The Commandments of Love

Hear what the Lord God commanded: “Take a lamb for each household, and make of it a feast, with unleavened bread and bitter herbs, and mark your doorways with its blood, that death may pass over you when I smite the Egyptians so that Pharaoh will let you go.” And further, he decreed, “You shall observe the Festival of Unleavened Bread, for on this very day I brought you out of the land of Egypt.” And thus, the people of Israel are marked and separated from death; delivered.

Now hear what Christ commands: “Eat this bread, and drink this cup; do this in remembrance of me.”

And thus we are united, for we take Christ into us through an inexplicable mystery, made one in the church which is his body and he the head. It matters not whether there is some physical transformation, as some have held: Christ truly is present; he is manifested in these simple material things. And thus we may believe that he is made part of us, that his presence becomes part of our selves. But moreover, as we remember his death for us and for all, we testify to his saving acts. For he is the true Paschal lamb, the sacrifice and feast of our Passover; his blood is upon us, upon the doorposts and lintels of our hearts. We are separated from sin and death, that in the end they shall not claim us.

Thus we should not think of communion primarily as some sort of spiritual food, tempting though that may be. Our spiritual supply tanks are not drained as the week goes on, to be replenished of a Sunday morning. No, as we consume the bread and the wine, we make real again what is already there: our connection to the saving power of Jesus through his death and resurrection. Therefore we proclaim the mystery of faith: Christ has died, a sacrifice for the sins of the world, once for all, forever ending the curse of our fallen nature; Christ is risen, breaking the power of death; Christ will come again, as we remember through every Eucharist, coming to end this old world of sin and suffering and bring out of it the eternal life of manifest grace and glory.

And so, finally, hear what Jesus commands: “Love one another as I have loved you.” It seems a separate commandment, but it is not; it is of one substance with all that comes before. For after all, how was Jesus about to love them? “He stretched out his arms upon the cross, a perfect sacrifice for the whole world.” His sacrifice is also our sacrifice: not just offerings, not just hymns of praise and worship, not just the rites he commanded us to observe. Our lives must also be of love, so that we do not need to ask, “when Lord, did we see you hungry, or thirsty, or naked?” for we will know Christ in all around us in need or trouble—but also, that all around us will know Christ through our love. And it is of course too much for us sinners: our love is halting and held back by our fallen nature. So we sin again and again; yet as we confess them, as grace pours forth in absolution, as the Spirit dwells in us, in the end it will not matter. Therefore, week by week we gather here; we hear the word of God, we proclaim our faith, we offer up our prayers, and we repeat the remembrance of Christ's death and resurrection. And we go forth in the power of the Spirit, to love and serve the Lord, by carrying his love into the world through the witness of our words and deeds, that the world may be filled with the knowledge and love of God as the water covers the sea.

Once and for All

Preached for Proper 28, Year B. The lessons read were Daniel 12:1-3, Hebrews 10:11-25, and Mark 13:1-8.

“Such large stone, and such large buildings!” If you go to Jerusalem today, you can still see many of the stones, and they are indeed big: those at the Western Wall are about four feet high and six wide, and some are quite a lot bigger. Those stones were put there as part of Herod's project to enlarge the Temple Mount precinct, which began around 20 BC and continued almost up to the the destruction of the city in the year 70. Of course, the great buildings are gone, razed by Titus's legions. The timeframe of this leads to some curious conclusions: given that Jesus was probably born in 5 BC (the year before Herod's death), it would seem that his mother Mary was born about the time that the temple reconstruction commenced, and that Zachariah, John the Baptist's father, had already taken up his duties in the temple at the time.

The enlarged temple was not the only product of Herod's pride. On the southern side of the temple platform, he had a huge stoa built, where the Sanhedrin met and where the money changing we hear of was conducted. Josephus, the historian of the final Jewish revolt, acclaimed it as deserving “to be mentioned better than any other under the sun.” It also is utterly gone, burned in the revolts and eventually replaced by the Al-Aqsa Mosque hundreds of years later. The second temple itself, erected in the reign of Darius I, stood for five hundred years before Herod's work, and almost another century before its obliteration by the Romans. But it is all gone. If the the retaining walls remain, nothing that once stood upon them is left: not one stone is left here upon another; all were thrown down. In those days, the massive splendor of those walls, the golden stone shining in the middle eastern sun, surely seemed, if not eternal, certainly destined to stand for ages to come, but as Jesus foretold, they had less than forty years left.

The temple destroyed, the focus of Jewish worship shifted, perforce, to the synagogues. But these are houses of prayer, not places of sacrifice. Even in modern Jerusalem, there are no more sacrifices. And for us, the members of the church, the sacrifices we make are transformed. The priests made offerings for sin, so that the height of the sacrificial year was that made on Yom Kippur, when a bull, two rams, and two goats were sacrificed in atonement, both for the high priest's own sins and for those of the people. We make offerings for remembrance: the eucharistic sacrifice we do for the remembrance of he who is our salvation. So why the change? Well, the Jews do not sacrifice because there is no place for them to do so, for their temple is no more. But we are Christ's temple on earth, as Paul states over and over, we in our own bodies comprise the body of Christ and temple of our God, with Jesus simultaneously the head of this body and the foundation of this temple. And it is no longer a place where the blood of animals is shed in our place, for the blood of our savior which was shed on Calvary is enough for eternity. Jesus was and is the perfected sacrifice, the perfect God and perfect Humanity which atones once and for all. We are reunited with God through Christ, and so the curtain in the temple was torn at the culmination of the passion; and thus our sacrifices are of remembrance and thanksgiving, and not for our own atonement. “It is finished,” Jesus said on the cross; redemption is won, and is eternal.

Therefore, at the Eucharist, we proclaim the Mystery of Faith, and note well the tense of each verb: “Christ has died,” for his sacrifice for us is done, over, complete, a matter of history; “Christ is risen,” for the new life is now and redemption is present, not in some future, but here and now; “Christ will come again,” for the final union of heaven and earth and the death of the old is not yet accomplished, but we are promised it, and one day the harvest will be completed and the old life will end forever.

Of course the disciples wanted to know when this would be accomplished; who would not? And Jesus gave them an answer, which has turned out over the many centuries to be completely useless thus far. For he gave another answer, than no person would know the date—not even the Son of God Himself. Thus we have seen wars and famine and murder and violence and apostasy and plainly false religion, over and over, and yet, Jesus has not returned. Perhaps when the time comes, the signs will be more clear, but the point, after all, is the readiness. The day will come like a thief in the night, and shall we find ourselves fit to face our God?

For we will face him: that we are also promised. We will all be called to judgement, against which our only advocate, our only savior, will place his sacrifice, that we, in faith, may claim it and live. And so living, the new Jerusalem, we are told, will have no temple. We, the temple of the body of Christ, shall no longer need a place to represent the dwelling of God, for all that exists will be that dwelling, where sin and alienation and sorrow and loss will find no more a place to live.

So, my brothers and sisters, gathered together in this place, remember that one sacrifice, and have faith; you are saved. And remember that faith to others, that they too may come, and be baptized, and join in the temple of Jesus the Christ, through whose one sacrifice is all redemption.

Remembrance

For Maundy Thursday, 2016

Remembrance: this is crucial to faith. It is so central to the Eucharist that theologians and liturgists have a special word for it: anamnesis. Amnesia is forgetting; anamnesis is remembering. We do this in remembrance of him, according what we have been taught of old.

People tell us that spirituality is all about a search for God, and that furthermore, one carries out this search on a path of ones choosing with some vague confidence that, if nothing definite is ever found, it is the searching that matters. But that is not how true religion works. This is not to say, not at all, that God is not to be sought, but rather that the world makes God the passive and silent object of a person's seeking. But the LORD God, so the story of scripture says, is not passive; indeed, it seems more the case that He is wont to reveal Himself to people without warning or invitation. Abraham, Moses, and Samuel in the Old Testament; Zachariah and Mary in the New: all these were the target of God's revelation, wanted or not. In the case of Paul the apostle, the divine presence was thrust upon him quite against his will.

We moderns, for the most part, are spared such revelations. No burning bushes, no voices, no angels speak to us, and we are apparently in little danger of being thrown from our horses. So how do we know God? Well, by word and sacrament, as the prayer book says. Language is fundamental to humanity: while other animals do communicate, and we have taught some rudiments to a few apes, it is humans who speak and hear and write and read. Humans, and God. God said, “let there be light.” Jesus is the Word who is God. Thus scripture manifests God, simply by telling the divine story.

Scripture testifies to the LORD God, and he commands its recollection. Tonight we have heard two of these commands. In Egypt, on the eve of deliverance, he tells the Israelites to prepare the Passover meal out of which will come the mark, the sign of their separation; but he also commands festivals in perpetuity, that the Jewish people should ever remember their exodus and how it was accomplished. A thousand-odd years later, Jesus ordains another meal, bread and wine, which we are to do in remembrance of him, until he come again. In obedience to this the church has set apart ministers to break the bread and offer the cup, that the death and resurrection of Jesus be remembered to the end of ages.

So here we are: The LORD God, in the words of scripture, is sitting there revealed to anyone who would but read. We have been given the story, and we have but to have faith in it, and do as it tells us. But if words come from God, well, lying came from the serpent. And the words of scripture: well, God spoke them through the mouths and pens of men. Thus we are presented with a paradox: the truth is not only out there, it is right out in the open; but being words, we cannot of ourselves sift it from all the untruths and misapprehensions and outright frauds that pretend to tell us the fundamental truths of the cosmos. Thus, when we turn away from written revelation and conduct our own search, we like as not end up at an idol of our own construction, having forgotten the God once shown.

But we have more than word; we have sacrament. Jesus said, “do this in remembrance of me”; but he also said, “this is my body”, and “this cup is the new covenant in my blood.” And while many have argued through the years that these words are purely symbolic, that is not what the church as a whole has taught, and this is not what this church has taught. Broken bread and poured wine are not merely token; Jesus is really present, in a mystery whose explanation is beside the point. We eat and drink, and Jesus becomes part of us, in reality. Likewise, in baptism we are bathed in Jesus' death and resurrection, not just in play-acting, but in a truth which is beyond mere materialism. And all this is carried out in the Church, that great and sacred mystery, in which the words and sacraments are handed down, from one generation to another. We remember, because the church remembers—because we remember. We remember the holy story, and we repeat it again, and thus it is passed along, the most fundamental ministry and evangelism there is. The truth is not found; it has revealed itself, and that revelation must be told, and must be partaken of in the rites of the church.

And thus anamnesis: remembrance. To remain the people of God, we must remember that we are the people of God, and we must tell the story anew. Otherwise the gospel, the good news, dies as we die, and the vine of which we are the branches fails to grow. In this age of studied skepticism and contempt for authority, this is a very hard thing, since after all, our telling is but the latest in a long chain of speakings, and who will believe what he has not seen?

And yet, in so believing, we are blessed. And therefore in telling, we are the more blessed. Jesus commanded the disciples to love one another; and if our love for the world leads us to tell the sacred story to those who have not heard it, our love for each other must manifest itself in our mutual encouragement, in the repetition of the gospel, that it not be forgotten. Let no one be a stumbling block to another's faith; let us recollect together the holy Word which is within us and which binds us into the church. Let us, in remembrance of him who died for us and rose again, break the bread, drink the cup, and repeat the story of salvation as we await the day of his coming, when the story will be fulfilled and we will see the truth, face to face, world without end. AMEN.