Sermon (Fr. Peay) April 22, 2018

St, John Chrysostom Episcopal Church - Delafield, Wisconsin

Fourth Sunday of Easter – April 22, 2018

V. Rev. Steven A. Peay, Ph.D.

[Texts: Acts 4:5-12/Psalm 23/1John 3:16-24 /John 10:11-18]

            "The Lord is my shepherd, I shall not want." Those are touching and familiar words, but also rather unfamiliar in other ways. How many of you have had any direct interaction with sheep or shepherds lately? – I thought not. Because I know that I haven’t. It’s almost like something I read from a British clergy magazine, “Two sheep were standing in a field. ‘Baaa,’ said one. ‘Bother,’ said the other one. ‘I was going to say that!’”  Two years ago Julie and I went to Ireland; there we saw flocks and flocks of sheep as we traveled around the wondrously green countryside. Little lambs gamboled about and one got the picture of a truly pastoral landscape. Oddly enough, on this "Good Shepherd Sunday,” I can’t think of a flock anywhere close.

Today we have to go to the zoo or way out into the countryside to see sheep, yet so much of the imagery we have for our faith is based on this pastoral, sheep and shepherd thing. I am the pastor – the shepherd (well, I’m more like the sheep dog) and you’re the flock, but we don’t know what that really means. Do we? Sheep, shepherds and suburbia simply don’t seem to mix.

            It would have been different in the time of Jesus. Certainly both the Old and New Testaments draw on the imagery of sheep and of shepherds. So when David wrote the Psalm, when Jesus spoke his words, sheep were everywhere.  While most often it was the king, like David, who would be seen as shepherd in the ancient near East, Israel developed a different motif. For Israel it is the living God who is the shepherd, as the familiar words of Psalm 23 remind us. It was out of that pastoral culture that Israel began to understand its relationship as a people to God.

            A shepherd cared for the flock and held the lives of its members in his hands. Thus, the Psalmist isn't merely playing with a romantic notion. This Psalm unfolds against the threat of want, of "shadow of death," and of the presence of enemies. Yet, God's provident care and embracing love allow the flock to be gathered in safety and to live in peace.  So the flock becomes an apt metaphor for the Church. We are a community gathered around the Good Shepherd. One of the titles for clergy is 'pastor,' but there is really only one Shepherd.  I would suppose pastors are more like sheep dogs than shepherds; our task is to run around – sometimes barking a bit – trying to get the flock closer and closer to the Shepherd.

John's Gospel has the Good Shepherd giving us the description of how he relates to his sheep. He doesn’t approach them as a hired hand, as someone who only sees this as a job, but as one who profoundly loves and cares for the sheep. The shepherd, unlike the hired hand, sees his welfare intimately tied-up with that of the sheep. The sheep come to know the shepherd, trust him and follow him, because they have come to know his voice and his care. The relationship of the faith community – the church – to Jesus is like that of the sheep to the shepherd. Jesus says that the sheep hear and then follow. The community of the Good Shepherd, then, is a listening community. We seek to hear the Lord speaking to us with the ears of our hearts. His Word of life and love takes hold of us so that we then follow after him, become his disciples, trying to live out the word that we have heard.

All sorts of voices will compete with that of the Shepherd. These voices will seek to draw us away from the path of life and love to follow one of narrow self-interest and selfish behaviors. These voices will exhort us to distrust people who appear different from us and exclude those whose beliefs, or thoughts, or ways don't match ours. If we are to follow as we must, then we need to keep our ears attuned to the Shepherd's clear tones. We do that by offering worship, listening to and studying the Scriptures, meditating on them, and by prayer – in common and in private. Out of our hearing will come our following, because we will want to conform our lives to that of the Shepherd.

Thus the sheep hear and follow while the Shepherd knows and gives life. He knows us because he has become one of us and has shared our life. Even when we may turn away and seem changed from what we were, still he knows us and cares for us. That's why Peter in Matthew's Gospel would say, "Lord to whom shall we go? You have the Words of eternal life." The life giving Word Jesus speaks tells us of God's love for us, of our worth, and of our potential to be whole. He modeled that Word for us on the cross showing us the path of unselfishness. Each of us, then, is called to come to life, to renewal in the Risen Christ, the Good Shepherd. The life Jesus offers us is to be one with the Godhead. He prayed in John 17:22 "So that they may be one, as we are one."  Now he speaks of “one flock, one shepherd.” The fullness of life for us is found in community with God and with one another. We are a flock gathered around the Shepherd, so we need one another.

Our community, the flock, is to be a place of unity, of peace, of all-embracing love, and life-giving acceptance. It's unfortunate that all too often churches don't look like churches because they've been deformed or injured by selfishness, agendas, or lack of true love. The buildings may be there, but the community isn't, it's just a group of individuals, not a flock.  I think Gordon Lathrop offers an apt description of the flock in his book Holy People: A Liturgical Ecclesiology:

The church is an assembly. The church is a gathering of people in a particular place who are, together, through concrete means, participating in the mystery of Christ and so are being formed into the holy assembly. The church is not a collection of consuming individuals, choosing religious goods according to their own self-perceived needs or desires. It is not a club supporting a particular ideology. It is not the audience for a speaker's eloquence, a choir's concert, or a priest's rituals. The local church-assembly is itself, as gathering, the primary symbol. By its participation, by its communal mode of song and prayer around Scripture reading, meal keeping, and bathing, it is being transformed into a primary witness to the identity of God and the identity of the world before God.  [p.49]

If, as Lathrop says, we speak forth the very identity of God in the world, then we are to be a people of real love and real care.

            How do we achieve this? I think the readings from the Acts and John’s first epistle give us glimpses. Peter and the apostles are hauled before the authorities because they’ve done a good deed in Jesus’ name – they healed a man. Now they testify to the healing power of Jesus’ love, even in the face of opposition and persecution. We’re to be like that, doing good, being instruments of God’s healing love, even when it’s not convenient. The essence of God's love for his world goes out through us, in the words we speak, in the things we do, even in the thoughts we think.

            A shepherd – a good shepherd – was willing to risk everything for the sheep. That’s what John tells us Jesus did, and because he laid down his life for us, we’re to lay down our lives for each other. John’s epistle challenges us. John isn’t interested in what we say we believe. John isn’t interested in how we think on any level. John is interested in how we act. So, he says, “Little children, let us love, not in word or speech, but in truth and action. And by this we will know that we are from the truth…” 

            To be in the community of the Good Shepherd is to be placed irrevocably in God's hand. We are brought into this community through Christ's identification with us. How, though, can we know that? By listening for the Shepherds voice, hearing him call our names, knowing us, and our needs. Listen and you will hear that you are called to the table. Come, eat and drink. Through simple signs of bread broken and cup poured we will hear his voice. Here then is the table prepared and the overflowing cup. It happens here in a community gathered in worship, around Word and Sacrament. It continues and grows as we leave this place and live lives guided by the Good Shepherd showing our faith by the way we live in the here and now.

            So, here we are sheep, with a Good Shepherd, in suburbia – who would have thought it possible. And dear ones, fellow sheep, healthy flocks grow. Flocks that are well-tended, loved and cared for, produce. It is that way with churches, as well. The difference is that the Shepherd is ALWAYS tending, it's the flock that neglects to receive the care. We can only grow and prosper as we place ourselves in the hands of the Good Shepherd.

            I believe that this flock is ready to work to be healthy. All around me I see signs in the desire for spiritual growth and the offering of loving service. My job as your interim is to help you get there, and your vestry folk and I are going to work on this. Together let's continue to listen for the voice of the Shepherd as he speaks to our hearts and through each other. Together let's follow in loving service, giving of ourselves as the Shepherd did who says, "I lay down my life for the sheep." If we hear and follow, we will be known and given life, especially as we let our following bear fruit in loving and unselfish deeds in everyday life. The Lord IS our Shepherd and we are his flock, his community.

Sermon (Fr Peay) April 15, 2018

St John Chrysostom Episcopal Church – Delafield, Wisconsin

Third Sunday of Easter – April 15, 2018

V. Rev. Steven A. Peay, Ph.D.

[texts: Acts 3:12-19/1 John 3:1-7/Luke 24:36b-48]

"Why are you frightened, and why do doubts arise in your hearts?" Jesus' question to the apostles, hiding in the upper room, is also asked to every assembly of Christian believers. That question confronts us this morning as, like the disciples, we are "in our joy disbelieving." We want to believe, we want to accept, but the doubts continue to bother us. How can the message of Christian faith possibly be true? How can someone rise from the dead? How can a human being become a child of God?

I don't believe that doubting is wrong. Rather, I am an advocate for doubt. All of us have heard the phrase from Descartes, "Cogito, ergo sum." "I think, therefore I am." That may be the most famous, but I don't think it's his most accurate proof. His most accurate proof was, "Dubito, ergo sum." "I doubt, therefore I am." Because his understanding was that one cannot doubt that one is doubting. You see that you have to exist as the doubter, you can't doubt that you are doubting. You can doubt everything, except doubt you're doubting. Dubito, ergo sum -- no doubt about it.

Doubt, then, sets the parameters for faith. As there can be no reason without doubt, neither can there be faith without doubt. Faith rises out of doubt. Faith when first learned deals only with certainties. These are the things that our parents, our teachers, our heroes have explained to us. But the situation changes as we grow older. I like what the theologian Romano Guardini has written. He says, "Belief in the living God, the Creator and Father, means really belief in him as he is in himself." But in the mind of everyone, as I have said, faith is associated with some kind of mental image. For the child that image is first of all his/her own father, only raised to a mysterious greatness or to some other person especially revered or who represents majestic authority. As the child develops, that early image no longer fits in with newly found ways of thinking and feeling. The natural loosening of the ties between child and parents and opposition to the authorities in one's childish world have an effect. Hence, the young person's belief in God begins to waver. Now, is that wavering necessarily bad? No.

Doubt simply signals a change in the relationships and perceptions that we have. We need to learn to understand the difference between revealed truth and our own certainties. Like when we found out the real truth about Santa Claus or the tooth fairy, we begin to realize that reality can live in larger constructs. So that we can very well say, "Yes Virginia, there is a Santa Claus" because the spirit of giving is more than just the personification of giving. So here we come to see that maybe we've constructed a vision of God that is not the same as divine revelation. "Why are you frightened, and why do doubts arise in your hearts?"

Doubt, a healthy skepticism, allows for real faith. Coming to know who God is in himself means to develop. This is what the great existentialist philosopher Karl Jaspers exposed in his classic Philosophical Faith and Revelation. There he raises the point that creeds, statements of faith, had once served a purpose as defining or explaining how believers related. However, when these statements became absolutes, here's the truth and there is no other, they can then become fatal to relationship. If we think that we possess all of the truth, if we have no questions, then we don't need to communicate anymore. We don't need to ask questions. We don't need to be open to questions. We become closed. Thus, the I-Thou relationship that is central to coming to know God, as the Transcendent came to make contact with the finite, is cut off. We're stuck in our own little world which we've made too small.

Peter Berger, who was a sociologist of knowledge as well as of religion, took this notion a step further. He says that there is a heretical imperative. The Greek word herein means an opinion or choice, so the heretic makes choices of what to believe from the whole body of the tradition. Berger says, given the wide spectrum of choices that are available in our pluralistic society, coming to the heretical imperative is absolutely necessary if we are to affirm faith in God. Berger wants to affirm the human as the starting point for theological reflection and to reassert the sacredness and the supernatural character of religious experience. So relationship with the Other is what enables us to deal with present reality and future uncertainty.

Relating to a God who see us as not some object, but as a subject, as one who is able to relate, affirms our own dignity as human beings. It says that there is something worthwhile in us and in the world around us. This is why I am convinced that God spoke his Word into flesh in Jesus Christ. As John writes, "See what love the Father has given us, that we be called children of God." Jesus is the one, who by his incarnation, passion, death, and resurrection, fully embraced humanity and brought it into God's life. In him we see how God wishes us to relate and how we are to respond. So our present status as God's children and our future hope of the full revelation of God's mind to us has real, profound ethical meaning for the present. We are called to truly become children of God, living after the manner of Jesus in the way we approach each other. We are to respond to God's invitation to be his children and to live after his image and likeness, restored in us through faith in Jesus Christ.

Our response need not be irrational. Faith is not antithetical to reason. Thomas Aquinas would talk of grace building on nature and how God can speak to the human intellect in such a way as to begin the process of redemption. In other words, from our doubt, through our reason we can come to relate to God. We often wonder how this can happen, especially in face of the claims of the resurrection. However, in the words and acts of Jesus we find that the risen Lord is no phantom or figment. In Luke's Gospel Jesus teaches us that death and resurrection are not escapes or excuses for not living in a responsible or reasonable manner. One commentator cited George Bernard Shaw, who -- in true Irish tradition -- was a great skeptic, as saying that he could imagine no fate more horrible than remaining himself forever. "The good news of the story of the resurrection is that there is a genuine transformation of the self, but it is not a change into a dreamy fantastic state that would be so totally different as to be completely discontinuous with the lives we have lived as real human beings. Resurrection life is God's own mystery, but we hope for it as life continuous with but different from the one we now know." This resurrected life begins here and now in the way we approach life every day and it produces joy in the heart.

The joy which marks a child of God is not giddiness. Nor is it foolish. Rather, the joy which comes of realizing who one really is, that God is our truly our father and not simply our progenitor, gives a sense of well-being and of peace. It allows us to respond to the world around us differently; not with harsh words or narrowed vision, but with genuine kindness and concern. In difficult times and in the face of things which seem to make no sense we can begin to see God at work, seeking to relate, seeking to love, seeking to care for us.

I encourage you, as children of God, to embrace doubt. Don't reject doubt, embrace it. Question, ponder, think and as you do God will reveal himself. Perhaps not as we'd like or as we'd thought, but he'll be there. God's presence will be as real in that moment as it is right now in the midst of this gathered people. God's presence will be as tangible in that moment as it will be in the bread and cup to be shared among us.

If Jesus had not asked those apostles about their fear and doubt they would never have known the joy, even in their disbelieving. If they hadn't questioned, Jesus could not have affirmed them and that they were now heirs with him of the Father's love. There would be no faith if there was no doubt. Creeds wouldn't have been written if someone would not have challenged. Faith comes only after doubt. If we've never doubted, we never believed. To be a child of God is to have the freedom to doubt, to come to faith, to have joy in living. To be a child of God is a great gift -- no doubt about it!

Sermon (Fr Peay) April 8, 2018

St. John Chrysostom Episcopal Church – Delafield, Wisconsin

2nd Sunday of Easter/April 8, 2018

V. Rev. Steven A. Peay, Ph.D.

[texts: Acts 5:27-32/John 20:19‑31]

"Seeing is believing." This common sense commonplace is fairly straightforward. If you can't see it, can't verify it through your own experience, it isn't real, isn't believable. I'm sure that many folks would say that "doubting" Thomas should be the patron saint of scientists. Didn't he have the researcher's mind as he looked for the evidence to corroborate the other Apostles' assertion, "We have seen the Lord"? Sure, he had seen Jesus bring Lazarus back from the dead, but this was different. Thomas had seen Jesus on the cross. He had seen the nails and the spear do their work. He had seen the stone seal the entrance to the tomb. For Thomas to find this hypothesis credible there would have to be a lot of hard evidence ‑‑ nail prints and spear wound touched and probed ‑‑ before he could believe.

To be honest, Thomas wasn't much of a scientist. While science ‑‑ and I should remind us all that scientia, knowledge, or its pursuit, is the proper description for more than just the physical or experimental disciplines ‑‑ involves facts, evidence, and proof, it also requires belief. A true scientist believes in what she or he is about. Thomas Kuhn changed the way scientists looked at their field when he introduced the concept of the ‘paradigm shift’ in his Structures of Scientific Revolutions. Kuhn, however, ultimately framed his description of paradigmatic shifts in religious language: faith, belief, conversion. One has to have faith in the paradigm, believe in the work undertaken, and/or be converted to a new way of perceiving what one sees. Thomas, it seems to me, would have benefited from meeting his twentieth century namesake.

When I was in high school we watched a film on the circulatory system, "Hemo the Magnificent." Something from that film has always stuck with me. At the very end of this rather fine documentary on research into how our life's blood works there was a reflective section on the task of the researcher. They quoted Max Planck – the father of quantum physics – who said: Anybody who has been seriously engaged in scientific work of any kind realizes that over the entrance to the gates of the temple of science are written the words: Ye must have faith. It is a quality which the scientist cannot dispense with.

[Where Is Science Going? (1932)] And then they quoted Paul to Timothy, "Prove ye all things to see if they are of God."

You see, a believer isn't a Polyanna, a naif. Frankly, I distrust those who blithely wish to discount the value of the intellect and reason. My studies of the Christian faith have led me to believe because of the keen intellects who have been witnesses to the wonder of God's work among us in Jesus Christ. Scholars like Anselm of Canterbury who uttered what I have taken as my own motto: Fides quaerens intellectum (faith seeks understanding) or “America’s theologian” Jonathan Edwards, who saw God's beauty not only in the Word, but in his studies of biology and botany as well. Christians stand in a marvelous intellectual tradition, as Anselm said, "I believe in order to understand" (credo ut intelligam); to that I say 'Amen.'

Thomas got his chance when Jesus again appeared in the locked upper room, spoke his calming words, "Peace be with you." And then he took the 'Thomas challenge,' saying to him, "Put your finger here and see my hands. Reach out your hand and put it in my side. Do not doubt but believe."  He saw and he believed, but Jesus had more to say, "Have you believed because you have seen me? Blessed are those who have not seen and yet come to believe." Those words, that blessing is for us ‑‑ for you and for me.

Peter declared the core of the Christian proclamation, the essence of our story, when he stood before the council, just as he had before his fellow Israelites in Acts chapter two. He preached that God raised Jesus up from death, "because it was impossible for him to be held in its power." John Chrysostom in his Easter homily speaks of how death thought it had gotten hold of just another poor mortal and found itself facing God‑in‑the‑flesh and was overcome. Peter and the other witnesses to the resurrection were brought beyond their own limited understanding of life and death; through Christ they were brought into the presence of the author of life and death. The beauty of Peter's proclamation is realized in his first letter, "Although you have not seen him, you love him; and even though you do not see him now, you believe in him and rejoice with an indescribable and glorious joy, for you are receiving the outcome of your faith, the salvation of your souls" (1 Peter 1:8-9). As Jesus said to Thomas, "Blessed are those who have not seen and yet believe."

The truth of the matter is that even the apostles had to go beyond experience to come to faith in the resurrection. Although they were "eyewitnesses" to this remarkable occurrence ‑‑ how else could you explain the presence of the Lord in his glorified body being able to come through solid walls? ‑‑ they had to come to a whole new understanding of God's presence and of themselves. For the Christian, believing is seeing.

Thomas saw and believed. We do not see, yet believe and as a result begin to see the world in a wholly different way. When we come to know that believing is seeing we look at ourselves differently. We realize that here is a person loveable and possessed of enormous worth ‑‑ a child of God ‑‑ as the hymnist says, "Changed from glory into glory." When we come to know that believing is seeing we look at those around us differently. We see all persons as loveable, children of God, children for whom Christ died and was raised up again. How can we possibly judge ourselves, or anyone else, in the manner we used to? How can we possibly ever look down upon or condemn another ‑‑ one for whom Christ died and was raised up ‑‑ because they do not rise to our standard? How can we look at any material thing in the same way, since it also shares in the benefit of the fresh start given all creation by the resurrection?

John tells us that, "Jesus did many other signs in the presence of his disciples, which are not written in this book. But these are written so that you may come to believe that Jesus is the Messiah, the Son of God, and that through believing you may have life in his name." If believing is seeing, Jesus continues to do many signs through his body: the church. If believing is seeing, you and I become the signs through which others may come to believe and have life in his name. If believing is seeing, and I believe it is, the stuff and the people of everyday life become sacraments, means of encounter with the living Christ.

Believing is seeing and what we see in our believing leads us to cry out: "My Lord and my God!" Amen. Alleluia!