an ideal for love. This is the ideal to which the newly-weds aspire, and the parental generation chuckles because they know that the bliss of the nuptual day will be exchanged for tough times that try patience, kindness, and all the other aspects of love. The wedding party prays that the couple will grow into love that can carry them through life’s difficulties, and this is all to the good. Paul’s point, however, is that, regardless of being a future ideal, only actual love can make the other virtues count. Having love as an ideal, not a reality, is not enough.

Paul’s reasoning in this chapter is that of all the gifts and virtues, only love is self-sufficient and never ends. Only love is eternal. When prophecies are fulfilled, we don’t need them any more. Speaking in tongues ceases. Whereas now our knowledge is partial, when it is complete in the knowledge of God, we will not need our partial knowledge. Our knowledge of God will be complete when we know God as God knows us, fully, face to face, not a glancing reflection in a mirror. That kind of knowledge is full love. According to Paul, love alone of all the spiritual gifts and virtues is for its own sake, not for the sake of something else. All the other gifts and virtues are good because they are useful for something else. Love is for nothing else: it is simply the way God is God and the way we should live before God.

Some of you know than I like to sing and have an “old ruined voice” like the late Johnny Cash. One of my favorite pieces, even sweeter than Johnny Cash’s own songs, is Johannes Brahms’ song cycle, Four Serious Songs. The first song of the four is on a text from Ecclesiastes that says, in an English translation of Brahms’ adaptation: “One thing befalleth the beasts and the sons of men; the beast must die, the man dieth also, yea both must die. To beast and man one breath is given, for all things are but vanity. They go all to the self-same place, for they all are of the dust, and to dust they return. Who knoweth if a man’s spirit goeth upwards? And who knowedth if the spirit of the beast goeth downward to the earth? Therefore I perceive there is no better thing than for a man to rejoice in his own works, for that is his portion . . . ” The second song, also from Ecclesiastes, says: “So I returned and did consider all the oppressions done under the sun. And there was weeping, weeping and wailing, wailing of those that were oppressed, and had no comfort, for with their oppressors there was power, so that no one came to comfort them. Then did I praise the dead which are already dead, yea, more than the living which still in life do linger. Yea, he that is not is better than dead or living, for he doth not know of the evil that is wrought forever on earth.” The third song, from the apocryphal book of Sirach, laments: “O death, O death, how bitter art thou unto him that dwelleth in peace, to him that hath joy in his possessions, and liveth free from trouble, to him whose ways are prosperous in all things, to him that still may eat. O death, O death, how bitter, how bitter art thou. O death, how welcome thy call to him that is in want and whose strength doth fail him, and whose life is full of cares, who hath nothing to hope for, and cannot look for relief. O death, O death, how welcome art thou, how welcome is thy call.” Although those texts might have an exaggerated pessimism, they also have a great realism. Why does life seem meaningless? Why is there such evil? Why is death cruel to the happy and a release for the wretched? The fourth Serious Song, as you must have guessed, is our 1 Corinthian text, the text that says love is not for something other than itself, that it is the highest gift and never ends.

Brahms’ point in the fourth song is not to reverse the burden of the previous three, that life has no transcendent meaning, that evil is pervasive, and that death ruins the happy and is the best the wretched can hope for. Brahms’ point is that those things are transient and are transformed when taken up into the greater reality created by love. Love gives purpose to life that might have no purpose itself. Love lets us bear the evil that comes with God’s creation. Love lets us triumph over death that is premature and over a miserable life for which death is a welcome blessing.

Brahms’ fourth song begins with a wild dance of upsetting rhythms, crashing chords, and impossible leaps, like real life, interrupted by lyrical phrases longing for love; that life’s greatest virtues count for nothing without love is a madness of noise, a cacophony of sounds. The slow middle section reflects on now seeing through a glass darkly and looking forward to then seeing face to face; the sinuous melody is like the
sound of a distant hunting horn, while underneath the piano builds a hidden beat of triplets, the divine energy. The last section begins like the first but with small changes brings the cacophony to transcendent harmony; it connects heaven and earth with more than octave leaps in a paean to faith, hope, and love. A coda brings the song home with the melody and rolling triplets of the middle section, now made harmonically more complex, to say that the greatest of these is love. I want to sing this love song for you, counting on you to remember that I am merely a preacher bringing the message of love in a vocal medium, not a certified singer like our choristers. That the song is too high for me is like the fact that such love is also too high for me. [sing]

Now the reason love fills eternity is that God is love, as John says. The best way to understand creation is as the creativity of love that makes lovely things for their own sake. God’s loving presence with each of us in our inmost heart is the Holy Spirit loving. By the Holy Spirit we can love God. By the Holy Spirit we can love our neighbors. The Holy Spirit is God creating us to be lovers. When we search our souls and find little love of God and neighbors, this means that we must awaken to the Spirit within us. When we search our communities and find little love of God and neighbors, this means we must awaken to the Spirit among us. In one sense it is vain to attempt to call down the Holy Spirit or to understand its workings through the cosmos. But in another sense the Holy Spirit is the fount of our very existence as individuals and communities. The creative Spirit is God loving us into existence. That we don’t see this much of the time is because we, not the Spirit, are asleep. So I call upon us all to wake up to the Spirit of love, the power of creative impulse, the deep-seated sympathy that makes our hearts flip-flop at the sight of danger or suffering for others. We can awaken to the loving power of God pounding like triplets about to break out in new life and justice. So life has no meaning on its own terms: life filled with love is lived in God. So evil is inevitable and rampant: evil endured in love is transfigured to victory in God. So death cuts short the happy and consoles only the wretched: love for however long a life is part of the eternal love in God’s life.

Forget the impatience of your love and wake up to the patience of God’s love. Slough off the unkindness of your love and put on the cosmic kindness of God’s love. Don’t let your love be envious, you already possess all things in God. Your love need not boast because it already reflects the glory of creation. Abandon the arrogance of your love, for God’s love that you share humbles itself to slip beneath the claws of meaninglessness, evil, and death. If your love insists on its own way, don’t worry because God’s love of which yours is part always gets its way. If your love is irritable or resentful, don’t worry, you also have God’s love that is joyful and all-giving. If you sometimes rejoice in wrongdoing, don’t worry, for even that flawed love awakens the longing for God’s truth in love. When we are awake to the true Spirit of God’s love in creation, it does not matter that our love does not bear all things: God’s love bears all things. Though our love cannot believe all things, God’s love set the truth to be believed face to face. Though our love’s hope is faint, God’s love sounds all Heaven’s trumpets. God’s love is the beginning of creation and its end. Between Alpha and Omega God’s love pulses the Holy Spirit through our lives, setting the weakest, most flawed, perverse, and self-defeating of our faint versions of love within the fullness of God’s love. Praise God, that to have even the most pitiful and wretched impulse of love is better than perfect faith, hope, or any other spiritual gift with no love, for it participates in the being of God. If we have any love at all, we live within the whole of God’s perfect love that draws us toward the perfection of creation. Come Holy Spirit, love divine. Amen.

-The Rev. Dr. Robert Cummings Neville

posted in Uncategorized on 02.1.2004 at 11:00 am

By Marsh Chapel

Psalm 19

Proclamation is not the job only of preachers. You might get that impression from Paul’s first letter to the Corinthians where he details many different jobs in the Church, like different members of the one Body of Christ. Preaching is one job among others. Actually, Paul said that God appointed a number of ranked offices, beginning with apostles, then prophets, then teachers, then deeds of power, gifts of healing, forms of assistance, forms of leadership, and finally various kinds of tongues. The first three, the offices of apostles, prophets, and teachers might all count as proclamation in related senses.

Lest we preachers take too much comfort from this high ranking of our supposed spiritual gifts, we should remember that Paul goes on immediately to say that there still is a more excellent way, outranking apostles and the rest, namely the way of love. The spiritual gift of love is far more important for the Church than preaching, miracle working, healing, and the rest. Love is a spiritual gift desired for all Christians, in fact the distinguishing spiritual gift of Christianity itself. That the Church, the Body of Christ, has kept its offices running more or less efficiently throughout history, while so often failing miserably at love, is a bitter sadness. With regard to preaching itself, although not every Christian is supposed to have a pulpit, every Christian does proclaim faith, or lack of it, in everything said and done. I’ll come back to this.

The text from Nehemiah describes heavy-handed proclamation. Ezra the scribe and Nehemiah the governor have brought the Israelite leaders back to Jerusalem after the exile, sorted the families and rebuilt much of the Temple that had been destroyed. Then at the request of the people, Ezra read to them from his version of the Torah, from early morning until noon on the first day of the seventh month after their return. He explained the Torah to them—it was in Hebrew and they spoke Aramaic—and the leaders told the people to rejoice, for the day of the first reading of the Torah with the people back in Jerusalem is holy to God. What was proclaimed was not only, or most importantly, the words of the Torah, but the fact of God’s victory in bringing the people of Israel back to their promised land where they had the opportunity, denied them in exile, to live according to their law. Christian proclamation is something like that: despite appearances to the contrary, God is present in saving ways and all we need to do is to live out salvation. Every town and homestead is a Christian Jerusalem.

Of our texts, Psalm 19 has the over-the-top proclamation: “The heavens are telling the glory of God; and the firmament proclaims his handiwork. Day to day pours forth speech, and night to night declares knowledge. There is no speech, nor are there words; their voice is not heard; yet their voice goes out through all the earth, and their words to the end of the world.” Day and night are like heavenly choruses that antiphonally proclaim God’s handiwork. If only we could hear the music of the spheres!

The text on which I wish to focus, however, is that from Luke in which Jesus reads from the scroll of Isaiah. What Luke says he reads, actually, is not exactly like anything in Isaiah as we have it; it is closest to Isaiah 61:1-2 or perhaps 58:6. Jesus’ proclamation has two moments. First he reads the scripture, which is a witness to God’s word to Israel. Then he preaches a sermon about it.

In his text, Isaiah claims that the Spirit of the Lord is upon him. Why? The reason is that he has been anointed “to bring good news to the poor. He has sent me to proclaim release to the captives and recovery of sight to the blind, to let the oppressed go free, to proclaim the year of the lord’s favor.” This is to say, if someone has been so anointed to do these things, the Spirit of the Lord is upon him, or her. We might be inclined to think that the causation goes the other way—if the Spirit of the Lord is upon you, then you are anointed to proclaim these things. Without the Spirit, you can stay home. But Jesus quotes Isaiah, accurately, to the effect that having the job is what brings the Spirit.

The job itself, of course, is to proclaim a reversal of terrible conditions: the despair of the poor, the incarceration of captives, the loss of sight, the bondage of oppression, a people forgotten by God. Isaiah wrote that he himself had been anointed to proclaim these things, and therefore was blessed with the Spirit of the Lord. Jesus cited this text to pass these points on into the Christian Gospel, which in turn everywhere and always proclaims hope for the poor, freedom for captives, recovery of sight, freedom for the oppressed, and a people beloved by God. Jesus chose this passage from Isaiah to make this point. He reinforced the point in many contexts of his preaching, for instance in the Beatitudes, or in saying that the last will be first and the first last. Jesus’ intent was not to say only that Isaiah in ancient times had been anointed to proclaim these things. Rather, those things are worth proclaiming whenever and by whomever.

Jesus’ sermon after the reading was dynamite and it got him in trouble, as next week’s lectionary Gospel will relate. The whole sermon was one sentence: “Today this scripture has been fulfilled in your hearing.” Period. That is, Jesus himself is anointed to proclaim the reversal of terrible conditions, and because of that the Spirit of the Lord is upon him. Whereas it was pious to say that Isaiah had the Spirit of the Lord, it was blasphemous for Jesus to claim it for himself. The novelty in his sermon was not in the content of the proclamation; after all, that was at least as old as Isaiah. The sermon was radical because it claimed the Spirit of the Lord for Jesus.

Now Jesus did not say that only he was anointed to bring good news. In fact, every Christian is anointed, by virtue of baptism, to proclaim these and the other points of the Gospel and, in so proclaiming, the Spirit of the Lord will come. This has astonishing meaning for us today. It is not enough to look back on Jesus and quote him as he quotes Isaiah. To be disciples of Jesus we need to call down the Spirit of the Lord on us by our proclamation, among other works.

The Spirit of the Lord so often seems to be sleeping in our time. If we are a consumerist society, and we are, it is because we think we have to buy something to get the satisfaction that the Spirit of the Lord should bring. If we have a global economy that rewards successful greed despite the fact that the poor are made poorer by that, and we do, it is because our conscience has been made deaf to the Spirit’s proclamation. If we tolerate a government that lies to justify its greed and murderous exercise of power, and is supported mainly by people who admire its machismo, and we do, it is because the spirit of the world has blocked out the Spirit of the Lord. If we fill our leisure hours with entertainments that are vacuous of any
critical edge of prophetic thinking, and that cover over our consumer madness, greed and false patriotism, and we do, it is because we want to drown out that prophetic voice that we have known in our heart since Isaiah’s time.

Our land is filled with the poor, while we roll back taxes that might help them. The stalags of Guantanamo are filled with captives who defended their country against our invasion, and prisons across America are filled with people whose hopelessness sustains a culture of crime, while we tout our political righteousness and legal due process. Across our country and around the world are legions who are blind, sick with AIDS and other devastations, victims of natural disasters and the follies of ethnic and factional wars, while we complain about the high price of health care and spend billions to go to war. Millions of people are oppressed by traditions that do not respect them, by governments that steal from them, by poverty that blights their soul. Millions are oppressed because of their race, their gender, their age, or their sexual orientation. Millions are oppressed by a global economy that makes the poor poorer and rewards the rich who are best able to compete. In the face of this oppression we take false pride in democratic freedom that often means little more than freedom for avarice. Surely the Spirit of the Lord is sleeping!

Perhaps I exaggerate. That’s common among preachers. Many people do have powerful emotional experiences of the Spirit, or of some spirit that feels religious. Twenty years ago those things I have been complaining about would have been attributed to rampant secularism. But it has been religion that has been rampant, here as well as in those parts of the world that seem most troubled. Emotional religion truly vents psychic pressure and gives singular discipline and direction to people in the midst of confusion, both of which are good psychological functions. Sometimes whatever vents psychic pressure and disciplines chaotic life, however, is taken for true religion. Not every spirit that fires enthusiasm is the Spirit of the Lord. Terrorists are filled with some spirit. Many seemingly spirit-filled Christians are complacent about the poor, the captives, the blind, and the oppressed and still think they have the Lord’s favor. Without the careful and conscientious discernment of spirits required for distinguishing the Holy Spirit from counterfeits, religion filled with spiritual emotion is dangerous. Jesus’ point was that the Spirit comes because of special behavior, in this case preaching good news to the poor, release to the captives, recovery of sight to the blind, freedom for the oppressed, and the year of the Lord’s favor. One very important test among many for the discernment of spirits is whether they witness to God’s justice as the prophets laid it out.

Now Jesus’ sermon on Isaiah was not the whole of his message nor is it the whole of the Christian gospel. Perhaps even more important is the message of the way of love as the right way to live in the Kingdom of God, as the proper context for speaking and doing justice. Moreover, the Christian gospel is not only Jesus’ personal message but a way of life lived in orientation to Jesus. Christians follow out the Way of Jesus and this includes faith in his person as well as his message.

Nevertheless a certain priority resides in the proclamation of good news to the poor, release to the captives, sight for the blind, freedom for the oppressed, and the year of the Lord’s favor, namely that it is proclamation about and for others, not just ourselves. Although we should proclaim the whole of the Church’s life and work, too easily that can degenerate into concern for only the Church itself. The Church can be itself only when it lightens up on its own concerns and empties itself for the poor, the captives, the blind, and oppressed. Seek the proclamation that brings the Spirit of the Lord: that determines whether the spirit at hand is the Lord’s Spirit.

The poor, the prisoners, the afflicted, and the oppressed cry out for the Spirit of the Lord. My friends, by Christ’s mercy I beg you to awaken to the Holy Spirit. Do that by proclaiming God’s justice and the rest of the gospel. Preaching is not one job among others, as Paul’s Corinthians text might suggest. To be baptized is to be anointed to speak out for justice and the whole gospel. Speak plainly to your friends. Inform yourself so that you speak with wisdom. The real issues of justice are very complex, and general symbols such as the poor, the captives, the blind and oppressed go only so far. A Great Awakening of the Spirit must be filled with intelligence and light. Reject any form of religion that does not demand the utmost of critical questioning and inquiry. Anti-intellectualism is a sure sign of a spirit other than the Lord’s. Three weeks ago I preached about the witness to Jesus beginning with the Three Wise Men. A Great Awakening of Spirit is not only a matter of understanding and speaking. It is also true enthusiasm, a joy in the experience of God that moves us to moral improvement, holy community, and a rush to the ecstasy of being filled with God. Two weeks ago I preached on Jesus’ baptism, the one where he brings the Spirit and fire. A Great Awakening of Spirit is not only understanding, speaking, and enthusiasm. It is also a celebration of God’s work, indeed victory, in the Christian life. In John’s account, the first thing Jesus did after he had gathered the core of his disciples was to take them to the wedding party at Cana. Of course it took the disciples a long time to learn that discipleship is a party, because it sure didn’t seem like that. Jesus was crucified and most of them were martyred. But the wedding at Cana prefigured the marriage of God and the people and celebrated what those who are awake in the Spirit know, that God brings us home, already has us at home, where the crown of thorns is really a victor’s laurel wreath. A Great Awakening to the Spirit is not a simple thing, is it?

Nevertheless I call you to it. Perhaps the next step for you personally is not a profession of faith, or an ecstatic religious experience, or the joy of being taken up into God’s work. Perhaps the next step is proclamation of good news to the poor, release to the captives, recovery of sight to the blind, freedom for the oppressed, and the year of the Lord’s favor. Speak it, and your actions will follow. Speak it as an anointed proclaimer, and the Spirit of the Lord will be upon you. Seize the Spirit and let it glow. Make your faith something serious, and you will find yourself accompanied by others who also are seeking and finding the Spirit, for that will be God working within us all. Amen.

posted in Uncategorized on 01.25.2004 at 11:00 am

By Marsh Chapel

The undergraduates in Chapel today probably like John’s story of the wedding at Cana better than did the very sober Christians of my youth. What do we learn from the story? First and most obviously, Jesus liked to party. The names of the married couple are not mentioned, and we can assume from the story that they are friends of Jesus’ mother rather than Jesus himself. Cana is nine miles from Jesus’ home, and that is a long walk if you don’t like parties for strangers for their own sake. We know from the story that Mary too liked to party, because she was the one who had been told by the steward that the wine had run out. We learn from the story that Jesus didn’t want to use any special powers but did so because his mother insisted, sort of a caricature of the relation between a Jewish mother and her son. Not only were Mary and Jesus not teetotalers but we don’t see much of the discipline of moderation. If we suppose that the host had ordered and served the wine he expected to be sufficient for the party, then Mary and Jesus must have been having a good time, which they wanted to continue, for them to want to make more. Now if you calculate six water jars holding 20 to 30 gallons apiece, filled to the brim, that’s between 120 and 180 gallons of top quality wine from Jesus the Good Vintner. It’s a good thing they had a nine-mile walk back home. Psalm 104 says that among the great things of creation God made wine to gladden the human heart, and this must have been a glad party to end all parties, even if the married couple seem peripheral to the story.

Nevertheless, the sober Christians of my youth were somewhat uncomfortable with this story, and with good reason. Whereas wine might have been the preferred beverage in rural Galilee because they didn’t have much clean drinking water, we know the damage drinking can do when drivers drink, when excessive drinking ruins health, when inappropriate drinking ruins work, projects, friendships, and families; we know alcoholism to be a serious disease, something not at all understood in Jesus’ time. It might be strange to hear me say in this instance that you should not do what Jesus did but rather what the University says: don’t drink if you are underage and drink in careful moderation if you are old enough; know also that a little alcohol might lead you to do things you wouldn’t do when sober and for which you nevertheless are responsible. So why then is this over-the-top party story in the Bible, especially at such a pivotal place in John’s Gospel?

The clue is in the first four words of the first sentence: “On the third day there was a wedding in Cana of Galilee.” The third day from what? It was the third day from the calling of the core disciples, whom Jesus then brought to the wedding. John’s Gospel has a different account of the calling of the disciples from Matthew, Mark, and Luke who describe a seaside calling of fishermen. In John’s account, Jesus went to be baptized by John the Baptist at Bethany, near Jerusalem. There he met two disciples of John the Baptist whom the Baptist sent to get acquainted with Jesus. One of those was likely John, the brother of James, by repute the eventual author of John’s Gospel, and traditionally identified with the Beloved Disciple. The other was Andrew, Peter’s brother. The two disciples of John the Baptist were so impressed with Jesus that Andrew found his brother Peter, who apparently also had been involved with the baptizing phenomenon, and brought him to Jesus. The next day Jesus left the Jerusalem area for Galilee and found Philip, who was a neighbor of Andrew and Peter. Philip then found Nathaniel who confessed Jesus to be the Son of God and the King of Israel.

It was three days after Philip brought Nathaniel that Jesus took his new band of disciples to the wedding at Cana. John does not record that Jesus took them first to a mountaintop for an exhilarating new experience, as happened later at the Transfiguration. He did not take them off to pray. He did not preach or lecture to them, or take them to a communal meal. The first thing he did with the disciples, according to John, was to take them to a wedding party and make sure they enjoyed it.

John’s Gospel differs from the others in being the last written and having the heaviest theological interpretation. Although John is likely to be the most accurate historically, it is written from the standpoint of people who already know the end of the story. The end of the story, as John tells it, is that Jesus has triumphed over the world, that he made a place for his disciples with God, that he himself is with God and has sent the Holy Spirit to be with his followers forever. The point of John’s Gospel is that God has triumphed in Christ and that God’s Holy Spirit is with the people to see them through. So God’s victory should be celebrated right off with a party. Although the disciples could not understand it at the time, Jesus initiated their ministry with a celebration of God’s victory. That the party celebrates a wedding, with an unnamed bridal party, prefigures or symbolizes the marriage between God and the God’s people. The real bridal party is God and Israel, God and the disciples, God and the Church, indeed God and the whole world including the Gentiles.

The story of the wedding in Cana is the first of a series of increasingly complex and startling miracles that Jesus performs in John’s narrative, ending with the raising of Lazarus from the dead and finally Jesus’ own resurrection. All along the way people who do not understand Jesus slowly come to do so. Remember poor Nicodemus who thought he had to return to the womb to be born again in the Spirit? The closing scene of John’s Gospel is the fish breakfast Jesus cooked for his disciples after they thought he was dead. He healed the spirit of poor Peter who had denied him three times by getting him to say three times that he loved Jesus. He told Peter to feed those whom Jesus loved. Peter asked Jesus about Jesus’ special relation with the Beloved Disciple, and Jesus responded to the effect that it was none of Peter’s business because Jesus’ relation with each person is different, a poignant lesson with which to end the Gospel.

Now I am not asking you to believe in miracles, turning water to wine, multiplying loaves and fishes, healing the sick, or raising the dead. What to believe about miracles is a very important topic for another time. But I am asking you to live in God’s time after the first party. Or rather, regard this time as our party of the Christian life, even if our time look like anything but a party. This is our time, like the disciples in their time, for learning what it means to be God’s people, and we shall make foolish mistakes before we get it down. Living in God’s world is not what we might expect. Great armies do not come down to drive out the Romans or protect us from terrorists. Too many Christians defend racism rather than remove it. The Christian movement is not a government that rules with righteousness; in fact it has to live subversively with governments that usually are not righteous, as the early Christians did. The strong and proud are not our real leaders, the humble and poor are: witness Martin Luther King, Jr. In so many ways, the Christian life is lived contrary to all expectations of victory and greatness. Resurrection to spiritual life is obtained through spiritual crucifixion, through suffering the blind and evil powers of the world, and through keeping the faith when all hope is given up. Dr. King was a martyr.

How do we awaken to this strange, up
side down story of Christianity? We’ve heard it so often it no longer startles us. Many answers to that question exist. Sometimes world events shock us so that we ask with new urgency what it means to be a Christian. I remember the shock of Dr. King’s assassination, and with several other ministers in my area preached on the Grapes of Wrath the next Sunday. The events of 9/11 and the war in Iraq have had that effect for many. Sometimes a vision of the poor lets us see Jesus. Sometimes we meet a person or group who startles us to awareness of the seriousness of Christianity. For many of us, it takes a tragedy such as the death or serious illness of someone close. What I want to urge today, however, is none of these stimuli from the outside. I ask instead that we turn inward and inquire how it is with our souls. Isn’t that the question you should ask of your best friends, in order to be a friend yourself? Of course such questions are embarrassing, and only the best of friends can ask that question straightforwardly. But asking the question of ourselves does not involve embarrassment, only confusion, shock, sometimes grief, and sometimes joy.

“How is it with my soul?” is a very Methodist question. Last week I urged us to not settle for being what John Wesley called an “almost Christian.” Wesley preached a sermon in 1741 called “The Almost Christian” in which he distinguished that from the “altogether Christian.” An almost Christian has what Wesley called the “heathen virtues” of morality and a strong regard for justice, truth, and giving assistance or charity to one another. An almost Christian also has the “form of Christian godliness,” by which Wesley meant living by the stringent moral code of the New Testament and participating in all the means of grace in the Church, including private prayer. From the outside, an almost Christian can look very like an altogether Christian. But what is lacking, he said, is inner sincerity. When we look into our soul, you and I, do we recognize deep sincerity?

Sincerity, Wesley said, involves three things. First it involves genuine love of God, not sentimental feelings of gratitude but genuine love. Loving God is very difficult, because God’s creation involves destruction as well as construction. Second, sincerity involves loving our neighbors, not just behaving charitably toward them, not just being good to them. Sincerity involves genuinely loving them, which is a disposition of the heart that can be difficult when our neighbors are our enemies. Third, sincerity involves real faith in the inward heart. By faith, Wesley did not mean just belief, although true understanding is part of faith. Wesley had a quaint way of making this point. He said that devils, because of their supernatural knowledge, know the truth of all the Christian history, witness, and doctrines, including that Christ had died for their salvation. Yet they are still devils because their hearts do not accept that salvation. What the devils lack, perfect theologians that they are, is the inward acceptance of God’s saving love and the rejoicing, the returning of God’s love, and the loving of neighbor out of the excess of joy.

This brings us back to the wedding at Cana. An altogether Christian, sincere in loving God, loving neighbor, and rejoicing in the convictions of faith, knows that discipleship is a party. We usually don’t understand how it is a party—coming to understand how it is, is part of discipleship. It usually does not look or feel like a party—most of Jesus’ disciples were martyred and he himself was crucified. Our own lives are filled with many confusions, failures, betrayals of others, of ourselves, of our ideals, of our Christ, just like Peter’s. Yet in loving God in total sincerity, and loving neighbors in total sincerity, and abiding in the deepest faith in which God dwells wildly and joyfully, the altogether Christian knows that this life is a party given by God. It is our very own wedding party.

Wesley knew his sermon had a little trick to it. Most of us are not anywhere near being even an almost Christian. We aren’t very moral, truthful, just, or even fully observant of the forms of the Christian life. The point is that if we get the sincerity, that which distinguishes an altogether Christian from the almost Christian, then the virtues of the almost Christian will come along in time. Begin with the sincere love of God, the sincere love of neighbor, and the sincere faith that God’s love and power for salvation already resides in your heart, and all the rest will be added through the practices of sanctification. Love and faith come first, and they are available now.

So I ask you about your soul. Do you find there sincere love of God and neighbor, the joyful faith in God’s love and power? That question might take a long time to answer. I invite you into the Christian life in which that faithful sincerity can be awakened and made to glow. More specifically, I invite undergraduates to come to the Marsh Room downstairs this Tuesday and following Tuesdays from 5:30 to 6:30 to become what Wesley called a “Band,” a group for spiritual discernment and formation. We will pray, begin a spiritual discipline, and work to increase our ability to love God and neighbor, and to dwell in joyful faith. Our purpose is not psychological analysis or the invasion of personal privacy; people will be free to speak or not and can leave any time. Our purpose is mutual help and accountability in the pursuit of the spiritual life, beginning with care for the question, how is it with our souls? All undergraduates are invited. If others who are not undergraduates would like to begin a Wesleyan Band, which is not a musical organization, please contact the Chapel office.

Back to the wedding at Cana. Given that Jesus was instructing his disciples to become aware of the love of God and the fulfillment of being a disciple within God’s world, I’m sure that the Good Vintner used the 30 gallon containers and made a full 180 gallons of the very best wine. Amen.

posted in Uncategorized on 01.18.2004 at 11:00 am

By Marsh Chapel

Psalm 29

Acts8:14-17

Luke 3:15-17, 21-22

Today is the first Sunday after Epiphany in the Church calendar and it celebrates Jesus’ baptism when, according to Luke, he was blessed by the Holy Spirit and the voice from Heaven said to him, “You are my Son, the Beloved; with you I am well pleased.” My own baptism was not half so spectacular, I can tell you. I was nine and remember vividly going to the chancel rail with my parents in the Methodist Church in St. Louis where I grew up. The minister was saying words I didn’t understand, and when he dipped his hand in the bowl of water and pressed it down on my head, the brittle Stay-Comb hair fixer my mother had slathered on my unruly mop shattered and crackled with a most upsetting sensation of something breaking. That was not an epiphany, although I wish I still had the hair.

The text from Luke actually makes reference to three baptisms. First, John the Baptist was conducting a revival with mass baptisms for repentance and cleansing from sin. Second, Jesus, who came to John for that Baptism, was uniquely revealed by the Spirit and Word to be the Son of God. And third, although first in our text, John says that Jesus himself will bring a baptism not of water but of Spirit and fire. These three different references to baptism all have significant meanings as they have been developed within the Christian tradition. Christian baptism, of course, is not literally any of these, except perhaps the last; rather it is the ceremony of initiation into the Christian life, into membership in the Church. I believe that we need a new awakening of the meaning of our baptism, not that those who have been baptized need to be baptized again, but that we need to catch the Spirit and fire of what it has meant all along.

The first meaning of baptism is obvious from the symbolism, namely a washing away of our sins. Sin is symbolized as dirt, uncleanness. Many Christians, especially those called “Baptists” (not unexpectedly) believe that a person needs to be totally immersed. Like John the Baptist who called upon people to repent of their sins, and baptized them in the Jordan only after they had repented as a symbolic act of making them clean, many Baptists and others today believe that only people old enough to understand what they are doing and genuinely repent should be baptized, a custom called “believer’s baptism.” Other Christians, however, note that the cleansing from sin is an act of God and not a reward for repentance. So they baptize infants who are presented by their parents. Whatever kind of original sin a baby might have inherited, and there are many conflicting beliefs about that, it is washed away with the ritual and the child is incorporated as a full member of the Christian community. The parents, godparents, and the whole household of God are charged with the education of the child in Christian piety. Whether of infants, nine-year olds, or hardened repentant sinners, baptism means that the baptized people ever after are members of the Christian church, for whom other Christians have a responsibility, regardless of whether they carry on congregational membership, moral seriousness, or Christian belief. No one ever needs to be baptized twice.

Let me tell you then that if you have been baptized, and yet you feel burdened by guilt, that burden is unnecessary. You might well be guilty and something should be done about that. But you should not be burdened by the guilt or let it keep you from God. The author of Colossians wrote “And when you were dead in trespasses . . . God made you alive together with him, when he forgave us all our trespasses, erasing the record that stood against us with its legal demands. He set this aside, nailing it to the cross.” (Col. 2:12-14) Remember the verse from Horatio Spafford’s hymn “It is Well with My Soul”: “My sin, oh, the bliss of this glorious thought! My sin, not in part but the whole, is nailed to the cross, and I bear it no more, praise the Lord, praise the Lord, O my soul.” If you feel such a burden, then take your baptism seriously, renew the baptismal vows that you made or that were made for you at your baptism and participate in the full grace of the Christian community. If you have not been baptized, enter into the process of becoming so. At Marsh Chapel our Easter Vigil service will include the baptism of new members of the Body of Christ and the renewal of baptismal vows of those who would like that. Please talk with one of the deans of the Chapel if you want to participate. The second sense of baptism is deeper in meaning, if such a thing is possible. In this sense, baptism is going down with Jesus into the waters of death, and then rising from those waters in resurrection. The author of Colossians wrote to the people of that congregation, “when you were buried with him in baptism, you were also raised with him through the faith in the power of God, who raised him from the dead.” When John the Baptist put Jesus under the waters of the Jordan, like returning to the primeval chaos before creation, that prefigured Jesus’ death. When Jesus rose from the waters and the Holy Spirit descended, like the divine wind in the beginning, that prefigured Jesus’ resurrection. When we Christians are baptized we die with Jesus to the old life of sin and rise with Jesus to the new life, the new creation, in which we are already embraced eternally with God. The author of Colossians went on to say, “So if you have been raised with Christ, seek the things that are above, where Christ is, seated at the right hand of God. Set your minds on things that are above, not on things that are on earth, for you have died and your life is hidden with Christ in God.” (Col. 3:1-3) I pray that you have a musical ear for these wonderful symbols of the Christian faith.

Of course the resurrection of life in baptism, enjoyed by all Christians, does not mean the end of daily life and its problems. The author of Colossians goes on to say that resurrected Christians should put to death the old patterns of sin and put on the new ways of God: “But now you must get rid of all such things—anger, wrath, malice, slander, and abusive language from your mouth. Do not lie to one another, seeing that you have stripped off the old self with its practices and have clothed yourselves with a new self, which is being renewed in knowledge according to the image of its creator. In that renewal there is no longer Greek and Jew, circumcised and uncircumcised, barbarian, Scythian, slave and free; but Christ is all in all!” (Col. 3:8-11) As baptized Christians, dead to sin and raised to new life in Christ we don’t have to worry about sin’s burdens or the fear of death. Our only concerns now are sanctification and holiness. We have the Holy Spirit, God’s creative power present throughout all creation, to discipline and guide us.

The third meaning of baptism follows precisely from this. John the Baptist said Jesus would baptize not with water but with the Holy Spirit and fire. I suspect from other things he said that John thought that Jesus would be an even fiercer judge than he himself had been. But the subsequent Christian understanding of Jesus’ baptism in the Holy Spirit is more complicated than moral judgment. It means at least four things, I believe.

First, baptism in the Holy Spirit means that God is with us in the process of sanctification in which we put aside our old bad habits one by one and take up the habits of new life, as described in the las
t Colossians passage. What does this mean in practice? It means that the creative power of God is all around us, in the renewing powers of nature, in our bodies’ natural healing processes, in the natural desire of people to help, and in our own love of life. Many things hold us back, especially feelings of guilty unworthiness. But we have died to those things and are free for God’s renewing power to run through us like a river.

Second, baptism in the Holy Spirit is in all the things of religion, especially the Church, which provides patterns of good life, symbols to connect us with redeeming powers, congregations of people with whom life builds up all who participate, scriptures to read, theology to contemplate, service to render others, songs to sing, dances to dance, and messages to preach to witness the Spirit in our lives. What does this mean in practice? It means we need constantly to be alert to the discernment of the true Holy Spirit in contrast to the tempting spirits of evil, for we all know that religion can be harmful, the Church sometimes advocates destructive patterns of life, symbols can be used demonically, congregations can be dysfunctional, theologies can lie, service can be manipulative, songs can destroy the spirit, dances can become marches, and testimony can preach hate. The Christian life collectively and individually is a constant critical discernment of spirits, measuring their claims by the fruits of the Holy Spirit. With our own spirits alert, the Holy Spirit can be discerned in the incredibly rich resources of the Body of Christ such that our new lives have powers to heal the world as well as ourselves.

Third, the indwelling of the Holy Spirit in which Christ baptizes us manifests the love of God toward us, patient, kind, and lovely. When Jesus was baptized, the divine voice called him “My Son, my beloved” and, as we are grafted onto Christ as branches of the true vine, we become aware of being beloved children of God. This is celebrated in our public worship. In the ancient Church the communal enjoyment of the blessings of God’s love in the Holy Spirit was expressed sometimes through ecstatic speaking in tongues, and many Christian congregations experience that today. Even more God’s love can be felt in the depths of our hearts as our spiritual discipline teaches us to be silent and still. The life of prayer, meditation, and contemplation in private, often guided by a spiritual director, can lead to profound experiences of God’s loving, correcting, comforting spiritual vitality. As Augustine said, when you go deep enough within your own soul you find not yourself but God. Divine ecstasy means being beside yourself, which can take place in charismatic worship as well as in profound contemplation.

The fourth meaning of Christ’s baptism with the Holy Spirit and fire is the genuine ecstasy of turning from glorying in God’s love for us to our loving God as our beloved. If we are truly created in God’s image, and God is the great lover who creates the world and redeems creation, then it is not enough for us to receive God’s love. We fulfill God’s image by loving as God loves. We can love the creator in all things created, for which the shorthand expression is loving our neighbors. And we can love the Creator God as our beloved. Loving God is not exactly like loving another being, because God is the depths of our own hearts, the ground of our being. But loving God is not loving only the God in us. Through the Holy Spirit, which is God in us, we can love the Creator of the entire cosmos. This is not easy, because that Creator gives us suffering and death as well as all the graces of life. Probably we have to hate God before we can love God seriously. When we do take God as our lover, our beloved, our own sense of self sinks to insignificance. The fire of sexual ecstasy has long been the best symbol for the ecstasy of loving God. When the Holy Spirit brings us to love God, who can say whether it is we giving ourselves to God in the Spirit loving us, or we in the Spirit loving God, or God loving God in us, or we loving the creation in God? Please groan in the Spirit to be God’s lover, for it is part of baptism in the Holy Spirit and fire.

I have represented these four meanings of being baptized in the Holy Spirit and fire as if they were separate, yet they are intimately connected and grow into one another. Personal sanctification, communal holiness, personal and communal experience of God’s love, and the ecstasy of loving God are integral parts of the one fire of Christian life. The light that came into the world in Christ brings our misdeeds to life and cleanses them: it leads us through the death of our old selves to new life of holiness: it sets us aglow with the power of sanctification, communal holiness, the experience of God’s love, and the ecstasy of loving God. In that light we can turn from our self-concerns and live for others as free friends and lovers of God. The appearance of Jesus makes all this possible.

If you are a Christian whose sense of your baptism has fallen asleep, I invite you to wake up. Do you long for cleansing from sin, for going through death to true life, for sanctification, holy community, the knowledge of God’s love for you, and the ecstasy of loving God? Then become a Christian in a serious way. It’s time for a Great Awakening of the Holy Spirit in us and in our land. Do not settle for being what John Wesley called an “almost Christian.” Like Jesus, come to the baptism of the Holy Spirit. Amen.

posted in Uncategorized on 01.11.2004 at 11:00 am

By Marsh Chapel

Isaiah 60:1-6

Psalm 72:1-7, 10-14

Ephesians 3:1-12

Matthew 2:1-12

Welcome to the New Year, 2004. I hope that you all enjoyed the holiday season and that the diets you swore to four days ago are still in effect. My wife and I spent much of the holiday with our daughter and her husband in Washington, D.C. It was a time of great religious services, wonderful gatherings of friends, lots of relaxing conversation, and almost non-stop eating, hence our resolutions about the belt. I thank Dean Meredith Ellis for taking the pulpit last week. We all know, of course, that the holiday season is very difficult for many people and look for ways to ease their pain. We hope that 2004 will bring a global peace that eluded us last year, as well as a sense of direction in a world that seems to be based on greed, from the nation’s geo-political extremes to our personal habits.

For Christians today is not only the first Sunday of the new year but more importantly, Epiphany Sunday. Epiphany celebrates the appearance of Jesus Christ to the world and the traditional text is the story of the three wise men who were the first strangers to pay him homage.

Wise men were not in good supply in the first century and, even with the recent addition of wise women, we still suffer from a short supply in the twenty-first. Late-modern society requires a good education, especially in technical fields, yet too many of our people lack the education even to be steady unskilled laborers. Democracy requires both a broad background and a refined capacity to learn new things and evaluate competing opinions, yet too many of us are merely parochial and cannot understand issues more complex than our immediate environment. Happiness in personal life requires knowing how to take satisfaction in our lives, in the lives of others, in the arts, the sciences, and public affairs, yet consumerist culture persuades us that satisfaction is impossible without more commodities. Our nation wields enormous economic and military power to impose the government’s will on others, yet without understanding from the perspective of those others what would be genuinely good or bad for them. Our cultural wisdom seems to be asleep! Thanks for letting me vent as a professor!

My particular concern as a Christian pastor is with the short supply of wisdom in our religious life. One of the glories of our age is the magnificent advance in scientific understanding of nature, yet too many popular theologies ask us to believe what we know to be false. Another of our glories is a fantastic explosion in the plastic and visual arts, literature, poetry, drama, dance, and music, fed by a wonderful confluence of world cultures and freed from the pieties of both Enlightenment rationalism and dogmatic religion, yet popular theologies insist on a simplistic picture of human nature we know to be false. The rock bottom conviction of the Christian faith is that the world is God’s creature, yet popular theologies ask us to believe in a God so small that the breadth and depth of creation cannot possibly be God’s creature. The human predicament addressed by the Christian faith is that our hearts are sinful, yet too many theologies simply aim to make us feel good. Jesus Christ asks us to love God with all our heart, mind, soul, and strength, yet too many theologies say it is belief that counts, or conspicuous membership in so-called Christian culture. Jesus Christ asks us to love our neighbors, to love those different from ourselves, the poor and culturally excluded, indeed to love our enemies, yet too many theologies say we should love first the Church. They say we should think for the Church, act within the Church, be first of all for the Church, because the Church is what Stanley Hauerwas calls a band of “resident aliens,” God’s people enduring a foreign land. To the contrary, the Church is a bearer of God to the world, the Church is for the sake of the world, the Church should invite all the peoples of the world into the hospitality of God, as Henk Pieterse says, not into the limited hospitality of the Church.

The result of too much sleepy theology is that the Christian movement is split by culture wars between conservative and liberals. It falls prey to patriotic enthusiasm when those aliens and enemies should be its loving concern. It neglects the poor and needy. It fails to see what God’s hospitality would be for those of other cultures. It fails to engage the infinite passions of our heart with God rather than self-interest. It leads us to believe that the limits of the relevant world are what we can own and control. It blinds us to the shattering criticisms that the arts make of our defensive self-images. It alienates us from the understanding of God’s creation, which is the beginning of true piety. It presents us pictures of a domesticated God when God in fact is wild beyond measure. Too many sleepy theologies have made the Church unwise. The official way to say this is that the Church has lost the Mind of Christ.

Of course I exaggerate. The Christian Church has many wise thinkers and leaders. So do other religions. Nevertheless wisdom does not now inform the Church in the complex ways needed because we seem to have a childish terror of the complexities of life. Too many believe we need a simple theology, because people are simple. So instead of thinking through the complexities and ambiguities of cultural life we sell the simple falsehood that you just need to sign up with the conservatives or liberals. Instead of the painful process of coming to see through the eyes of others, we half-guiltily advocate our own tradition as the only way. Instead of tracing carefully how our social system makes some people poor we promote feel-good charity. Instead of patiently inquiring what form of religion would be salvific for people different from ourselves we let ourselves believe a one-size-fits-all piety will do. Instead of stretching our minds to know God through the vast reaches of space and time, and to love God with a love that overcomes disappointment and death, we think of God as a nice, just king who will make things come out all right according to our conception of rewards. We settle for puny, simplistic symbols even though the divine logos with which we are given to think dares to think the unthinkable.

The Epiphany story in the Gospel of John reads something like this: “In the beginning was the Logos, and the Logos was with God, and the Logos was God. . . What has come into being in him was life, and the life was the light of all people. The light shines in the darkness, and the darkness did not overcome it. . . . The true light, which enlightens everyone, was coming into the world. . . . He came to what was his own, and his own people did not accept him. But to all who
received him, who believed in his name, he gave power to become children of God, who were born, not of blood or of the will of the flesh or of the will of man, but of God.” We need a new Awakening of wisdom for Christianity to be true to its light, its Logos. Otherwise we cannot be born of God, only of some simplistic fake god.

Now you surely have a sense of humor about this, knowing that I am a professor of philosophy, religion, and theology and am preaching from a university pulpit. What else can a person such as I say? Most ordinary parishes would not tolerate such a plea for more responsible Christian intellect. They would say my stance is elitist. But remember that Jesus’ first devotees were the three wise men from the East. The Epiphany of Christ was first to the wise. The wise were the first to enlist. Remember also that the First Great Awakening, in the 18^th century, was started by people like John and Charles Wesley at Oxford, gathering fellow students for prayer and a mission to the poor; the leader of the American side of the First Great Awakening was Jonathan Edwards, America’s greatest theologian, whose last job was to be president of the college we now call Princeton. The Second Great Awakening, in the 19^th century, took its start at Yale under the leadership of Yale’s president, Edward’s grandson, Timothy Dwight. If a Third Great Awakening should come from a university, that would not be surprising to those who know the importance of wisdom for loving God.

Christian wisdom to awaken our time must embrace all that can be known in the university and elsewhere, else we fail the Logos from which we have our being. Of course our knowledge is fallible, often little better than well-entrenched hypotheses; this holds for theology as well. For this very reason Christian wisdom should seek out any domain of inquiry that might correct it. That theology is best that makes itself vulnerable to correction from every angle, adjusts itself to
well-taken criticism, and steadies itself through learning from all sources of knowledge. I myself am convinced that most theologies that have had any currency whatsoever have had an important truth for someone in some context; theologies conflict with one another, and
become genuinely false, when they are generalized beyond those contexts. Sometimes in desperate prayer, an image of a domesticated God is just fine; but a domesticated God cannot be creator of this wild cosmos. The theological job of Christian wisdom is not so much to pick one theology to defend against all others, as happened in the First and Second Great Awakenings, as it is to understand the different contexts in which different symbolic expressions are true, and the contexts in which they are false. Genuine theology embraces and articulates all the ways in which God can be engaged truly, and guides the people in all of their contexts.

I have not been talking about the difference between a wise intelligence and a foolish or stupid intelligence. Rather I have been complaining about a sleeping intelligence, and calling for an awakening of that intelligence. The Christian tradition, like most others, is filled with wisdom that once was awake and vital. My complaint has been that many of those who should have been awake and vital with Christian wisdom—others can speak for other traditions—have been asleep. Christian wisdom has become too disconnected from the sciences and arts, too inward looking when it should make itself vulnerable to the world, too defensive of past identity. Sleeping wisdom leads to foolish behavior. I ask for a revitalization of Christianity in the twenty first century starting with an awakening of wisdom to its role, a role that engages the best we know, that embraces all those whom we should love, and that rejects simple ideas that merely reflect our own image back at us in favor of the complex inquiry that lets us find the image of God in the infinitely dense creation. To be born of God is to love the light and Logos of God. The first Epiphany of our Lord is as divine wisdom.

I invite you, therefore, to participate in a Great Awakening of wisdom. A new Great Awakening must also awaken fervor, and witness, and new direction, and new discipline, all of which I shall preach about on subsequent Sundays. But the Third Great Awakening begins with awakening wisdom, and perhaps in a university. If your mind hungers for honest truth and is offended by the simplemindedness of the theologies you have heard, come to an awakening of Christian wisdom that will unfold a more realistic, complex way. If your moral strength hungers to bring justice to a world more complex than slogans, come to an awakening of Christian wisdom that sorts that out. If your soul hungers for meaning in an age when even religion seems to be a commodity, come to an awakening of Christian wisdom that participates in the deepest mysteries. If your heart hungers to know God, and to be known by God, come to an awakening of Christian wisdom that dares to touch the unthinkable, that dares to be penetrated by the Logos of God, that dares to be vulnerable to God’s wild love, that dares the ecstasy of divine knowledge in our flesh. For, we cannot pray unless we have the thoughts with which to witness the divine immensity. The wise men witnessed the Epiphany.

-The Rev. Dr. Robert Cummings Neville

posted in Uncategorized on 01.4.2004 at 11:00 am

By Marsh Chapel

The stories of Jesus’ birth in the gospels of Matthew and Luke are great treasures of the human heritage, significant far beyond the community of people who accept Jesus as the Christ. Most of those stories, in one way or another, express two of the great themes of the Christian religion. The first is that God is the gracious giver of good gifts. This theme can be understood by children. We Americans have turned Christmas into a children’s holiday, focusing on the baby Jesus as a gift to the world, responding with a celebration of gifts to Jesus and gifts to our own children and to one another. Now is not the time to complain about the materialism and consumerism of the American Christmas—time enough for that later. Now we should simply rejoice in the practice of giving gifts to others, one of the very best senses in which human beings can embody the image of God. We rejoice also in the practice of gratitude for gifts received, which is the essence of piety. God’s gifts, of course, are cosmic: God creates the world, God shapes its evolution to provide a habitat for human beings, God gives us consciousness, reason, and freedom, God redeems us when we fall, and God gives us a home in eternity. The sum of our gratitude for all these things is becoming lovers and givers like God. Children get a fore-taste of this heavy-duty Christian metaphysics in the gift-giving of Christmas.

The second great theme of the Christmas stories is not easily accessible to children. It is that God’s gifts turn upside down the customary expectations of the world, especially those about power, authority, and righteousness. The core of Mary’s song, called the Magnificat, says God “has scattered the proud in the thoughts of their hearts. He has brought down the powerful from their thrones, and lifted up the lowly; he has filled the hungry with good things, and sent the rich away empty.” God gave a child to Mary’s cousin Elizabeth when she was far too old to conceive, and the angel Gabriel remarked that “nothing will be impossible with God.” Jesus was the heir of David, but he was born in a stable because there was no room at the inn. The wise men brought riches, not for King Herod who wanted their obeisance but for the baby in the stable. Who remembers Herod the Great now except as a villain in Jesus’ story? God turns human expectations upside down and history is filled with divine irony.

We Americans are living through a crisis of expectations turned upside down, and it causes great confusion. Our sense of national identity, of the values that make us Americans, is grounded in the mythos of our origins. The real history is more complex than the mythos, and yet the mythos is the source of our commitments to justice and national integrity. Have we been turned upside down and forgotten our origins? Have we Americans forgotten the covenant of our youth as a nation, the gratitude to God for our love of freedom and self-determination, of brotherhood and justice for all? Have we forgotten that the founders of New England sought the land here to be free, free especially to practice their religion, because they were not free to do so in England? Have we forgotten that the colonists fought a bloody war of Independence from England because the so-called mother country disregarded that freedom and tried to enforce an imperial economic order that was not to the advantage of the colonies? Have we forgotten that the colonists were farmers and shopkeepers, not professional soldiers, and that they faced the overwhelming might of the modern 18th century British military, plus mercenary allies? Have we forgotten that we lost nearly every pitched battle but won an underdog’s guerilla war? Have we forgotten that the British came back with greater force in the War of 1812, swept through the country, burned Washington and savaged the people, and yet lost to our rag-tag guerilla forces? Two weeks after the peace was signed, but before the news of that reached him, Andrew Jackson won the battle of New Orleans against a vastly superior marine invasion force. The Americans’ hastily assembled defense included the outlaw pirates of Jean Lafitte.

This is the American mythos of the common people, often slightly outside the law that would grind them down, defending their freedom against overwhelming forces of shock and awe, defying an oppressor who seeks to constrain Americans into a larger imperial political and economic system that is not to their own perceived interest. When shall we remember that covenant of freedom and justice for the humble people that was the source of our righteousness as a nation before God, the mythos that was our moral compass?

Since last Christmas we have invaded Iraq for no apparent legitimate reason except to force America’s economic and political vision on that country, the “American Empire” as some neo-conservatives call it. Perhaps there is a better justification for our undeclared war than I can discern: the situation is complicated. Nevertheless, we went into Iraq with overwhelming military force and smashed their standing army. But the Iraqi opposition , those defending their homelands and the whole Muslim world they perceive to be under attack, have mounted ever more effective guerilla actions to discredit the American occupation forces. We turned Saddam Hussein, a thug as bad as Osama bin Laden, albeit our one-time ally, into a Robin Hood hero defending the little people against the high tech rich and distant oppressors. Even more tragically we have let our own children in the military, for whom we pray daily, be seen around the world as like the hated imperial Sardaukar of Frank Herbert’s Dune novels, who for all their technological superiority and savage training could not defeat the underground Fremen. In some parts of Iraq we have since rebuilt resources that we had destroyed, as well as some that had been allowed to deteriorate under Saddam. Yet the more cynical among us note that, having destroyed the infrastructure of Iraq, now American companies in league with the Administration are getting rich attempting to rebuild that infrastructure.

Our American founding mythos, itself so like the Magnificat, has been turned upside down. When will we remember that America sides with the underdog against the bully, with the right of economic self-determination rather than coercion to fit an economy that favors richer parts of the world, with the right to practice the religion of conscience? This is our true covenant as Americans. Some American prophet needs to remind us of the heritage that defines us, not the greed that defiles us.

Of course there is an American counter-mythos. The heroic general, Andrew Jackson, became the president who governed under the principle that to the victor belong the spoils. As many if not more early immigrants to America sought their personal fortune more than freedom and brotherhood. The great American entrepreneur, P.T. Barnum is quoted to say there is a sucker born every minute. Many people in the Third World say that this gospel of greed is the true American mythos, that our appeals to higher morals are hypocritical, and that American foreign behavior and domestic materialism are all the evidence needed to justify these claims. In this Advent time, when we present ourselves for judgment and look forward to the Prince of Peace, we find ourselves turned wrongly upside down, standing for the things we’ve always stood against. Can we be turned again?

Praise God that the Babe who is coming can make all things new. If we have turned ourselves upside down, we can be turned back right again. As Americans we can turn to side with the small people, the hun
gry and the poor. God empowers us to do this by coming to us with love. We do not have to repent first so that God then will love us. God loves us before repentance, and has come to proclaim that love in the Christ whose incarnation we are about to celebrate. Of course we condemn ourselves, as my words just now were self-condemning. Not only do we condemn ourselves individually, we condemn ourselves as a people, feeling the betrayal of the religious foundation of America at some unconscious level and trumpeting a self-righteous me-first patriotism to cover up the feeling. Unrepentant self-condemnation is the ordinary condition of terror with which we live just below the level of consciousness.

God’s love breaks through that. God’s love does not give up. Every year the calendar comes around with Christmas, the Feast of the Incarnation. We don’t have to go to God, because if we did, as unrepentant self-condemners we would not. God comes to us. God fills our lives with love’s grace that overcomes the worst we can do.

The great Christian theme that God turns human expectations upside down puts the bully, the proud, the powerful, and the rich under judgment. This holds for nations as well as individuals. The infant power of the coming Babe exalts the poor, the humble, the common, the hungry, the lowly. The first will be last and the last first.

As servants of the Infant, we Christians have special obligations for our gift-giving gratitude, the other great Christian theme. Of course we gift our families and friends. Of course we gift the poor and needy in our neighborhood and city. Now we can gift those whom our upside down American policy has bullied. What a gift it would be to the Iraqi people if all American dollars for rebuilding their country were contracted to worker-owned Iraqi companies, not foreign ones! What a gift if such companies could be set up with American advisors paid by the American government rather than the companies’ profits! What a gift, and statement of the Infant’s Power, if the economic interests of the United States and its allies were forbidden to profit from the war, and instead the United States could implement reconciliation commissions to bring together the conflicting factions within that country, and between Iraq and its neighbors! Gratitude for God’s love manifest in creation, the evolution of human societies, and our personal and national life, should explode in gifts that manifest God’s turning upside down the expectations of the proud, powerful, and rich. In the divine story of human redemption, the coming of Jesus Christ opens the way for us to be on the right side.

So now let us long for renewed fellowship with the One who gives us power to repent and turn around. Let us call for Christ to come who judges us with truth and blesses us with mercy. Let us go toward Christmas as the celebration of giving, the heart of Christian love. Let us approach the Feast of the Incarnation with a gratitude that can turn our own lives upside down. Come to the table of the Feast to receive the gift of God. Come to the table to meet the Babe, grown, gone, and come again. Come to the table with the procession of Christians from all over the world to receive the Babe. Go from the table to deliver your gifts, which are of God. Amen

posted in Uncategorized on 12.21.2003 at 11:00 am

By Marsh Chapel

One of the great things about Advent, is that you don’t have to figure out whether you are coming or going. On the one hand Advent is the beginning of the liturgical year and looks back to the historical coming of Jesus, a kind of preparation for Christmas. The overwhelming emotion for this sense of Advent is gratitude, gratitude for the birth of the Christ, gratitude expressed in the giving of presents to those whom we love and who are in need. Our Marshian Fellowship next weekend, in cooperation with a high school youth group, will take presents to the children of people who are incarcerated. We all will do special deeds of kindness this next month in gratitude for God’s grace. People will make extra charitable donations between now and Christmas not only because of the tax advantage, for which God be praised, but also because it is the season of sharing out of gratitude. (Please remember Marsh Chapel, you in the radio audience as well as you in the building!) The Thanksgiving celebration this past week has been a liturgically appropriate warm-up for the Advent remembrance of Jesus’ first coming. When we sing carols such as “Hark the Herald Angels Sing” and “It Came upon a Midnight Clear,” we celebrate the commemorative interpretation of Advent, looking back to the first coming of Jesus. The text from Jeremiah is about the promise of that.

On the other hand, Advent looks to the second coming of Jesus, which is the subject of the texts from First Thessalonians and Luke. First Thessalonians begins with the gratitude theme: “How can we thank God enough for you in return for all the joy that we feel before our God because of you?” The apostles preaching the historical Jesus had birthed this wonderful congregation of Gentile Christians. The passage ends with reference to the second coming: “And may he so strengthen your hearts in holiness that you may be blameless before our God and Father at the coming of our Lord Jesus with all his saints.” In the passage from Luke, Jesus was speaking of the coming cataclysmic judgment of the world, not necessarily his own second coming. Nevertheless he was sharply clear that we stand under judgment, that the signs of the times showed his audience that they were ripe for judgment, and that people should live always on the edge, ready to face judgment.

Biblical scholars are rather agreed now that Jesus himself, from what we can find in the New Testament, believed that the end of the age would come within his lifetime, that God would overthrow the powers of injustice and set Jesus up as the messianic ruler over the entire world, established as king in Jerusalem where all the nations would come to acknowledge the God of Israel. One tradition in scripture is that he elevated twelve disciples because there were twelve tribes of Israel that needed special sovereignty. What a shock it must have been when Jesus realized he would be crucified instead, with no angels to save him at the last moment! His cry from the cross, “My God, my God, why have you forsaken me?” was all the more heart-rending in light of his earlier expectation. Amazingly, after he was crucified the disciples did not collapse in shock but met him raised in many places. They spread the word that he would come again soon and bring about a truly world-changing judgment. Paul reflected this belief in 1 Thessalonians when he said that, although a few of the congregation had died before Jesus’ second coming, most of them would still be alive. He wrote in chapter 4, “For this we declare to you by the word of the Lord, that we who are alive, who are left until the coming of the Lord, will by no means precede those who have died. For the Lord himself, with a cry of command, with the archangel’s call and with the sound of God’s trumpet, will descend from heaven, and the dead in Christ will rise first. Then we who are alive, who are left, will be caught up in the clouds together with them to meet the Lord in the air; and so we will be with the Lord for ever.”

Now I don’t know what you think about this marvelous vision of Jesus coming from above to bring his people out of the sinful world that we know. It certainly is a different tradition from the alternative vision Jesus himself seems to have had in which the world we know would be changed and ruled with righteousness. Many Christians today prefer the latter, hoping for divinely enabled liberation and the establishment of a just society. Many others, however, find inspiration in the Left Behind series of science fiction books by Jerry Jenkins and Tim LaHayne. That series picks up on images from the Book of Revelation to depict a titanic struggle between God and the Anti-Christ that ends with a Pauline-like destruction of the world and a heavenly fulfillment for the relatively few righteous people.

Jesus of course did not come back according to Paul’s timeline, and the New Testament writers had to cope with that. The author of 2 Peter held that Jesus would return and destroy the godless, but much later because a day for God is like a thousand years for us. The author of Ephesians and Colossians, as well as John the Evangelist, rethought matters of the end-time to invent what is called a “realized eschatology.” A realized eschatology says that Jesus has already established our right relation with God and that we already have our place with God eternally even though we have to live out our lives within the ambiguities of history. If Paul was the author of Ephesians and Colossians, as the tradition holds, he must have changed his mind when Jesus did not return as expected.

I hold to a realized eschatology myself and believe that we have eternal life within the eternal life of God. Our temporal life that we live a day at a time is only a part, an abstract part, of who we really are and we can expect historical life to keep on going pretty much the way it has, with trials and tribulations, ambiguities and fragmented projects. Our temporal obligation is to live as justly, piously, faithfully, and hopefully as we can. The historical Jesus was received by the first disciples in a way that began the extraordinary Christian movement of people who know how to live their lives in time with their eyes on eternity. Whereas most people think temporal life is all there is, and are alienated from a God who would create them in such a life filled with suffering and death, Christians know that wholeness is only within the eternity of God. Christ’s faithfulness on the cross to commend his soul to God even when he believed God had forsaken him points to that larger reality. Temporal life is transformed as resurrected life when, like Jesus, we live in that faith. We are New Beings in Christ because we live with an orientation to God’s eternal life in which the entire created cosmos lies.

Or are we such New Beings? All the imagery about signs of the end and Jesus’ second coming makes us ask whether we do in fact live with a proper orientation to God. Do we live with charity like God’s fecund creativity, or do we hoard and cheat to make a buck? Do we insist on justice and suffer the consequences of that insistence, or do we temper our righteousness to accommodate the powerful. Do we study to understand, and practice to perfect, our piety before the eternal God, or do we leave holiness for holidays? Do we conform our temporal lives to the joy, humor, and seriousness of God’s eternal, ultimate perspective, or do we look to religion to get out of life more?

Jesus’ warnings about the signs of the end are good ways to think about our temporal lives in light of eternity. If this were our last day, are we ready for judgme
nt? If not, then please attend to what must be done. Our eternal identity is to live out our lives in time, responsibly, and under judgment. God is incarnate in temporal life precisely so that we can live concretely in time for eternity. Jesus’ first Advent was quite sufficient to give us the direction, power, church institutions, and loving friends we need for living life to the full all our days. No suffering exists that we cannot bear, because grace abounds. No justice obliges that we cannot die for, because God’s grace abounds. No creature exists that we cannot love, because grace abounds. No situation is so bad we cannot engage it with faith, because grace abounds. No separation from God can destroy our hope to see our eternal home, because grace abounds. God’s grace is sufficient, and the church proclaims Jesus Christ as the Lord of grace. Jesus came once and changed the world. He comes again every day to measure our temporal life by its eternal standards.

I invite you therefore to enter into Advent by making Jesus’ story part of your life. He was a young man so winsome, the story goes, that people gave up their livings to follow him around. He taught them to be peacemakers, to be non-judgmental and merciful, and to figure out ways to love one another with a divine passion. He told those who would hear to wake up to the fact that their small lives were part of a divine reality, and not to sleepwalk their days. He showed people by innocent parables that they were under judgment for how they love their neighbors and God. Though innocent of wrongdoing he ran afoul big-time politics, according to the story, and was crucified to death as a criminal, a winsome young man racked to gore. Then he rose from the dead in a victory over suffering and death, and the story becomes cosmic. He turned his disciples from distraught losers into apostles of new life. He became for them a deity from heaven, not only a man from Nazareth. His story grew so that he was one with God, as much God as the Father, King of the universe, Creator of the cosmos, Savior of all souls. And yet his story is that he can be your friend and mine as we imagine a way together with him, our confidant, the one who knows us best, who demands honesty, who leads us through despair to more life, our best lover, our winsome beloved. His story is that we can look upon our death as going home to him, a joy that defeats death’s sting. I invite you to tell yourself into Jesus’ story and become a New Being, free, unafraid, a lover of God and God’s creatures. The Church is a way into that story, and I invite you to join your story with those of other Christians as part of Jesus’ life. We do that now by calling for the Christ who came once to come again, now, that we might be in him in eternal living, deniers made penitent, losers made winners, sinners made saints, the corrupt made holy, the dead made live, awake, attuned, engaged, embraced, beloved, lovers.

Amen.

posted in Uncategorized on 11.30.2003 at 11:00 am

By Marsh Chapel

Most of the time we preachers deal with topics that are so mysterious we don’t really know what we are talking about, or that require so much specialized expertise of sorts we lack that we speak in ignorance. Yet we must address those topics in order to remain true to the gospel. Today’s topic is different, however: sin. Sin is no mystery, and I am expert in it. Sin comes up at this moment in the Christian calendar because Advent is only two weeks away and sin is that from which the advent of Jesus Christ is supposed to save us. The text from 1 Samuel was used by Christians to pre-figure the birth of Jesus: Hannah is a bit like Mary, and little Samuel grew up to save Israel. Mary’s song, the Magnificat, in Luke 1 is a self-conscious parallel to Hannah’s song of thanksgiving in 1 Samuel 2, both of which texts are in your bulletin insert. Our text from Mark is an apocalyptic discussion of waiting for Jesus’ second coming, a premature topic when we haven’t considered the first coming yet. Today the word of God is about the human condition and how Jesus stands in relation to that.

Sin is a double offence, outward and inward. Most obviously sin is an offence because of the harm it does to people or things. What to do with this aspect of sin is, first, avoid sinning, second, make amends when you have sinned, and, third, expect to pay an appropriate price for the harm done others, our environment, our institutions, or ourselves. The second kind of offence is that in sinning we make ourselves into sinners, compromising the contributions we might make to the righteousness of the cosmos and putting us before God as deviant from the holiness we should have in gratitude for creation. Whereas the first, outward, aspect of sin is a moral problem, the second aspect is religious, sin against the inward heart. The religious dimension of sin is that it alienates us from the Ground of our Being that gives us a context in which we both are free enough to be responsible and are surrounded by choices in which our obligation is to choose the best option insofar as we can know that.

The religious problem is what to do with the religious offense in sinning. Ancient Israel understood the situation this way. God had laid down on Mt. Sinai an elaborate set of rules for what we would call both moral and cultic or ethnic behavior. The Ten Commandments and many other rules are moral in our sense of the term. Rules about what foods are unclean and should not be eaten, or what kinds of fabric you can combine in a garment, are cultic or ethnic, special practices that distinguished Israel from the surrounding nations. Because Israel was ordained to be a whole nation of priests, according to the covenant with Moses, its very identity depended on keeping the rules of the covenant. Of course, infractions of the covenantal rules were inevitable, and often unintentional. So in addition to prescriptions to pay for the sins where possible respecting the outward offence of sin, the Mosaic covenant established a variety of ritual sacrifices that restore the individual offender and the whole people to a right relation with God. The priests who conduct the sacrifices are the people’s special representatives to God.

This situation is a profound expression of God’s seemingly conflicting traits of righteousness and mercy. On the one hand God sets up the covenantal rules for right living before the righteous divine majesty, thus in effect establishing the ways by which people can become alienated from the divine majesty, sin in the sense of breaking the covenantal conditions. On the other hand God sets up the atoning sacrifices that allow sinners to be returned to right relation with God, restoring Israel to the status of a nation of pure and holy priests who can approach the divine majesty. God is righteously demanding, and yet merciful to sinners.

We sophisticated late-modern people—some of you young folks might even be postmodern—are likely not to be able to take the ancient account of Israel’s covenant at face value. Many people today are unwilling to believe in a God whom they believe sets up rules to trip us and then condescendingly establishes ways to pick us up again. Such an image of God is not only too anthropomorphic, it depicts God as an adolescent. Yet I ask you to think outside the scriptural language for a minute.

We find ourselves in a world filled with things and ways with varying values. Because we are free to choose among different ways to go, we know that some of those ways are destructive of important values and others are productive of them. Some options are better than others. Situations sometimes are so complex that it is hard to tell which are the better choices. Most often, however, we do know what is right and what is wrong. We are obligated to choose the better course precisely because that is the better course to choose: that’s the meaning of obligation. When we do the worse rather than the better, there are two results. The first is that the world is worse off by our choice than it would be had we chosen differently. The second is that we make ourselves into bad choosers. We give ourselves the moral character of being the people who made these wrong choices when we could have made better ones. Rarely is our moral character wholly determined by one choice. It develops over a lifetime of choices, some bad, some good, some important, others trivial, some made with deliberate intent, some with thoughtless inadvertence. Moral character is extremely complex. Yet it is what we make of ourselves through the lifetime of conditions in which we have to live. Although throughout our lives we are connected to other people and environing conditions in many ways, and most of our actions are not ours alone—we act conjointly with others—the one thing for which we have sole responsibility is the building of our own moral character.

Deep in our heart each of us knows that our moral identity is who we are before God, who we are in ultimate perspective. Our moral character in this sense is our religious identity. We know we are responsible for it, and we have a good idea just what our character is. And it is terrifying. In our best moments we rush to do better and make amends for our sins, that is, to deal with the first, outward, offense of sin, the actual harm done. Even if our efforts at amendment are successful, however, the moral character we previously created for ourselves remains, only to be supplemented by new virtue, not erased.

And so we talk fast to persuade ourselves and others that our own moral character is not important. We talk about the causes served and the harms done, calling attention away from ourselves. If circumstances push hard at us we explain ourselves as pawns of the forces of history, as the products of problematic families, as victims of a deprived environment, as participants in a story where others are the powerful agents. The faster we talk the less convincing we are. We can’t stop talking because we know that if we did we would hear the truth. Yet we become anxious because we realize we are in denial. We can’t sit still because of our need to be occupied with busyness that distracts us from the inner life. But as we fall asleep at night or wake in the morning, as our thought-controls loosen, the truth sneaks up on us. It’s like suddenly meeting God the Judge: we are caught naked.

“Where can I go from your spirit? Or where can I flee from your presence?

If I ascend to heaven, you are there; if I make my bed in Sheol, you are there.

If I take the wings of the morning and settle at the farthest limits of the sea,

Even there your hand shall lead me, and your right hand shall hold me fast.

If I say, ‘Surely the darkness shall cover me, and the light around me become

night,’

Even the darkness is not dark to you:

For the night is as bright as the day, for darkness is as light to you. (Psalm 139)

Even though the Psalmist says we cannot escape God in any way, that is good news.

The bad news is that the Psalmist might be wrong. We who rush about too much live in fear that we are empty inside. If we deny ourselves long and hard enough, we can convince ourselves that we have no true self, no moral character at all, that we do not exist as personally responsible people. This is not happy Buddhist emptiness, a cleansing doctrine of no-self. It is an implosion of identity. Although God might be everywhere, we are nowhere. When we turn at last to the inward life, no one is home. Having denied it, we look frantically for our inward life of moral and religious character and it is gone. In ultimate perspective our existence is lost. We are dead before God and ourselves and in horror we know that we will that. This is the seriousness of sin.

With half my heart I wish you all can live in cheery oblivion of sinful offense against the inward life. I hope you approach the world so as to fix it up and suffer only mild pangs of conscience that you don’t allow to accumulate as a moral character. But with the other half of my heart, I wish you can face the truth and attend to the facts of your inward life, for this is what the Christian gospel addresses.

The Letter to the Hebrews, read today and for the last several Sundays, says that Jesus is a High Priest who can offer sacrifices that atone for our sins. Moreover, Jesus himself is the sacrifice, more precious than sheep or bulls, that completely redeems us. Jesus’ sacrifice took place once and for all. Our sins, real as they are, no longer count against our moral character unless we hold on to them.

Now you might not like the sacrifice imagery in Hebrews, which comes from the Old Testament approach to sacrifice. But what it means for the Christian gospel is that we are accepted by God in ultimate perspective. Our moral character, sins included, is acknowledged, registered, and accepted. This is who we are, and who we are is accepted. We do not have to deny ourselves, for even the worst about us is accepted. We should have done better, but still we are accepted. We should do better in the future, but no matter what we do, we are accepted.

If we thought our souls were empty, that was a mistake because they are full of God loving us. If we thought we were dead in the inward parts, that was a mistake because God’s life is there, cradling the intimate faults and virtues of our truest self. If we thought we were lost on the wings of the morning or at the farthest limits of the sea, that was a fault of our vision because, even in our flight from God, God accepts us fugitives. If we thought there was no one home in the dark night of the soul, that was a fault of our vision because God accepts even our will to be nothing. The Psalmist was not wrong: not even nothingness can separate us from the love of God.

Jesus summed up the tension between God’s righteousness and mercy as ever-present creative love, like a father’s, and he taught his disciples to live in love with one another. Jesus’ model of how to live before God as a redeemed sinner changed history. The author of the Letter to the Hebrews symbolized this with the imagery of Jesus as both the Supreme High Priest who can purify us so that we can be taken directly into God, and as the sacrifice itself that makes us clean. Our purification never means denying who and what we really are. We have to be loved for ourselves, or not loved at all, for God knows our inward parts, as the psalmist said: we are who we are in ultimate perspective, and that is accepted into the divine life.

The passage from Hebrews ends, “And let us consider how to provoke one another to love and good deeds, not neglecting to meet together, as is the habit of some, but encouraging one another, and all the more as you see the Day approaching.” As we “see the Day approaching,” which is to say that we think of ourselves in ultimate perspective, I invite you to meet together with those sinners redeemed by Christ, “to provoke one another to love and good deeds.” Enter more fully into the community of friends to find courage for living life with all possible fullness, putting sin in its proper place. Sing with us to sin less in the outward ways of harming the world. Sing with us the freedom of the inward life from sin’s bondage, guilt, denial and death. Sing with us a new life made possible by the New Life in Christ whose advent we are coming to celebrate. Come sing again this song of redemption that accepts us in ultimate love and gives us personal status and eternal life before God. For, when you know redemption’s song deep in your heart, only then can you learn the better song that lovers sing to God, our Beloved. Amen.

posted in Uncategorized on 11.16.2003 at 11:00 am

By Marsh Chapel

Because of the controversies in Vermont and Massachusetts over the legality of gay and lesbian people to marry, or have civil or holy unions, it is imperative for responsible preaching to address the issues and not duck them to avoid controversy. I apologize to those who believe it to be unseemly to discuss topics like this from the pulpit, yet feel obliged to do so because of their deep religious significance and urgency: The Massachusetts Supreme Judicial Council will decide the Commonwealth’s cases momentarily. Today I will conclude a series of four sermons about deep emotional moral conflicts within the Church, and also local society, illustrated with discussions of homosexuality. If you want copies of the previous sermons, they are posted on the Marsh Chapel website, or you can call, write, or email the chapel. Next Sunday I return to lectionary preaching in preparation for Advent.

The wonderful story of Ruth, part of which was read, testifies to the profound loyalty that the Moabite woman Ruth had for her Israelite mother-in-law Naomi after the death of her husband, Naomi’s son. In our texts from Ruth, Naomi tells her daughter in law to get into bed with Boaz so as to seduce him. Boaz, seduced, then acquires a field that belonged to Naomi, and with the purchase of the field he also acquires Ruth as a wife. The point of the story is that the child Ruth has by Boaz will support Naomi in her old age (and will be the ancestor of King David who is thus not a pure Israelite). Marriage is represented as the commercial transaction of buying a wife motivated by sexual attraction; the function of children is as much support of the elders as carrying on the lineage; and the only love in anything like the modern sense is that between the older and younger women who were in-laws through a previous marriage.

With regard to the legitimacy of contemporary gay and lesbian marriages, we need first to ask about that sense in which marriage is a civil union. The civil aspect of marriage does not require love but it does require a contractual agreement to function in society as a couple. In our society, the marriage contract does not treat women as commercial property. The marriage contract does define such things as tax status, rights to insurance, to health benefits, to disposing of estates at death, and to the care of and responsibility for children.

Like heterosexual married people, some gay and lesbian people, though by no means all, want to live together as couples, developing the domestic, economic, social, and legal roles of couples. Some political figures in Massachusetts who now oppose marriage in the full sense for same-sex couples have proposed to legalize civil unions that give such couples the legal benefits of marriage. This is the law now in Vermont. I see no reason whatsoever not to go along with civil unions in this sense. Viewed strictly as a civil contract, marriage makes a couple with roles of economic and domestic rights and responsibilities. If gay and lesbian people want to enter into such a contract there is no reason not to allow it. In fact, to disallow it deprives homosexual people of a legal right to enter into certain contracts solely on the basis of their sexual orientation, which is wholly irrelevant to their ability to observe the contracts, to benefit from them, and to contribute to society in the ways that justify civil marriages for heterosexual people.

For most people today, however, marriage means much more than a civil contract and this colors how they think about the matter of civil unions. Let me attempt to describe this richer reality of marriage in neutral terms. Imagine society, if you will, as composed of a vast ritual dance of interconnecting social roles. I use the phrase “ritual role” in a Confucian sense to mean a general form for interacting with other people and social institutions, like learned stylized steps in a dance. A ritual is a coordination of many such roles in a complicated social dance. A society has rituals within rituals within rituals. Within a society’s system of rituals lies a utilitarian core so that the economic, domestic, justice, military and other necessary functions are satisfied more or less. Yet the rituals are far richer than their utilitarian functions. They convey the emotional and value-oriented elements of civilized culture, providing both meaning for human life and ordered ways by which human aspirations can be cultivated and satisfied. A society’s rituals are dysfunctional when they do not convey the intense satisfactions of civilization, including religious ones.

A ritual role by itself is a kind of abstract form, like the role of being a “student,” which means fitting into general patterns of how to spend the day studying, having certain kinds of friends, dressing within the student dress fashions, living around libraries, dormitories, and the like. Each individual has to individuate the social roles in exactly his or her own way. No one is a student in general, only a student in particular, and many different ways exist for individuating student rituals. Personal identity cannot be defined fully in terms of the abstract ritual dances in which one engages, although that is the way we begin to get acquainted—“What do you do? Where do you live? Tell me about your family.” Full personal identity is the individuation of those ritual roles with one’s own impulses, chemistry, and inward life. In our individuation of social roles we play them more or less well, often very poorly, like D students.

Marriage in our Western society is a very complex ritual dance set among other social rituals. It has all the functional ritual roles outlined in the civil contract of marriage. In addition marriage has at least two more ritual elements. The first has to do with love, something more emphasized in the modern world than in the ancient Hellenistic world. Love begins as children feel themselves loved by parents. With the onset of adolescent hormones, love takes on an intense sexual dimension and marriage ritual includes being sexual partners as well as friends. Love also extends to the care of others the way the ritual says parents should care for children, with care directed in mutuality between the couple, and perhaps to their extended families, and also to the next generation. The next generation might be blood children or adopted ones, or surrogates in a host of other social rituals such as education by which older people care for dependent younger ones. The ritual roles of marriage are intrinsically involved in larger social rituals of care and dependency.

The second ritual element in marriage is that it is a fundamental defining element for personal identity: to be a person as one of a couple is different from being a single person, and this difference can be extremely important, perhaps the most important defining element of identity for many people. The religious importance of personal identity is that it is what we present to God. It is who we are in ultimate perspective.

Remember that I am speaking about the ritual roles, not about their actual individuated performance. In an actual family one or both of one’s biological parents might be missing during the formative years, and whoever functions in the parental roles might be unloving. Love between the partners might be deficient in emotional quality or sexual fulfillment, and people’s better friends might be outside the marriage; similarly a couple might be terrible actual parents for their children. One might individuate one’s personal identity as a married person as a horrible marriage partner—abusive, codependent, emotionally absent, or adulterous. How people individuate the complex of roles defining the
ritual character of marriage might be very different from what the rituals themselves call for in terms of ideal performance. Yet I believe that what I have described so briefly is in fact the cultural definition of marriage in contemporary Western society—a definition based on a ritual dance of roles for social functions, love, and personal identity but understood always to be actualized in ways that individuate the roles in better and worse ways. When people talk about the real meaning of marriage, they mean something like this.

The problem for our rancorous debate about homosexuality is that the way we commonly identify such ritual complexes as marriages is with quick images, paradigm cases or outstanding models. These images are nearly always too one-sided, too selective, to be faithful to the complex social reality. When we think of “captains of industry,” the images that come to mind are usually of men, sexists as we are, not of women despite their prominence now in business. With regard to marriage the image, reinforced in literature, art, and tradition for centuries, is of a man and woman married lovingly to each other, each with parents, grandparents, and an extended family and together having children who in turn will mature and marry. This is the dominant image of marriage in our society. Even when we call to mind the vast complexity of marriage, and the distinction between its ritual roles to be performed and the actual performance of them, our thinking of marriage is focused and filtered through the dominant quick image.

Surely those people who claim to be social conservatives are right that few institutions in our society are as important as marriage, for purposes of domestic social function, the satisfactions of love, and ultimate personal identity. But social conservatives also claim that the heterosexual image of marriage is the only and definitive image of it. They believe that marriage itself, that wonderful ritual complex for human civilization and individual satisfaction, needs to conform to that image. In point of fact, however, same-sex couples can play all the roles that heterosexual people can in marriage. They can fulfill the contractual economic and domestic roles, the ritual connections to their own parents and extended family in learning love and care, the rituals of sexual love and fulfillment, the joining of careers and friendship, growing old together, and caring for the next generation, perhaps even in raising children of their own. No reason exists to believe that gay and lesbian people will individuate these roles more or less well than straight couples. There are winning and losing examples of both. I believe that anyone who can bracket out the short-cut images of marriage and think about its complex of ritual roles would agree that people of same-sex desire and commitment can enter faithfully into those ritual roles just the same as people with other-sex desire.

Of course most people are not going to think of marriage always with the analytical tools of sociology and ritual theory. We usually engage complex social realities by means of our images. Given the facts that about 95% of the population here and around the world is heterosexual, and that heterosexual marriage is far more efficient that homosexual marriage in matters of procreation, the dominance of heterosexual images of marriage is perfectly understandable. So is the passion with which those images are defended: what is under attack, as understood by people whose sole images of marriage are heterosexual, is not the mere image but the complex institution of marriage itself. Gay and lesbian people make up only about 5% of the population, and by no means all of those seek fulfillment in marriage. Very few models or images of same-sex marriages are well-known beyond the gay and lesbian communities. The resistance to same-sex marriage, resistance fueled by very great passion, is a noble defense of the very important social institution of marriage.

But it is misguided, I believe, by its association of the ritual complex of marriage with exclusively heterosexual images. Homosexual images can also be faithful to the complex reality. In time, perhaps not too much time, gay and lesbian couples will be more conspicuous in the community and will be depicted in the media so as to take on iconic functions. For gay and lesbian people to be denied either the legal right to marriage or the social respect of being able to enter into real marriages in the richest sense is unjust. The injustice is based on a confusion of the heterosexual image of marriage with the actual ritual complex of marriage roles that can be played equally well by same-sex couples. Same-sex marriages do indeed threaten the exclusivity of the image of marriage as between a man and a woman. But they do not threaten the reality of heterosexual marriage: the only complement heterosexual ways of individuating the roles of marriage with alternative same-sex ways that are satisfying for people with same-sex desire.

A final point is in order to reflect on the Christian significance of marriage. The Christian gospel is that as God loves us as creatures in our own right, so we should love one another and love God. Jesus taught the ideal of friendship in loving communities as the best context for cultivating love of God and of the others in creation. No evidence exists that he thought of marriage as a particularly good form of loving community, and given the social patterns of dominance and the economic definition of women prevalent in his day, this is understandable. Our own society has developed to the point, however, where marriage, set in the ritual context of family, economy, and cultural life, is a highly prized form of loving community. To be sure it is not for everyone. But for those who seek to find their personal identity as married people it is perhaps the richest kind of community of love in our culture. Therefore, to deprive gay and lesbian people of the opportunity to enter into marriage and have that blessed by the Church is an arbitrary betrayal of the Church’s mission to foster communities of love.

Let us therefore bless those people who fight for the integrity of marriage in all its complexity, praising God for the passion required to sustain it in a consumer society that would sell it for a profitable mess of pottage. Let us bless those people who recognize that the image of heterosexual marriage depicts only one way of individuating the complex ritual character of marriage, a way fulfilling for those with other-sex desire but devastating for those of same-sex desire. Let us bless those people who provide images of marriage individuated in the multiple ways open to gay and lesbian people, and bless those who learn from these new images. Let us bless those who move our social consensus forward with patient but firm conviction to do justice to the gay and lesbian members of our community who are marginalized regarding marriage because our social images are too limited. Let us bless the God who forgives us our mistakes when we remain obdurate in the face of this injustice or when we push so fast as to threaten the social stability within which the precious institution of marriage is meaningful. Let us praise the God who creates from the depths of complexity in the institution of marriage, and yet who makes all things new to bring all his children to life. Like Jesus at the wedding at Cana, we revel in joy for life and love. Praise God! Amen.

posted in Uncategorized on 11.9.2003 at 11:00 am