Sermon (Fr Peay) March 18, 2018

“Sir, we wish to see Jesus.”

            I read somewhere that those words should be inscribed, facing the preacher, in every Christian pulpit. The request those Greeks made of Philip hasn’t left us. People come to churches, talk to spiritual directors, read books, watch television shows, spend time in meditation and lots of money seeking exactly what those seekers from Greece were – they want to see the One who can bring them to peace, make them whole and bring them to union with God. Over the last several weeks we’ve talked about the human condition as seeking and how God responds to it with the covenant and grace. Last time we talked about our first response – conversion. Now the second – communion.

            Those who would see Jesus would know communion. The word communion comes from the Latin word communio, which implies a mutual participation. Webster’s tells us that it is “an act or instance of sharing . . . intimate fellowship or rapport.” You can see where this is going, yes? That communion involves communication and results in community? Another way to talk about this would be to use the language of relationship and of intimacy.

            God gives the promise of a new covenant, and thus a new level of relationship and of intimacy to the prophet Jeremiah. God promises that He will “put my law within them and I will write it on their hearts.”  As a result, the people will know that God is their God and that they are the Lord’s people. Here is the answer to the Psalmist’s cry for a “clean heart” created within him.

Samuel Roberts points out, “The limits of human moral capacity become the beginning of divine provision. Jeremiah portends a realization that the great moral problem of humankind – that is, sin – is not cognitive, but rather concerns the sinful will. As Pascal writes, ‘God wants to motivate the will more than the mind. Absolute clarity would be no more use to the mind and would not help the will.’” It is God’s action that enables us to live in right relationship – this is grace lived out.

            The new covenant implies a new community, which means a new, a transformed way of approaching life. The One who ultimately makes this possible, who incarnates the Divine will to relationship, is Jesus. The early church saw in his life and actions the fulfillment of what Jeremiah had prophesied. That’s why the author of the book of Hebrews – long thought to be Paul, but now we realize we simply don’t know the author’s identity – makes the statement of who Jesus is. Moreover, how the fullness of God’s salvation has been made known through Jesus, the priest in the order of Melchizedek, whose priesthood was without beginning and without end, fulfilled in perfect obedience (deep listening/communion) to the Father.

            Jesus indicates this – and the writer to the Hebrews talks about it – when he says, “Very truly, I tell you, unless a grain of wheat falls into the earth and dies, it remains just a single grain; but if it dies, it bears much fruit.” It is a lesson that has inspired many and brought even many more up completely short. It is one of those hard sayings of Jesus that makes us uncomfortable and places a demand on us that we don’t particularly want to hear. Jesus is telling us that we have to die to self. In fact, he comes right out and says it: “Those who love their life lose it, and those who hate their life in this world will keep it to eternal life.”

            When the seed goes into the ground its hard outer shell slowly gives way and the germ of the plant is able to root and then to grow. As a result a single seed will be far more productive than if it had remained as it was, stuck in its individual shell. Believe it or not, spring is here and soon we will see the fruit of seeds pushing their way up in our gardens. Those of you who plant vegetable gardens know well the wonder of harvesting your own produce. I remember the cherry and the peach trees that we had in our yard when I was a child. There was nothing better than the fruit from those trees, each of which had been planted by my grandfather from a single seed. So it was with the life of Jesus. He was open to receive what the Father had for him. He was willing to take the risk of leaving self behind for the promise of a greater harvest. He planted his life and it continues to bear fruit.

            Several years ago Richard Jeske wrote something in the journal Interpretation which seems particularly apt for the times in which we’re living. He said that Jesus was the highest achiever imaginable, but that he accomplished his highest achievement by remaining open to the Father. He wrote: “The way of recipiency is a difficult way for those who are born achievers – and that means all of us. Not only are we born such, but particularly in our society are we conditioned to think, value, and practice achievement. In our society it is the high achievers who succeed, the high earners who are respected, the haves (not the have-nots) who are our heroes. Our society will always choose competition over cooperation, property rights over personal rights, concentration over distribution, and accumulation over purpose. Our education systems no longer have as their objective education for citizenship but rather education for competitive production in the marketplace. To accumulate more is the basic value lesson our young people are being taught in our society, and as one magazine put it, ‘More is Never Enough.’”

            Given what we’ve read in the papers, heard on television or seen on the internet this rings rather true, doesn’t it? Many sought the more that was never enough and now our country and indeed our world are again teetering. Why? Because self became more important than other; because my good, my desires, my way all became more important than the common good.

            The message of the Gospel stands in the face of this view reminding us, through the life and ministry of Jesus, that there is a different way, a different value, a law written on the heart which will lead us to communion, to union with God.  The new heart promised to Jeremiah is thus open to a level of relationship never-before thought really possible – we become the friends of God.

            One who had experienced suffering herself, Julian of Norwich sees the opportunity for being “oned” or united with God through it. In her Showings or Revelations of Divine Love the suffering Christ is the means by which God identifies with all suffering, human or otherwise. She records:

Here I saw a great unity[oneing]between Christ and us, as I understand it, for when he was in pain we were in pain, and all creatures able to suffer pain suffered with him. . . . And so those who were his friends suffered pain because of love and all creation suffered in general; that is to say, those who did not recognize him suffered because the comfort of all creation failed them, except for God’s powerful, secret preservation of them.[1]

As Kerrie Hide points out, “Furthermore, creation in Christ unites humanity to all creation. This bond is such a great oneing that as Christ experiences the pain of the Passion it reverberates over the entire cosmos.”[2] This, perhaps, is the point Jesus makes at the close of today’s Gospel lesson when he says, “And I, when I am lifted up from the earth, will draw all people to myself.” All suffer and now in Jesus, the “Suffering Servant,” God knows, shares and transforms it. Maybe that’s also why several people want us to remember that the cross is also a ‘plus’ sign as we are joined to God and God to us?

            Our response of communion then, is to open ourselves to God’s invitation to friendship and to intimate union. As we make our response, we’ll discover that we’re able to relate in a new and more open way to the people and even to the world around us. We’ll see each other with a renewed appreciation for the wonder that is the human person. We’ll see the “beauty of the earth” again because we’ll be seeing it as God meant for us to see it.

            Practically, then, take time this week – start today – to spend some time in prayer, open the Bible and spend some time with it and seek to show God’s love in the way you behave toward others. Every day we say the Lord’s Prayer, “forgive us our trespasses, as we forgive our trespassers.” It’s not rocket science; it’s simply living out what we say we believe every day. But if we live this, it will lead us to intimate rapport and to mutual sharing with God and with one another.

            If you would see Jesus, then look inside yourself and then look around. After all, didn’t he tell us that our actions toward others were as though they were done to him? “Whoever serves me must follow me, and where I am, there will my servant be also.” Our response is communion – with God and with one another. Begin today. Begin today.

[1] Julian of Norwich Showings The Long Text in Julian of Norwich Showings

Edmund College, O.S.A. and James Walsh, S.J., translation and introduction

Classics of Western Spirituality (New York: Paulist Press, 1978), p. 210-211.

[2] Kerrie Hide Gifted Origins to Graced Fulfillment: The Soteriology of Julian of Norwich

(Collegeville, MN: Michael Glazier-Liturgical Press, 2001), p. 100.

Sermon (Fr Peay) March 11, 2018

I put the word ‘conversion’ into GOOGLE and got back 128 million hits! The top one  thrilled me, it said: “convert just about anything to anything else.” For a moment there I thought I’d found the religious leader’s magic bullet…if only I could figure out a way to feed my congregation into that converter program! Then I noticed that it was talking about “weights, measures, calculators, converters” and the like. While coming across “covert just about anything to anything else” was oddly appropriate for today and it’s certainly a program, a feature that is designed to make one’s job easier. I’m afraid just not mine and, for that matter, not yours either. You see, all of us Christian types are confronted with the reality of conversion. What the program says it can do – “convert (change) just about anything to anything else” – is what you and I are called to do. We’re called to convert, to change into the people God made us to be.  

            During Lent we’ve looked at the human condition (searching) and God’s response (the covenant and grace). Today we look at our response and our response is – conversion.  So the human response to our condition and God’s offer of covenant and grace is – conversion. Essentially what we have to do is go from being one thing – searching, in the dark, however one wants to describe it – to being something else. In the case of the Christian faith it has a great deal to do with our recovering our created destiny as children of God and then living accordingly. Let me explain a bit.

            What we see in the Numbers reading is a people forgetting the appropriate response. God has offered covenant and grace bringing them out of literal bondage in Egypt and moving them toward the Promised Land. Now they’re out in the wilderness, encountering all sorts of difficulties and what do they immediately start to do – complain? I love the Yiddish word for complain, it’s KVETCH. Doesn’t it sound like complaining? They KVETCHED! When they were starving, God sent them “bread from heaven” (manna, which in Hebrew means “what is it?”). God even sent them quails and brought water from a rock. The people complain and complain – it becomes a pattern in the Hebrew Scriptures (one that we sometimes replicate, I’m afraid, but that’s grist for another sermon’s mill!) – and God does something to get their attention because they’re too busy kvetching.

            The real theological point in this passage is that Moses wants the people to believe God, this is, to TRUST God. Moses isn’t interested in getting the people to assent to some doctrine about God. Rather, he wants the people to move on, to continue their pilgrimage and thus to achieve their destiny because they trust that God will keep the Divine promises. They don’t and that’s why those snakes – the word for the poisonous snakes here is seraph, which literally means ‘fiery’ – appear.

            After encountering the snakes, the people come to their senses, approach Moses and say: “We have sinned by speaking against the Lord and against you; pray to the Lord to take away the serpents from us.” Moses prays and God instructs him to make a bronze serpent, mount it on a pole and by looking at it the people will be healed. Snakes were not always thought to be icky; they were originally identified with healing in ancient culture. The god Asclepius’ staff had a single twisted serpent, and the symbol for medical profession today, the caduceus, continues the tradition.

What we see here is an example of the flight from God, what the church Fathers called aversio a Deo, which marks the Biblical narrative from the Fall of Adam and Eve to the call of Abram and which keeps repeating itself in the story of Abram’s offspring: Israel. Here, as elsewhere the movement away from God becomes a turning toward God, a conversio ad Deum. As the people look to the serpent and heed the call in faith, they begin to trust God. They repent – they turn away from their former action – and move toward God. And here the snake becomes the symbol of healing in the same way that the victim lamb becomes the symbol of God’s passing over and in the same way that the Christ will be raised on the cross so that a symbol of torture and death becomes a symbol of hope and life and forgiveness. This is part of the conversion.

 What is important for us to understand, however, is that we come to grace through faith. The people could have chosen to stay home in Egypt or to have gone back to it. It was only when they opened up to the gift of faith were they able to act upon grace. That's where we Christians get into trouble. We think that 'faith' and 'belief' are the same thing -- they're not. 'Believing' is something we can do purely through the strength of our own will and intellect. Belief can lead people to do some horrible things because they "believed" they were right. One can say that he or she 'believes' in God and still have no evidence of it in his or her life. The Israelites believed they were right to complain and distrust this God who may have freed them from bondage, but then had called them to walk a perilous road. My mother had an expression about being “snake-bit” when discovering the obvious, the Israelites needed a snake-bit experience to get them to move from belief to faith.

Nicodemus 'knew' -- 'believed' -- that Jesus "came from God," but he couldn't act on what he believed. He still had too many questions that weighed him down: "How can anyone be born after having grown old? Can one enter a second time into the mother's womb and be born?" His sense of what was right, what he believed about the nature of the world got into the way of what God wanted to do for him in Jesus Christ. In fact, that's the case with most of us. We constantly want to make things more 'manageable,' more 'believable' so we set up all sorts of systems of belief to guarantee what we believe, what we know. We find ourselves outside the experience of grace; and the next thing we’re doing is substituting legalism – if I just do these things, follow these rules I’ll be ok – but legalism is no substitute, nor is magic. Looking on the snake wasn’t magic. Unfortunately some people even reduce faith to magic. Do you know where the word hocus pocus’ comes from? From the fact that most of the people going to Mass could hear was the priest mumbling. ‘Hoc est corpus meum;” which they heard was “hocus pocus.”  The next thing you know, there was Jesus in the sacrament and the people thought it was magic – but it isn’t. The people were healed when they looked at the seraph because of their trust, not just because they looked – and that’s the point.

Moses believed that God had called him to lead Israel out of bondage but he didn't let it go at that. This is how the whole notion of "salvation by grace through faith" works. It's not enough to just say, "I believe" and there's an end to it. When Moses heard the call of God, he acted upon it. He may have been reluctant, made an excuse or two and tried to get out of the job more than once, but still he went to Pharaoh, did what God commanded and led the people in their journey to the Promised Land.

One of my strong convictions, you see, is that right belief -- orthodoxy -- gives birth to right actions -- orthopraxy. Orthodoxy without orthopraxy is dead, cold, lifeless. I think that's why so many people have trouble with the Christian faith . . . no, I think that's why they have trouble with the way the faith is practiced – or not practiced. Too many of us, 'believers,' aren't living what we're supposed to be about. We forget that God calls us into covenant relationship, which means we have a part to play too. If we’ve been through a conversion, if we’re being born again, then it is supposed to show in the way we live – concretely, in the way that we talk, act, conduct our business, raise our families. Being born again isn’t a tick-off point on the to-do list of life – it’s not on “The Bucket List” --  it’s a way of life; at least it is when we’ve made our response to God -- conversion.

Nicodemus wondered how one could be "born again" and Jesus told him that it came from "water and the Spirit." Nicodemus "knew" but he couldn't act on it until God in Christ had revealed the truth that it's not what we do, but what God does in us and enables us to do that matters. You see that is the whole point of Paul saying that we have nothing to boast about. Salvation, then, is more a process of growth and change than a simple moment of crisis. Salvation is our entering into the covenant relationship and then living as God would have us live, and modeled for us in Jesus Christ. John von Rohr summarizes the teaching of the great Puritan spiritual writer Richard Baxter on this issue in The Covenant of Grace in Puritan Thought:

However, in this lifelong process under the care of God's covenant there must be a faithful covenant-keeping in order to reach the promised goal. A dead faith, Baxter knew, does not justify; it must live through its works. So he could write: 'Our first faith is our Contract with Christ. . . . [But] all Contracts of such nature, do impose a necessity of performing what we consent to and promise, in order to [receive] the benefits. . . .Covenant-making may admit you, but it's the Covenant-keeping that must continue you in your privileges.' Thus, he added, 'Faith, Repentance, Love, Thankfulness, sincere Obedience, together with final Perseverance, do make up the Condition of our final Absolution in Judgement, and our eternal Glorification.'

            Graham Standish, Presbyterian minister and spiritual writer, tells the story about an old man “who, while admiring the beautiful view off the edge of a cliff, stumbles and falls. Hurtling downward into the abyss, he flails with his arms, trying to grab at anything that might protect him from his certain death. With the ground rushing upward to meet him in a violent end, he manages to grab hold of a branch sticking out of a cliff wall. There he hangs, unable to save himself. The top is 100 feet up, while the bottom is 100 feet down.

            He had never been a religious man, but with no one else to help him he begins to shout out into the canyon: ‘God! Are you out there? Help me! If you help me, I’ll do anything you ask!’ He hears only the sound of the wind swirling along the cliff wall. ‘God! You are the only one who can help me. Save me, and I’ll do whatever you want.’ Again, he hears nothing but silence. Just as he’s about to give up all hope, he hears a booming, thundering voice echo through the canyon. ‘Sure, sure that’s what they all say.’ ‘God? Is that you? I mean it, I’ll do anything you ask!’ ‘Are you sure you want me to save you?’ asks God. ‘Yes, I’ll do anything.’ ‘Anything?’ ‘Anything!’

            Again, the man hears nothing but silence. Then he hears God say, ‘Okay, I’ll save you, but you must do exactly what I say.’ ‘Of course. You know I’ll do it. I’ll become a Christian. I’ll help the poor. I’ll go to church every Sunday.’ God says, ‘Here’s what I want you to do. Let go of the branch. If you let go of the branch, I’ll save you.’

            The man thinks for a while. Then he looks up and shouts, ‘Is anybody else out there?’”[1]

When it comes to conversion – real conversion – most folks are  the man hanging on to the tree limb. We want to be “good Christians,” we’ll promise God anything, we want to be “religious,” we just don’t want to change – not ourselves, our attitudes, nothing. We want to keep on being what we are and living how we live, but that’s not what God calls us to do or how God calls us to be.

Henry Blackaby, a Baptist minister and writer on faith, says that if we are going to follow God it means that there will be profound change, which will entail a crisis, a crisis of faith and action. He says: “’God’s invitation for you to work with God always leads you to a crisis of belief that requires faith and action. You must make major adjustments in your life to join God in what God is doing.’ Blackaby is saying that if we walk the narrow path that God sets before us, it will require, first, that we grapple with our faith and with making it concrete in our lives. We will have doubts. We will be unsure. We will feel lost, and we will not be certain at times if what we are doing is truly what God wants. Our only option will be to keep going and to trust God.”[2]

It’s about trust. Conversion – “from anything to anything” – begins with trust. We acknowledge our condition. We acknowledge God’s response of covenant and grace and then we respond, by trusting that God will walk with us, will heal us, will give us what we need to be “born again” and that God will help us to live as children of light. Conversion implies that at the end of the process we’re different, that we’ve changed. Conversion begins when grace is activated through faith, but conversion is the process of a lifetime. It’s got to start somewhere, but it takes a lifetime. The joy is it’s grace, God is with us.

[1] From Discovering the Narrow Path, p. 13

[2] Standish, p. 13-14.

Sermon (Fr Cunningham) March 18, 2018

In some ways the Gospels are presented as a mystery.  This is, of course, not your average whodunit, even though there is a murder.  With your average mystery novel or television mystery the question from the outset is: who did it?  That is: was it Colonel Mustard in the parlor with a candlestick?  And while, as I stated, the Gospels all contain a murder, the question is not who did it or even why they did it, but rather the question centers around who Jesus is.  Is he the Son of God or is he just some regular guy with delusions of grandeur?  The Gospels all answer this question in one way, which is that Jesus is the Son of God, but they also all show the other side; meaning that in the Gospels you have two different narratives.  Those who say Jesus is not the Son of God are often given the blanket description of the Scribes and the Pharisees.  This group, to one degree or another, believes that Jesus is a fraud.  Or put another way that Jesus is very mortal and that any actions he does that are Messiah-like are either delusional at best or are attributable to a darker power at worst.  On the other side of this mystery, we have another group which includes Jesus himself, who posit that Jesus is much more than what his detractors say and that who he is and what he does is something which comes from God.  Or to quote St. Peter, this side believes that Jesus is the Messiah, the son of the living God.  And as we get closer to Easter the drama of the Gospel narrative is getting us closer to the answer of whom Jesus is.  And today’s readings are making the case for this second answer-that Jesus is the one true Messiah.  But so what?  What does it really matter on which side someone comes down as to who Jesus is?  Well, it matters a whole lot.  So today while I want to look at this question and the two possible answers, I also want to personalize it a little and ask how the way in which we see Jesus affects us and the way in which we live. 

C. S. Lewis once wrote that, “Christianity, if false, is of no importance, and if true, of infinite importance, the only thing it cannot be is moderately important.”  And so the question for us is if we believe the answer to the question is that if Jesus is truly the Messiah, then Christianity must be infinitely important, but are we living that way?  Does it infuse everything we do or are we living like it is moderately important – sometimes affecting what we do and other times being forgotten about?

Honestly, though, if we think about it allowing Jesus to be infinitely important at times, but not at others, really makes no sense.  And the reason it does not make sense is because it means that we view the world in two different and contradictory ways.  And those two ways are either bottom up or top down.  And let me issue a bit of a caveat and say that I know what follows is a bit of an over generalization, but I believe it is sufficient for our discussion.  A bottom up view of the cosmos basically posits that the universe is here, it started somehow and the highest form of intelligence as far as we know is mankind.  Someday Mr. Spock might show up or dolphins might mutate and become our sea-mammal overlords, but right now we are all there is.  The other side, which is the Judea-Christian view, is that there was nothing, God created something, which includes us and part of us is that we are created in the image of God.  As a result we have some knowledge of Him and how he meant for things to be.  So to summarize one side says that there is nothing higher than us and the other says there is nothing higher than God. 

Now depending where you want to put the starting point we have been living in a man-centered era for somewhere between 130 and 400 years.  And while the exact date of its beginning is not that important, what is important is to see where it all ends up.  What happens when a society has largely answered the question by saying that mankind is really the most important thing in the cosmos and that Jesus is of little importance?

To make this more clear let’s go back and talk about the Scribes and Pharisees who insisted that Jesus was not from God which will be as fun as it sounds.  Now, of course we know that they were wrong, but we should not necessarily impugn their motivation.  They felt that they were protectors of Judaism and as protectors they could not just allow anyone to come and have revelations.  If they did they would soon find themselves with hundred, if not thousands of would be messiahs going in different directions.   They believed that there was an order to the universe and it had been revealed to the Jewish people and anyone altering such a view was doing it from a human centered point of view and this could not be tolerated.  I was an English major, so you have to pardon me when I occasionally bring in references to poetry, but in W.B Yeats’ The Second Coming we hear his terrifying vision of a world where everyone can choose their own revelation.  He writes, “Things fall apart; the center cannot hold; Mere anarchy is loosed upon the world.”  In a man centered world things do ultimately fall apart since there is no center, because everyone is a center.

            We look at the world these days and are often frustrated and a large part of that frustration is the bitter divisions that exist, but I would have to add that we really should not be surprised.  If man has been exalted to the highest form of being in the cosmos then why wouldn’t there be factions?  Because after all the question becomes which man is it that you are supposed to be following.  There are a lot of them, something like seven billion the last time I checked.  The economist Edgar Fiedler once said, “Ask five economists and you'll get five different answers - six if one went to Harvard.”  That is pretty much how humans are.  We have lots of opinions about the ways in which things are supposed to work.  And in some ways that is not a terrible thing, except if you forget to put God first.  We can have squabbles about what we should put on our pizza or color of your new countertops but not when it comes to who brings order to the universe.  Humanity is simply not equipped to take on this much responsibility.  I don’t want to get off on too much of a tangent, but have you ever noticed how many utopian projects that begin centered on a man or an idea that a man has cooked up end in bloodshed.  It happened on large scales like The Soviet Union or Cambodia and on smaller scales like Jonestown or the Manson Family.  But let’s get off this and get back to Jesus.

            We are getting very close to Easter and getting to the answer of who Jesus is.  And the thing with all of this is we have to decide if we are going to put Christ above everything. Jesus puts it rather clearly today when he states, “Those who love their life lose it, and those who hate their life in this world will keep it for eternal life. Whoever serves me must follow me, and where I am, there will my servant be also. Whoever serves me, the Father will honor.”  And so the question that comes to us is are we willing to lose our life for the sake of Jesus? Are we willing to submit our wills to his perfect will?  Are we willing to make Jesus of infinite importance?  Too often we treat Jesus as Lord when it is convenient, but that is not what Jesus says to us today.  We are to lose our life; that is to have it totally consumed by him.  

            Sometimes in all of the squabbles and troubles of this life we forget to put Jesus first – to serve and to follow him.  It is infinitely important and not something we do when we are in the mood.  The world is arranged from the top down and Jesus is our link to the God who has ordered all.  We must submit ourselves to him freely and fully so that we may be his both now and forevermore.