Singing Drivel

There are seven hundred twenty numbered hymns in The Hymnal 1982, though in practice the number is somewhat lower, due to multiple tunes and certain songs unsuited to ordinary hymn singing (e.g. the rounds). So let's say that the actual number is more like the six hundred that the 1940 hymnal contained. In actual practice no parish uses them all: some are just duds, and the office hymns simply see little use as people don't do those services much, and there are all the unsingable new tunes. But a lot of them simply do not reflect the taste of whoever sets up the liturgy. And the warhorses that people want to hear over and over leave less room for others. Our organist comes from outside the Anglican tradition, and she frequently asks me whether the congregation knows a certain hymn. I've at least looked at every single one, if not sung them all. (You can hear one of a few marathon trips through the lot here.) THe truth is that our parish, for several reasons, works with a relatively small subset of the entirety: if we use as many as half the total in a three year lectionary cycle, I'd be quite surprised. I suspect the number is closer to a third, probably less. Pne opf those reasons is that we also have a band, so that half the hymn slots are taken up by their songs.

But on top of this the new rector likes to put in music from the various supplements. We have enough Wonder Love and Praise copies to put them in the pews, though we haven't bothered to in years. Mostly what we sing from there are "contemporary" RC music warhorses, and it's always the same few. We also have Lift Every Voice and Sing for music from the black church tradition. Again we don't range widely through it.

But I haven't kept up with the progression of supplements, and lately we've been getting ones with newly written material. Occasionally there is a winner among these: "Mary Heard the Angel's Message" is a good text with a good melody. More typically the music is marginally tolerable, but the text is, well, bad.

Especially they tend towards the precious. Writing your own version of the Benedicite is always a risky business, especially when St. Francis almost certainly did a better job (and got it set twice n the hymnal at that: "All Creatures of Our God and King", which everyone sings, and "Most High Omnipotent Good Lord", which nobody does). You are already at peril of getting the treatment C. F. Alexander got at the hands of Monty Python:

All things dull and ugly
All creatures short and squat
All things rude and nasty
The Lord God made the lot.

And that leads to one of the hymnal duds: "Earth and All Stars", which most likely got in on the strength of a good tune and a reasonably good first verse. After that, it goes steeply downhill, what with the "loud humming cellos" and "loud boiling test tubes", and again there's that problem that parody is all too easy:

Vermin and pests,
Loud gnawing termites,
Sing to the Lord a new song;
Insects and bugs,
Loud stinging hornets,
Sing to the Lord a new song.

(I have more where that came from.) This peril has not however dissuaded others from trying thigs along the same line. So this past Sunday we got "God of the Sparrow" by Jaroslav Vadja, who as it happens has an entry in the hymnal: "Now the Silence, Now the Peace"; it makes for a nice solo during communion but which s not terribly practical for congregational singing. This "new" hymn (it actually dates from the late 1980s and appears in the 1989 UMC hymnal) at least has verses and a singable if not great tune, has the same kind of structure as "Earth and All Stars": each verse is the same except with different nouns filled in the blanks. And I'm sorry, Mr. Vadja, but on top of the problem of easy parody, the langauge is stilted and contrived. And yes, the parody. If "how does the creature say awe" brings to my not-inclined-to-reverence mind the point in the first George of the Jungle movie where the narrator is arguing with the characters about the "aaaw" they are experiencing seeing Ape Mountain for the first time, the urge to stick in random words is nearly irresistable. As it is, I kept my mouth shut and tried to think of other things.

Look, I know about writing hymns: it isn't easy, especially when you're trying to say something "new". I've tended to write my own texts, if only to escape copyright issues, but it is also difficult to find good material because the field is so heavily plowed and because so much of it is, well, sentimental tripe. There's a reason why most of the 400s from the 1940 hymnal didn't make the cut for 1982: they represent a Victorian piety and sentimentality which just didn't survive two world wars and then the sixties, at least not in my church.Mostly mine are assembled from BCP and scriptural material, which also helps me avoid theological novelty. I did set one of the Davids Adams's texts, but these are patterned after old Celtic forms (and as it happens, the one I chose also ended up in the New Oxford Easy Anthem Book), but by and large I find way too much recent material to be contrived and precious. And you always the risk of writing bad theology like "Mary Did You Know" (answer: YES! SHE DID!).

And as it stands, everyone knows the hymnal revision process is not going to kick into gear any time soon; but at the same tine, there is the same dissatisfaction with it that one sees with the BCP rites: a loss of nerve in the face of "progressive" social sentiment. Which is not totally bad: I'm plenty happy to sing a hymn written from the Virgin's perspective, if it be well-written and the theology be sound. But at the same time, they could crack the hymnal itself and try something "new" there.

It's "No Person's Liturgy Is Safe" Time Again

I'm going to start by saying that I have little interest in opining on the various calendar additions, subtactions, divisions and multiplications. It was one thing back in the day when there was a proposal to include a bunch of non-Christians, but thankfully that urge seems to have passed, and the rest is extreme inside baseball in a church where for the past few years my options for attending an Ascension Day eucharist have been severely limited. If you care to consider them, Scott Gunn goes though the lot, but I have other things to deal with.

And one of those things, I'm afraid, is the ongoing drive towards bowdlerization in the name of inclusion. Let me start with the depressing observation that it doesn't work anyway. And even if it did, the current reductionism of people to identities is (a) not loving, and (b) not coherent and likely to change considerably over the decades.

Let me start with gender/sex/sexuality. Here I am met with the stark contradiction that it is supposed to not matter, and that it is all-important. No amount of earnest 'splaining is getting me past that, and I say that as part of a household in which our adherence to Traditional Gender Roles is laughably poor. But we still can't get free of the urge to edit the Father out of the trinity, and this urge is wedded to some of the worst gender stereotyping around. All of this was evident poorly thought-through neutered versions of the Rite II liturgies, which by the way we have a resolution to apply this to Prayer C this time. It still stinks of "Moms are loving and nurturing and dads are cruel disciplinarians" thinking, but it's going to pass and it will give me one more thing I will have to check when I go church-visiting, because I do care about the theology being put in my mouth.

And now it has been decided that we have to fret about ableist language. Now we are getting into matters where I have skin in the game: over the last year I have had to deal with a knee injury which pevents me from walking normally, and I have had terrible nearsightedness since I was in kindergarten. If the devil showed up today with promises to fix both, I would at least have to read the terms and conditions. I'm sorry, but this sound as though it comes from people who have never read the gospels, as there are just too, too many episodes of Jesus healing for anyone to accept being blind, being crippled, having to live with birth defects and with injuries as identities. And to be blunt, the resolution reads as having been written by someone who never had to really suffer these handicaps. I do not authorize them to take offense on my behalf, and that is what they are daring to do.

The bigger issue, howeve, comes with the move to tamper with the Good Friday passion text. I will be blunt: we have no business making up our own version of the gospel passage which is not what the Greek actually says. In my parish, I am literally the person who reads this in our parish, year after year, and I say the whole exercise baldly ignores how our liturgical practices determinedly cast us as the Jews. Year after year we sing,

Who was the guilty? Who was it denied thee? Alas my treason, Jesus, hath undone thee. Twas I, Lord Jesus, I it was denied thee; I crucified thee.

And must I point out that the really "problematic" passage isn't in this gospel? It's in Matthew: "His blood be on us and on our children!" And yet one can readily explain the irony of the passage, in that Jesus' blood is upon them and us and every person who has lived or will ever live. Have we so little faith in our preaching? It's the same issue that shows up with EoW's bad institution narrative: we can't say the wods of scripture, so we rewite it to make it more palatable to us. For of course, this would/will not move the world one iota away from antisemitism. No does any Jew I know actually care, as long as we personally do not burn their homes and drive them away.

So once again, the effect is to exclude those who aren't signed on to this version of an ineffectual gesture at a problem over which we don't have much influence. Only this is far worse than passing resolutions about politics, because this hits people in the place where they do care about their church. Look, we don't cae about actual inclusion; all we care about is mouthing the right words about inclusion so our secular peers don't take offense. I can go down the road to Our Savior Hillandale (Maryland) and step into a parish which is actually inclusive, being a motley agglomeration of African and othe immigrants who do a very formal, serious, by-the-book liturgy. My only problem with inclusion there is that they want me to stay for their lavish, delicious potluck lunch, which I tend not to have time for.

Meanwhile, we have a resolution which makes the whole revision process even more vague. Yes, I agree: we do need to do a revision. But not this way. The very avoidance of revision suggests quite stongly that most people don't want it, and I personally don't want it not so much because I think the present book is ideal, but because, as I've said for decades now, the main force fo change is obtaining the approval of a secular subcultue which actually doesn't care.

Why General Convention is So Wearying If You Pay Attention

It shouldn't be hard to come up with an answer to the question of "what is the #1 issue facing The Episcopal Church?" It's the numbers. I haven't dealt with the stats since COVID upended them, but if we're doing better than the average 3% decline per year of the past, I would be quite surprised. In almost every diocese the decline and closure of parishes is ongoing and is (or ought to be) a major concern; in the more rural dioceses it's more like an existential threat.

Therefore you should not be surprised to learn that very little of business slated for the upcoming General Convention addresses this issue. Indeed, as you can also guess, most of it has to do with the pet issues of the American progressive upper middle class. I am not going to go over every proposed resolution as Scott Gunn is doing, if only because I do not have the time nor the stomach to read through fourteen resolutions on the Palestine/Israel conflict. I'm going to have to deal with things in broader terms.

Those Middle Eastern political positions are a good place to start, though, for all of the usual reasons. First, hopefully nobody who wasn't at GC will care how they play out. It's hard to imagine anyone outside the church will care except for right wing loudmouths who want to tar us as hopeless leftists. Nobody, anywhere, is going to say, "well, now that TEC has spoken, I must reconsider my views." We have no moral authority left. And I do not think we can get it back by taking sides in what is a very old, fraught, and complex struggle, especially considering that, if we aren't as immediately culpable as a body as we are with American slavery, we are historically hardly free from the taint of antisemitism.

But beyond that, I don't agreewith the answers given in these resolutions. It would be for the good of everyone if Netanahu were out of power as quickly as legally possible, but it seems to me that a realistic resolution has to accept that Israelis face an existential threat. I am quite repulsed by various progressive voices playing down the savagery of the attack that set the whole thing off. And so, OK, maybe they will be rejected on that basis; but the large and constantly presenting issue here is that the content of these resolutions comes from outside the church. We put a little TEC color on the language, but the fact is that these are the views of one subculture, and they are being put in the church's mouth.

This comes up all over the place. Just the fact of which committees exist is telling. For example, we have a Environmental stewardship and care of creation, which is OK except that there are four resolutions toward carbon neutrality. On one level I have no issue with that, and as I've said many times, if we're taking this seriously we have to go beyond that and re-bind the carbon that's already up there. The issue again is that we have no authority other than to place demands upon ourselves; not only that, but it's hard to imagine that a church convention brings sufficient technical expertise to the issue to be credible. And looking over our shoulders at all those rural parishes that have to worry more about having a roof at all than caring whether it gets solar panels placed on it, again, this is the project of a certain upper class group, particularly those who can set aside the issue that making all those solar panels is sure to involve a great deal of environmentally destructive mining in third world countries whose people have no power to complain.

We also have committees on Social justice and United States policy, Stewardship and socially responsible investing, Safety, wellness and mental health, Accessibility and inclusion.... And this is not to say that none of these should be concerns brought before the convention, but that the very names of the committees bespeak a certain mindset. And indeed, looking inside, we find, besides the usual self-affirming "commend" resolutions that neither I nor Gunn has much use for, we find for instance a resolution to urge those in prison ministries to urge their fellows from other churches to hold the same views on various sexuality etc. topics if they are to work together. Personally I suspect this is completely divorced from the realities of such ministries, not the least of which is that those fellows are likely to be Roman Catholics or Baptists whose church policies are less enlightened than ours. And I cannot imagine any chaplain worth his or her salt paying the least attention to this directive. But it makes people of a certain subculture feel good to have urged it.

Meanwhile, there are two resolutions on mission, and here the problem isn't so much the lack of resolution, as it were, as it is that church planting isn't so much a matter of Directives From 815 as it is a diocesan response to a myriad of local conditions. The big issue I see from my examination of the statistics some years back was that the character/quality of the rector was nearly all-important. The ideal priest is a serious celebrant, a gifted preacher, and a caring pastor; but since Rev. Mary Poppinses are uncommon, just getting one of these characteristics goes a long ways towards making a vital parish; and conversely, a priest is aggressively off-putting in one of these areas can hut a parish very badly. And this isn't something that is addressed well through resolutions; it has to be part of church and especially clerical culture.

This brushes up agqinst another issue which I want to hold off on until I deal with things liturgical, but for now, consider all this positioning from the perspective of someone outside that certain upper middle class progressive viewpoint. Some of us who are outside this worldview are just stubborn and dismiss all this, and bully for us. But the church's adoption of this outside worldview, which is out-of-step with so very much of the population, is intrinsically exclusive. We focus too much on obvious differences like race and sexuality and ignore the far stronger (in this age) divisions of wealth and especially of class and politics. And when we enthrone the values and opinions of one class/subculture, it is alienating to outsiders. And it comes to look like a control issue, which makes the exlusion more real.

Our Mission: To Witness

For the Easter Vigil: this year the gospel was from Mark.

We have heard the story of how the women arrived at the tomb, expecting to find a corpse sealed behind the stone, and were met instead by the angel, the messenger of the great gospel: Jesus is risen! And thus is salvation announced, the miracle beyond miracles. Moses held out his hand, and God delivered the Hebrews though the cleft waters, a show of power befitting the efforts of Hollywood special effects. The people walked through the sea on dry land, and then the waters returned to wash away the forces of Pharaoh and deliver God's people from bondage. Against this spectacle the empty tomb pales, and yet it is this which changes the world forever, for at that moment, death was broken forever. And those women, and ourselves these two millenia later, were not the agents of this salvation, but only witnesses to God's mighty act:

“The Lord will fight for you, and you have only to keep still."

In Mark's gospel, the women flee into silence, and yet we have their testimony tonight. Indeed, there are those who hold that the shortest versions of Mark are somehow truncated; and we have other versions which attempt to supply the seemingly missing ending, more or less clumsily. But that is not important, compared to the empty tomb and the angel's message, which is the conclusion of a single narrative common to all four gospels, to which they devote more space than any other single story. They all agree that Jesus took his disciples with him when he went to pray at Gethsemane, and that there he was arrested by guards from the temple, led by Judas; they all recount the same story of interrogation by Caiaphas and the chief priests, during which Peter denied his master three times, as prophesied; they all tell how Jesus was taken to Pilate, who condemned Jesus in spite of his obvious innocence, releasing Barabbas instead as a sop to the crowds. They all describe how Jesus was mocked, and how he was crucified with two others, Mary Magdalene and Mary the mother of James looking on, but the disciples dispersed. and how his clothing was divided among the soldiers; and they all state that Joseph of Aramathea came and, with Pilate's permission, took the body away and laid it in the stone tomb, wrapped in a shroud, before the day was out.

But that is not the end of it, by no means. All four gospels continue, relating the same tale of Sunday morning: that at daybreak Mary Magdalene went to the tomb with other women and found it opened, and that Jesus' body was not there; they all say that she and those with her encountered an angel who asked her why she wept, and who told her that Jesus was not there, and that he was risen from the dead. Here, then, is the heart of the gospel message: Christ crucified, but also, Christ risen. Nothing is more important to the faith than this—nothing! Only the incarnation approaches it in importance. It is because of the testimony of these women, and that of the disciples after them, in their encounters with the empty tomb and the risen Jesus, that we have a religion to preach. It was this that Peter taught in his address to the crowd on the day of Pentecost, and which teaching put him and the other disciples in front of the Sanhedrin.

Paul likewise makes Christ crucified and risen again the center of his teaching, and so must we also bear witness, for if Christ were not arisen, what would the point be? It is the testimony of that Friday, and that Sunday morning, that gives meaning and justification to our gathering here, to remember again the glorious grace which we have received. Were Jesus not arisen, well, we have many moral teachers from around the world; what is one more? Were Jesus not arisen, what hope would there be in our faith? Were Jesus not arisen, why should the world heed our message?

But the tomb is empty, as the women related; Christ is arisen, and death's power is thus broken, to be utterly wiped away on the last day, when the old passes away and all is made new forever. It is these moments in history, in which salvation is realized, that are the foundation of our message to the world. The brokenness of humanity is something that anyone can see; human sinfulness is the one doctrine verifiable by ordinary observation. But salvation is hidden from such inquiry; it can be found only in the church, not because the church owns it, but because it is the church's testimony, the memory of those sacred days, that brings the message of salvation to the world. Without us as its messengers, who would hear of Christ? Who would know that salvation is there, and is freely given, and may be taken for no greater price than confession, faith, and baptism? And when we say to others, “you should live as we teach, in the name of Christ,” who should heed us? We know that Jesus is the incarnate Son, and that his teaching is that of God on earth; but we know him first as Jesus crucified, buried, and risen again, and it is this which compels our worship, because it is in this that we see the fulfillment of the LORD God's saving purpose. And if it is how we see what is revealed, it is thus how we must show others the same divine revelation. We must be witnesses to the world, not hiding in fear, but bold in proclamation. We did nothing to defeat death: God, in his incarnate son, did that. But now we have been made part of that miracle, and it is through us that the world may also become part of it. That is our mission as the church.

Christ is risen from the dead: that is our first message; come and be baptized: that is our second; live together in the kingdom as Jesus taught, doing his work as we await the last days in faith, love, and hope: that is our third. One follows from the other; they are not separate. So here we are, and what work must we do? Well, to live as Christ taught, of course, dead to sin in the sacrifice of his crucifixion, as Paul explained. But it is not simply a matter of living an upright and godly life in charity and purity of heart. No, to the best of our ability, and in the grace of the Spirit, we must carry out the will of the Father not only in abjuring sin, but in showing the Son to the world. Those outside the church need to see a reason for coming in, not just through our superior life (for at this we fail over and over), but through our superior knowledge: we know the story of salvation, and the world does not. The world chases after false gods: not only failing to see the LORD God as He is, and worshiping others in His place, but elevating human lusts and greed and impulses above all other principles, to the end that any kind of life together becomes predatory and abusive. We must offer them, instead, the one True God, incarnate in Jesus the only Christ, fully real and truly man, crucified at one place and time in Judaea while Pilate was procurator under the Emperor Tiberius, and risen again from the tomb in Jerusalem, and from thence returned to the heaven which is beyond our mortal and physical knowledge. As they are taught, and are baptized, and partake of the sacraments, then shall they know the Word Incarnate, and shall see the Godhead, and with us they may join in the work of the kingdom. And then with us they shall proclaim the mystery of faith:

Christ has died! Christ is risen! Christ will come again!

Holding Up Our Lamps on the Day of the Lord

The Day of the Lord: who living under His covenant could not hope for it? The day when God's power washes over the earth and makes all things right. The days when God's enemies are finally and forever defeated: who could not hope for that day? Who among us does not want to see righteousness triumph and evil be thrown down?

Many years ago, Melissa happened to be listening to a local radio preacher, and he said, “You know, the Day of the Lord could be today! And wouldn't that make today extra special?” And even given how this utterly fails to grasp the awe that such a day should force upon us, let me just say that Amos rejects even the idea that we should expect to rejoice in that glorious deliverance—for he says, do not expect to be delivered, but expect instead that we might be that evil that the world is to be delivered from. And he says, “Even though you offer me your burnt offerings and cereal offerings, I will not accept them, and the peace offerings of your fatted beasts I will not look upon.” So what is wrong, that the offerings required by the Law are rejected? Well, the answer is in the next verse: “let justice roll down like waters, and righteousness like an everflowing stream.”

The same prescription is given by the prophet Micah:

“With what shall I come before the Lord, and bow myself before God on high? Shall I come before him with burnt offerings, with calves a year old? Will the Lord be pleased with thousands of rams, with ten thousands of rivers of oil? Shall I give my first-born for my transgression, the fruit of my body for the sin of my soul?” He has showed you, O man, what is good; and what does the Lord require of you but to do justice, and to love kindness, and to walk humbly with your God?”

And when we turn to the parables, we see the same. The King in the parable of the Sheep and the Goats says to the latter: “Depart from me, you cursed, into the eternal fire prepared for the devil and his angels; for I was hungry and you gave me no food, I was thirsty and you gave me no drink, I was a stranger and you did not welcome me, naked and you did not clothe me, sick and in prison and you did not visit me.” Then they also will answer, ‘Lord, when did we see thee hungry or thirsty or a stranger or naked or sick or in prison, and did not minister to thee?’ Then he will answer them, ‘Truly, I say to you, as you did it not to one of the least of these, you did it not to me.’

It is through our love of neighbor that we show our love of God. Not that we are to neglect worship of God, but these prophesies and parables are directed to the religious, not to those outside the fold. They are directed to us. We believers, if our faith is to be true, must make it so through justice and mercy and humility, not just through prayer and worship. Nor should we grow complacent and contemptuous as if our works elevated us above others, saying, “Lord we thank you that we are not like other people, not like that banker over there or that social justice advocate over there.” Our works do not save; only Christ does that, the Christ who shall return in judgement.

For when that terrible day comes—and it will be terrible, no question about it: the Revelation spends chapter after chapter on it, what with the seven trumpets and the seven bowls of God's wrath poured out over the earth—we shall indeed be called to account, with only the grace of God in Christ speaking for us. And that day will come upon us in a flash, like lightning across the earth, said Jesus. The parable I have just discussed falls at the end of the same chapter which begins with today's gospel, and like the chapter just before it, the emphasis is upon being prepared. And for the bridesmaids, the point to catch is that the bridegroom is delayed; he is coming at an unexpected hour, not catching them by surprise by coming early, but indeed, his arrival is heralded. But because of the delay, the foolish have run out of oil.

Now, when looking at this closely, the thing seems to fall apart. Why are the wise so churlish? What does the oil represent? How about the merchants? But really, this is the wrong way to look at a parable. The oil doesn't have a specific meaning; it is simply something that is emblematic of the lack of foresight by the foolish. It is the flame that matters, the light of the lamp that welcomes the bridegroom. Therefore keeping the lamp lit signifies our continued attention to our work as Christians, though the bridegroom's arrival be two millennia coming, and still longer. And then, on that awful day, if we have been steadfast in the Lord, our faith worked through in justice and mercy, let it be as Paul promises: we shall be taken up in the new life, to meet our God as he comes to judge the earth. For it is in that faith that we can say, in the face of that dread day, Maranatha: even so, Lord, come.

And Thus We are Freed

Preached Good Friday, 2023

Who was the guilty?

Who was it that killed the Son of God?

Most immediately, a band of soldiers, who with hammers and nails bound Jesus to the instrument of his final and fatal torment, at the command of Pontius Pilate, who yielded to the will of the crowd and the Sanhedrin, led by Caiaphas, after Judas betrayed him in the garden. This is all spelled out in the gospel we have just heard. So it would seem that we have exhausted the list of those responsible.

And yet.

All of those I have named are long, long dead; indeed, we are within a few years of the two-thousandth anniversary of the crucifixion, if it has not already past. There is neither man nor woman living, it would seem, who is responsible for Jesus' death; no Jew, no gentile; no authority either Jewish or Roman (for all such governance has passed away); no soldier, no bystander. All responsibility has been ended by the passage of time, at least as the world would count it.

And yet.

And yet, we look to the ultimate reason for Jesus' death, and it is our salvation. We modern Christians are reduced to bystanders before the cross, with John and the women, or else fled like the other disciples. The passion reading of last Sunday puts the crowd's words upon our lips, but then we sit again, and become merely the audience to the passion play. If we are more sensitive perhaps we feel for his suffering, but either way we are at a safe remove from the events of that holy and terrible day.

And yet, as we sit before the cross, the altar bare and the sanctuary stripped, the responsibility still lies upon us all. It is our sins which brought about the incarnation; it is for us that Jesus was born the Christ. For us he walked the earth in human flesh; for us he taught and prayed; for us he was given over to suffering; and for us he was betrayed, abandoned, and tortured unto death. We who would be bystanders are yet participants, for it is our sinning, and the sinning of all humanity, which brought all this to pass, and while we comfort ourselves that our sins are small compared to those of others, in the end, it matters not. So what if one man hammers upon the nails in His hands and feet by murdering and theft and exploitation, and we feel that we have naught to confess but our petty contempt and shaving at the edges of the law: nonetheless, it is all the same hammering. And it is the same love of Jesus for all that laid him on the cross and stretched forth his hands and feet. Within the past few days I saw an illustration of Jesus washing the feet of various reviled figures, and yes, his salvation was made for them as well as us, and not because his salvation is so great as to encompass even them, but because it is so great as to encompass us, whether we see the full extent of our sins or not.

For the full extent of our sins is that they pervade our whole being. Sin is in our very nature, and the only “cure” is death. So therefore we are cured, on Calvary's hill, by the death of God himself, given up to the evils humanity has wrought upon one another, so that the Son of Man is offered up, the Lamb of God that takes away the sin of the world as no other offering could.

And yet, we are still bound to the world, with every failing to feed and cloth and comfort the word, and by every harsh word, every theft, every slander, every injury. Each act against our fellows, even the contempt and malice we carry in our hearts: each chains us more securely to the dead weight of sin, that we may not escape the destruction it surely rains upon us. And yet, even knowing this, we hammer away, though we know not what we do.

And there is nobody to blame but ourselves. Judas may have betrayed Jesus, but it is we who put him in the garden. Caiaphas may have decided that Jesus was a threat to the Jewish authorities, but it was our sins which made those offensive teaching necessary. Pilate may have passed sentence, but we put the Son of Man before him. The Soldiers may have wielded the hammers and nails, but it is we who laid the Lamb of God on the cross. We are not innocent; we may not blame our neighbors, but only ourselves.

And yet, here we see that in Christ's suffering and death, all is forgiven. Salvation is accomplished, once and for eternity, upon the cross. Whatever we may think or feel about the matter, we free, and we who are baptized are bound to that salvation, so that every good we do likewise pours out the grace we have been given. Every witness to Jesus we make, be it through word or deed, manifests God's love. The cross is The End, at least to the first act of creation; sin is broken, though it continues until the end of all time, when death is destroyed forever.

And so, I am done today with “and yet”. For now we are in the age of “and thus”: and thus we see the glorious morn the result of sin's destruction is manifested. Thus we see our freedom realized. Thus we see our work set before us: to carry the church, Christ's body, his hands and feet and mouth, to all about us, and to enlarge that church through baptism in His death. And thus we look to that glorious day when all blame, one and for all, is burnt in the everlasting fire, that the eternity of salvation is harvested and gathered into God's house forever and ever. Amen.

Winnowing

Jesus said, “The kingdom of heaven is like a man who sowed good seed in his field: but while men slept, his enemy came and sowed tares among the wheat, and went his way.”

Jesus said, “But when the Son of Man comes in his glory, and all the holy angels with him, then he will sit on the throne of his glory. Before him all the nations will be gathered, and he will separate them one from another, as a shepherd separates the sheep from the goats.”

Jesus said, “Then two will be in the field; one will be taken and one will be left. Two women will be grinding meal together; one will be taken and one will be left.”

Jesus died for our sins, and not for ours only, but the sins of the whole world: these are the words of the Apostle John. There is salvation freely given to all. And yet—well, Jesus, rather embarrassingly for some, spends a great deal of time on what John the Baptist called the winnowing of the people: the wheat to be gathered into God's granary, but the chaff to be burned. And Jesus likewise says that at the end of days, in the great harvest, the weeds will be taken and burned; when the flock is collected, the sheep will be separated from the goats. One will be taken, another left.

Preachers of a certain stripe spend a lot of time on the subject of this judgment. You may have heard of Jonathan Edwards' notorious sermon, “Sinners in the Hand of an Angry God”, in which he speaks at length (for that is how things were done in those days) of how it is only the merciful hand of God which keeps us from the fires of perdition, and yet, the time will come (Edwards says) when this forbearance will end, and only those whose trust is in the Lord will be kept safe from the flames. This is the classic language of revivalist Christianity, but the same focus on judgment is central to late medieval piety. Edwards' image of God dangling souls like spiders on threads, over the the fires of hell—well, I think it is inaccurate as an expression of Jesus' teachings. It implies that God's mercy is capricious, and that is not how Jesus depicts it, nor the prophets before him, nor John of the Revelation after him.

No, this judgment, this winnowing, this sorting out of humanity is ordained in the mind of the Father, inexorable, its time set, yet hidden until the day when Christ returns and all accounts are settled. Should we then fear it? Yes, we should, but no, we shouldn't. Jesus simply spends too much time on warning us about the sorting of the harvest that I should brush those warnings off. And it is striking that Jesus, John the Baptist, and the prophets all agree that this sorting is on the basis of works—but not in avoiding sins as most people think of them, for the sheep who are saved are those who fed the hungry, gave drink to the thirsty, clothed the naked, and visited the sick and imprisoned. It is the works of mercy that save, and as James teaches, these works show our faith. And if we are merciful out of fear of damnation, well, is that not faith?

And yet, we should not fear, for God is with us, and if any man sin, we have Jesus as our advocate. Focusing too much on the fear of judgment tempts us to the surpassing sin of setting ourselves up in judgment, and even though Jesus says “Judge not”, again it is quite popular for us preachers to rail against this or that sin, and then to slip over into condemning and persecuting those sinners. And this is so obviously merciless and so obviously an arrogation of God's authority that even had Jesus not explicitly condemned it, we should infer its sinfulness from the whole of the rest of his teaching. The urge to pray “Lord, we thank thee that we are not like other, sinful people” is so strong that it takes constant vigilance, which is to be found in humility, to avoid alienating ourselves from our fellows, and therefore from God. The new kingdom of God is not in self-purity (though we should know and resist our impurities), but in mutual love: not in separation, but in inclusion; not in division, but in unity. It is not a kingdom of judges, but servants.

And that kingdom is not far off. It is near, it is now, and yet it is also coming, for Christ shall return and being this old world to its end. But none may know when, as proven by all those who have falsely prophesied a date. Each such predicted day comes and goes, for he is coming at an unexpected time. And yet, he is always about to come, for to us it is not about dates and times, but about our expectation, that we should make ourselves ready, like the wise virgins. The years, the centuries, the millennia stretch on, and still we wait, but still, Christ's return is always tomorrow, and our work, Christ's work in the world cannot wait, and not because our work makes the kingdom, but because our work is of the kingdom. We do not build the kingdom of God on earth; we manifest it, when we love God and love our neighbor. And as we draw others to Christ, both in worship and in service to one another, we further the knowledge of salvation, that the harvest may be increased without end.