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.

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.

Wisdom! Let Us Attend!

“Wisdom! Let us attend!”

These words, or variations on them, are spoken four times in the Liturgy of Saint John Chrysostom, the main Eucharistic rite of the eastern churches. They introduce each of the readings, and are repeated before the Creed is said. The great church of Constantinople was dedicated to Holy Wisdom—Hagia Sophia.

Well, let me tell you, I tried to attend to some wisdom in writing this, because the first reading is relatively new to the lectionary. And, well, one commentator on this passage began by saying, “On even the most 'ordinary' Sunday it can be difficult to preach and teach from the book of Proverbs. It may seem well nigh impossible to do so on Trinity Sunday.” I did not find this reassuring, though I have refrained from calling our priest and dumping the problem back on her. So let me see what wisdom can be found here.

The chapter from which our first reading is taken contrasts with that preceding, which describes an equally metaphorical, adulterous woman who leads the unwary astray. Our first verses today are part of that contrast: Wisdom speaks from the heights, from the gates, while her rival roams the streets, hidden. But the main contrast is between the two paths down which they lead their followers: one to sin, but the other, of Wisdom, to righteousness. The reading then skips over a passage on the virtues of wisdom, which on this day, perhaps do not need to be dwelt upon, for it resumes at the section most relevant to the day: the relationship of Wisdom to the Godhead.

Most of the commentators I came across equated Wisdom with the Son: Jesus, the Word of God. And there is something to be said for this reading. If nothing else, the parallel with the opening of John's gospel is strong:

In the beginning was the Word, and the Word was with God, and the Word was God. He was in the beginning with God; all things were made through him, and without him was not anything made that was made.

Likewise, Paul refers to Jesus as the “wisdom of God” in his first letter to the Corinthians. But I do not think think it is quite so simple. For one thing, our reading today says that “The Lord created me at the beginning of his work,” and we are instructed in the creed that the Son is “begotten, not made”. Furthermore, biblical figures of speech are not material for mechanical deduction. We name both the church and the bread of communion as the body of Christ, and therefore should it not be the case that, being members of this body, we are therefore also Wisdom?

No, I do not think that Wisdom is to be identified with the Word alone, and thus with Jesus. Wisdom is in Him, as she is in the Father and in the Spirit, but she comes forth from their action together, just as creation and redemption and holiness come from the Godhead as a whole, working as one. She speaks in scripture; she is revealed when the LORD God acts in history; she is heard in the tongues of the Spirit. But she herself is not one or even all of these things.

Wisdom calls us to seek God, but the finding is a strange thing. Surely it is wise to align oneself to whatever underlies existence, but how to do it: that is quite the problem. We who have found the LORD God, or have been found by him, are confronted with not just some philosophical under-girding of reality, but with a personality whose will confronts us in the history of salvation. And in this confrontation, it is Wisdom who stands at our side, not as advocate (for that is Jesus' care), but as guide. She shows us right pathways; she warns of danger; she counsels patience and forbearance. In this wise, are we not reminded of the Holy Spirit, the Spirit of truth, who will guide us into all the truth, and will declare to us the things that are to come? But I say, again, the Spirit and Wisdom are not one and the same; and yet when the Spirit leads us to understanding of the word of scripture: there, Wisdom is found. When the Spirit inspires our worship, that we perceive Jesus in the sacraments: there, Wisdom is found. When the Spirit moves us to acts of charity: there, Wisdom is found.

And the Father, of whom the Son, the Word is begotten, is He Wisdom? No, and yet Wisdom is his creation, as all else is. But that creation is through and with the Son and the Spirit, thus, so does Wisdom issue forth from the Three in One, so Wisdom is in the words of Jesus when he says, “whoever who has seen me has seen the Father”, as Wisdom is in the visions of the prophets and the writings of the evangelists and the letters of the apostles. But she speaks even before this, for it is she who points to scripture; it is she who points to the church; it is she who leads us to worship; and it is she also who shows to us our sin and corruption.

It is written that “the fear of the LORD is the beginning of Wisdom,”—indeed, it is written in the very chapter following our reading. And here we take up our final thread of Wisdom, for in that chapter, she has set up a feast:

To those without sense she says, ‘Come, eat of my bread and drink of the wine I have mixed. Lay aside immaturity, and live, and walk in the way of insight.’

It is that last phrase that is the key: “walk in the way of insight.” Wisdom is more than knowledge of God, if indeed one may use that word about the LORD who is beyond knowledge. Wisdom teaches us how to live so that we look to God in every thought and act of our lives. In every act of love, of worship, of thanksgiving, of charity, of reproof, of self-discipline, of leadership, of submission: there we may find Wisdom as our guide. We hear Wisdom when we are taught that God sent his only Son, God from God, to live with us and die for us and break the bonds of death; we hear it in account of the first Pentecost, when the Spirit came upon the disciples. We hear it in the councils of the church, where the creed which we shall shortly say was formulated to express the mystery of our faith. But hearing is not enough. We must return Wisdom's invitation and dwell with here so that she dwells in us. Therefore attend to Wisdom, so that we may live as Isaiah calls us to do: “Let us walk in the light of the LORD.”

Surrendering Unto Caesar

Over the summer, at McLean Bible Church, there was a crisis of leadership: the election of elders failed, and a second election had to be held. And the reason? Well, according to the chief pastor, David Pratt, as he related in a sermon on July fourth, a group was trying to take control of the church apparently to replace leadership with people who would espouse a more conservative line—that is, a more politically conservative line, for among other things, a rumor was passed that the three candidates were going to have church buildings sold to Muslims. And there certainly is a struggle going on: in researching this I found a Facebook page called “Save McLean Bible Church” which states the following:

MBC members have lost all confidence in the Elder Board and Pastoral Staff. The congregation is witnessing corruption, lack of transparency, deception, slandering, intimidation, and use of the pulpit to bully members of the church. The elder board and pastoral team continue to lie and peddle lies after lies. The vision and purpose of MBC is to make a gospel impact on Metro Washington with the message of Jesus Christ. This vision led to making disciples among all quarters of DC Metro area, including the influencers and policy makers in Washington, therefore, impacting the nations and even the world. We believed that this was a strategic mission because of the following reality: “Change Washington, change the world.” Join us in restoring McLean Bible Church to the purpose and vision for which it was founded upon!

In the end, the second election did seat the same candidates; even the first was quite close to the 75% margin needed to elect. The opposition was clearly a minority of the congregation. Nevertheless Pastor Pratt has been attacked in many places for his supposed leftist politics, as has Phil Vischer, whom you might recognize as one of the creators of the VeggieTales Christian videos. Another prominent evangelical pastor told Peter Wehner of The Atlantic that “Nearly everyone tells me there is at the very least a small group in nearly every evangelical church complaining and agitating against teaching or policies that aren’t sufficiently conservative or anti-woke.”

And then of course there are the preachers who have gone all in on politics. To take just one example, we have Franklin Graham, Billy's son, who posted on Facebook: “The House Democrats impeached Trump because they hate him and want to do as much damage as they can. And these 10, from his own party, joined in the feeding frenzy. It makes you wonder what the thirty pieces of silver were that Speaker Pelosi promised for this betrayal.” Thus he cast her as Caiaphas and the ten congressmen as Judas. I could go on for some time on this, for it is appallingly easy to find preachers claiming that the COVID vaccine is the Mark of the Beast, and not too difficult to find people making supposedly prophetic utterances that the previous president will be restored to office by this or that date.

My purpose, however, is not a enumeration of the sins of other churches, and I suspect that most of you already have some awareness of this, if not a grasp of its extent or depth. Given the day, though, I will spend a little time elaborating their vision of the Kingdom of God. First, I note the claim that “America is a Christian nation,” with the implication if not outright assertion that as a nation it is beset by satanic forces. The church, and thus the kingdom, is allegiance, and their purpose is first of all to defend it against outsiders. And thus, the second characteristic: the identification of church purpose with national purpose, which tends to reduce preaching to a reiteration of their social mores. Finally, their vision is apocalyptic: they look to the day when God's rule will be established again on earth, a rule gained by the crushing of God's enemies, which, of course, are also their enemies, and therefore their enemies are also God's enemies.

My description is, I will admit, something of a caricature, but the point in the end is that this vision is both militant and partisan. And here Pilate fits right in, for his question to Jesus reveals his concern: is Jesus a threat to the Roman state? Once he establishes that Jesus claims no civil authority, Pilate loses interest, and in the end only condemns Jesus to pacify the crowd and appease the Jewish authorities. Of course, we know better: we know that in the end Jesus' claim over all is God's claim, and earthly powers shall be swept away with the old earth itself. And yet, when we consider the many parables which describe the kingdom of God, they do not describe its establishment among humanity as a military campaign: it is growth, it is return on investment, it is the yield of the harvest, winnowed from among the weeds and barren places. The labor is that of the farmer, not of the soldier.

God's kingdom is not of this world, and yet, we are not apart from it—not yet. And as we act in the world, well, Jesus and the apostles teach us to minister to its citizens, not only by evangelizing and preaching, but in ordinary acts of love and mercy. This is the second great commandment, and we are taught that the neighbor whom we must love is the Samaritan, the Jew, the Muslim; those of other nations and races; those both above and below our social class; even the liar, the thief, and the murderer.

And, well, OK. We collect food for the poor, and we send them coats, and we make up gifts for the sailors, and no doubt we give to any number of other charitable works. Nothing wrong with that, though we are wrong if we think we work our salvation by those acts. But that is not all we must do, and we are confronted by the prospect of the ballot box and the judgment it asks of us. As to that, there are differing opinions. Anthony Bloom, the late Orthodox archbishop in Britain, once said in an interview:

The Church must never speak from a position of strength. It ought not to be one of the forces influencing this or that state. The Church ought to be, if you will, just as powerless as God himself, which does not coerce but which calls and unveils the beauty and the truth of things without imposing them. As soon as the Church begins to exercise power, it loses its most profound characteristic which is divine love [i.e.] the understanding of those it is called to save and not to smash.

And one could go on from this to assert that we as voters are not to consider ourselves agents of the church. I don't choose that for myself, and on the other side one may count Dietrich Bonhoeffer as an advocate for and embodiment of the need for the Christian to be involved in the world. Even among the Orthodox one may recall Archbishop Iakovos of the Greek church marching at Martin Luther King's side—literally so. But I think all of them would have agreed that our approach to the power that positions of authority provide must be reluctant, humble, other-serving, and ever-mindful of both the rebellion and the cruelty that lurk within our hearts. Bishop Bloom is surely correct in claiming that we are not ordained to rule the world for Christ.

Thus, when we look upon our political opponents, well, yes, obviously we must not demonize them. Easy to say, not so easy to do. One comes upon political candidates whose statements are cruel, contemptuous, full of lies and invective, and how hard it is to vote against them “in love”, and how hard not direct our own contempt against their supporters! And how easy it is to award those of our own affiliation with approval and congratulate ourselves simply for opposing the other side.

There is a further danger. Earlier I spoke of the confusion of the church's will with that of “conservative” culture. We here are not immune to that. “Culture catechizes,” says Alan Jacobs, professor of humanities at Baylor. We are taught by radio, the news, our Facebook feeds, our college professors, our friends and our parents—well, at least so the latter hope. And in this age it is so very easy to filter out those who do not reinforce our own urges and identity. We are taught by the voices of the world day in and day out, and then we come to church and spend maybe a few hours hearing, God willing, the voice of the Holy Spirit rather than that of the spirits of the age. And thus Jacobs asked, “So if people are getting one kind of catechesis for half an hour per week, and another for dozens of hours per week, which one do you think will win out?” And he continues, “This is true of both the Christian left and the Christian right. People come to believe what they are most thoroughly and intensively catechized to believe, and that catechesis comes not from the churches but from the media they consume, or rather the media that consume them. The churches have barely better than a snowball’s chance in hell of shaping most people’s lives.” Perhaps we want to believe otherwise, but it requires a constant effort to set aside the tenets, the prejudices, and, well, the communal sins of our own communities. It is terribly difficult to separate out what the world teaches about solving the problems of our lives and of those around us from the command that we love those around us; we are very much prone to confuse the need with the method. And we in this place are especially so tempted: well-educated, many of us set into positions within the government or its contractors, it is so very easy to know that we know what is best, without having to listen to others.

This world of constant chatter: it easily tempts us into unearned anger. Jacobs again: “What all those media want is engagement, and engagement is most reliably driven by anger and hatred. They make bank when we hate each other. And so that hatred migrates into the Church, which doesn’t have the resources to resist it. The real miracle here is that even so, in the mercy of God, many people do find their way to places of real love of God and neighbor.” Yes, perhaps there is much to be angry about, and yes, even Jesus showed anger. But anger is consuming, and anger against others eventually drives out love and embeds hatred within the heart.

So where does this leave us, aspiring to the kingdom of heaven?

Well, I have no simple answer. I mean, there is a simple answer, which is to love God with all our hearts and minds and souls, and to love our neighbors as ourselves, and to love one another as Christ loves us. Simple, and yet in our fallen lives, finding room to love can be hard, even impossible in our sinfulness. But we do have some things to plainly avoid, through Christ's teaching and example. We may not lord it over others; we may not seek to harm others; we may not put our own lusts above the needs of others, nor may we be indifferent to their suffering. And therefore, as much as we participate in politics, it must be to the service of others, not to do battle with them. For Jesus' kingdom is not of this world: his strength is in our weakness, his authority is in our submission, and his eternal reign is manifest in every passing act of love we carry out. But I cannot tell you exactly what those acts should be, and I would very much doubt another person who claimed otherwise. It is our own judgment, under the direction of love, which we must take to the ballot box, and may the Spirit ever guide us there. And there, we shall fail, over and over, in carrying out the work of the kingdom, but if anyone sins they have an advocate in Jesus Christ, who redeems not only our sins, but those of the whole world—even our enemies and persecutors. The kingdom of God is folly to the world, and we cannot defend its borders through force of might; but those borders are extended in every act of love and mercy, until the day when, as the Father ordains, the Son shall return in glory, and under the Spirit love shall hold sway everywhere, world without end. Amen.

We might as well be Nazarenes

preached on July 4 for Proper 9, Year B

In today's gospel we have a pair of stories in which miracles of healing play a part, but in what seem at first in opposite ways. The first story has Jesus returning to his home town, in which he receives a decidedly cold welcome. To us, accustomed to the modern trappings of celebrity, it is a strange reaction, for what modern place would not lay claim to a miracle worker? Perhaps the strangest statement, though, is this: “he could do no deed of power there.” For those of us who have heard this, every third year, for some time, perhaps it does not jump out at us. And yet, consider the implication: that the second person of the Trinity, God incarnate, to whom we ascribe all power and omnipotence not only because it is so revealed, but because it seems obvious—he is in this place incapable of exercising it.

Except.

The sentence continues, “except that he laid his hands on a few sick people and cured them.” One's first impulse is to read this as simply illustrating the diminishing of Jesus' power, but there is a message in this little coda. Recall in last week's story, Jesus spoke to the woman with the hemorrhage and said, “daughter, your faith has made you well.” Of course, we cannot be sure, because the gospel does not say so, but it is not unreasonable to suppose that those who came for healing were also made well through faith. But of the rest, “he was amazed at their unbelief.” For surely they had heard tell of the wonders he had done: their words testify to that. And yet the fact that this was the boy they had known, who had grown up on their town, the son of a carpenter, somehow this was enough to “offend” them. And yet, had they heeded scripture, they should not have been so surprised, for in the history of salvation it is recorded over and over that God chose not the high nor the mighty, but the childless to be the father of many, the second over the firstborn, the least over the most. Likewise, the disciples were ordinary men, seemingly picked by Jesus at random. Mary sang, “he hath put down the mighty from their thrones, and hath exalted the humble and meek,” and so then is Jesus himself: God made humble, so that man shall be exalted, indeed, raised to sit at the right hand of the Father. But his former neighbors did not, it seems, remember their scripture.

Instead, familiarity bred contempt, and they raised up for themselves a stumbling block, and out of these blocks, made their town a fortress against the power of the incarnate Word. And note further: from many other stories, we can see that doubt is not necessarily an impediment to the entrance of divine power into our lives; Jesus says that even the smallest seed of faith is enough to call it forth. But contempt is different, and, well, we live in a contemptuous age. You need only to listen how we practice politics to see that. And as many a parable relates, how we treat our fellow humans is how we treat our God.

Now, our second story sees no such impediment; indeed, it turns away from Nazareth and into the rest of Judaea. Here we have the first mission of the apostles, though they are not named as such, and as Jesus sends them out in pairs, we may recall his promise that “wherever two or three are gathered in my name, I will be in the midst of them.” And in this first mission, we see the same division between faith and rejection: faith brings forth the power of God through the hands of the disciples, but where they are rejected, the implication is that this rejection is not innocent. The disciples are not to harm those who do not accept the gospel word, but they are to shake off the dust off their feet as a testimony against those who reject it. I am reminded of a story of related by Anthony Bloom, the great Orthodox writer and bishop in Britain. The story is of a very nasty, hateful woman, who unaccountably throws a turnip at a beggar to chase him away. After she dies, so the story goes, she is judged and sent to the flames of hell, but there, she sees the hand of Jesus holding out a turnip, and he says to her, “grab hold of this.” Even the smallest good, it seems, may give faith something to grasp, but conversely, both stories today teach that rejection of the divine touch is also within our grasp.

It is quite tempting to view ourselves in the position of the disciples, going out into the world to spread the word and power of Jesus, when we read the second story. And I would not discourage this reading, for, of course, we are also so commissioned. But here, today as on every Sunday, we are the hearers. And in our familiarity with its message, we might as well be Nazarenes ourselves. And thus the question is set before us, in every act we make: are we ourselves to be bearers of the word, or do we treat it with contempt? The first way is life; the second, to turn away from it. Therefore, choose life, that you may have it abundantly.

In the Flesh

A piece of broiled fish, which he took and ate. An ordinary meal, an ordinary act, done every minute of every day all over the globe. And yet, it is a sign. The risen Jesus took food, and ate, ate like any man: put it to his lips, in his mouth, chewed, and swallowed. And thus, the sign: Jesus is risen, truly, in reality, in the flesh. It is the fulfillment of the incarnation revealed: God has united to humanity in all its fullness, walking, breathing, eating, sleeping, in all ways human.

An artist friend of mine was once commissioned to paint Jesus “in the act of resurrecting.” We had a good chuckle over the image immediately brought to mind, of Jesus shoving aside the shroud and sitting up as if he were about to get out of bed and go to breakfast. I do not think one can so capture the miracle itself, and no gospel says a thing about it: the most we have is the story from Matthew of the earthquake and of the angel rolling away the stone. The miracle is and must remain a mystery, unseen in the tomb, unexplained in words, uncomprehended by the human mind. And yet, her patron was on the right track, in a way, for what he wanted to see, in the frame, was the resurrection not as a symbol or metaphor or myth; he wanted to see it in the flesh. And that is what today's reading provides: a Jesus who can be touched, whose flesh is still marked by the wounds he suffered, who breathes and eats and drinks and walks and speaks like any other human being. No ghost, no vision: he is still material, though transformed and raised, not just to life, but to a new life which transcends the old. His bodily being is what the old Adam was intended to be, but more, and when the first heaven and the first earth are passed away, and all things are made new in the new heaven and new earth, we too shall become what he already is: the new flesh of the new covenant, made suitable for the life everlasting to come. And not only our flesh, but our hearts, our souls, our minds, for as Jesus opened the disciples' minds, so ours too are taught, through them, through their writings and those of the church after them. We do not understand everything, but we know what is crucial:

Christ has died;

Christ is risen;

Christ will come again.

And thus we proclaim to all humanity repentance and forgiveness of sins, and we go out baptizing in the name of Father, Son, and Holy Spirit, so that all may be joined into the resurrected flesh of our Lord and Savior Jesus Christ, to who be power and glory forever and ever. Amen.

In the Wreckage

This night, we look upon what, for all the world, looks to be the wreckage of the divine plan. The angel said to Mary, “the Lord God will give to him the the throne of his father David, and he will reign over the house of Jacob for ever; and of his kingdom there will be no end.” And where is that throne this night? Where is that kingdom? Mary said to Elizabeth, “He has shown strength with his arm, he has scattered the proud in the imaginations of their hearts.” And where slept Pilate, and the priests, on that night, while the body of the incarnate God lay cold in the tomb? “He has put down the might from their thrones, and have exalted those of low degree.” Truly?

How did it come to this? Who was the guilty? Who was it despised him? Well, the authorities of course: the priests and the Pharisees, Pontius Pilate and Herod Antipas—and their guards and soldiers. Judas Iscariot, who betrayed him directly, and the rest of the disciples, who fled into the night. The mob of Jerusalem, crying for his death. Here we have just heard the story of their collective treachery, as John tells it, though his version is not so very different from that of the other three evangelists.

And yet, does not the story range further? Who was the guilty? Who was it despised him? Was it their treachery alone, and not our own as well? No! Alas, my treason has also undone him—mine, and ours, and all of humanity. When he was hungry, and we did not feed him, or thirsty and did not give him drink, or naked and did not clothe him, or a stranger and did not welcome him, or a prisoner and did not visit him, we betrayed him; when we prayed, “we thank you, God, that we are not like those over there,” we betrayed him; when we made the dollar large and the measure small, we betrayed him. He carried all our sins, for in sinning against God, we sinned against his incarnation. We denied him; we crucified him, we and the whole fallen world.

And so, seemingly, the world got what it wanted: God made man, tortured to death. All was well with the world, again: the rich and powerful returned to their homes and slept the sleep of the self-righteous, Jesus' followers in disarray and the crowds turned away from him. The only thing left, seemingly, was for the women to return after the sabbath to finish the burial of God's revolt against his own people. But it is this seeming wreckage which is the point, for as is attested from the beginning of scripture, it is the willfulness of his creatures that made this wreckage. Our desires are warped, perverted, hateful; our hunger is greed, our will tyranny, our anger vicious. We have made a world built on exploitation, contempt, abuse, and war, and seemingly cannot stop it, except with more of the same.

And so, at the cross, the world got its way, and God did not resist, for it is this very lack of resistance through which the battle is won. Good did not triumph over evil through a show of divine force; it triumphed by making evil irrelevant. Even as sin got its way, it lost, because it could only “win” by bending creation, in all its goodness, against its creator; and Jesus did not bend, but instead laid his limbs upon the cross, transfixed in seeming helplessness against evil's force. And thus he lifted all with him, as he was lifted up to die. We too are are helpless in the face of evil, both its victims and its perpetrators, and we cannot combat it on its own terms; but in faith, now, that is a different story. But faith means trust in the weakness of Jesus on Calvary, in this world, and faith means directing our actions towards the care of our fellows, friends, family, and foes alike, but also trusting in God for our salvation. And it is that faith, made real through our works, that will bring us, on that last day, into the joy of the resurrection into which we are baptized, when all evil is wiped away for eternity, and when the new Jerusalem is founded forever on the wreckage of the old, dead world of sin.

Disobedient and Defiling

Preached on 16 August 2020

In today's gospel, we come into the middle of one story, and leave with another. We pick up the first after Jesus has contended with the Pharisees again, their bone to pick this time being that, against tradition, his disciples do not wash their hands before eating. And Jesus condemns them once again for their hypocrisy and for making up rules to escape from their holy obligations, but then he continues into the statements we hear today. “It is what comes out of the mouth that defiles;” that is plain enough, isn't it? The lies we speak, the slander we utter, the excuses we offer: these are the pollution we spread. Our acts of infidelity, of wrath, of treachery, of contempt, of theft: these are what alienate us from God, and thus from life.

I would think that, for us, this observation is so ingrained and so obvious as to be hardly worth making, especially for the overwhelming majority of Christians who were never subject to the laws of Moses and its rules of ritual purity. And yet, in this world of sin, the opposite is so often taught. We live in an angry, deceitful, contemptuous, greedy age, in which lying, cheating, violence, and just plain rudeness are exalted. We have created a new American religion of Politics, with its own rites of ritual purity, and in its name spew all manner of invective. And then there is the other great American God, Money, for nothing must interfere with Sacred Business and Commerce. Now, Jesus spends a great deal of time preaching about money, and many of the parables use investment as a metaphor for the work of the kingdom, and he even commends a dishonest servant for using his cheating of his master in order to win him friends. But we cannot serve God and Mammon; greed in our hearts issues forth and defiles us as certainly as any other disease of the heart.

We are so enmeshed in this world of sin, that without the Spirit upon us, it would seem hopeless to prevent our self-defilement. And here the words of Paul as we have just heard them make a strange claim: that it was meant this way. One hears, in the story of the Jewish kingdom, a depressing litany of kings who did not do as they were commanded, and before that, the story of the Israelites on the way through the desert is, if anything, worse. And in the end, the kingdom was split, and then each part destroyed in turn; but as we are told through the prophets, the Lord God did not abandon his people. In time, they were gathered back to Judea, and then, in the reign of Herod, God became, through the Son, incarnate in humanity, and brought salvation once and for all. Their disobedience was against God's will, but their disobedience came to serve God's plan of mercy. Therefore, when we sin—for who can fail to do so?—we are yet made clean through Jesus, even we who are not of Abraham's seed, and our sin provides the occasion for the glorification of God through this mercy.

Which brings us to the second story. The Canaanite woman has the rare distinction of arguing with Jesus and winning. And she bluntly acknowledges that she is outside God's people, and yet Jesus extends God's mercy to encompass her. Or is it a stretch? Her argument, after all, is that God's grace is great enough to extend beyond his own people the Jews, to which Jesus agrees. But what is it that leads him to agree? It is her faith. Faith is what extends the reach of salvation; faith is the vehicle of grace. And ultimately, faith is what has brought all of us, Jew or gentile, into the body of Christ.

And yet, faith without works, as James says, is dead. By this he does not mean that we earn salvation through our acts, but that in knowing that it is what comes from our mouth that defiles, we seek what purity we can, in acts of worship not only on our lips, but in how we live, in charity and harmony with each other and those around us. Our religion must not be empty observance and pious sayings, but needs be manifest in every word and deed by which we help—or harm—those about us. Therefore, brothers and sisters, we do the work of the kingdom of God, and look to its ultimate fulfillment on the last day, when every defiling word and deed will come to reckoning.

The Cross, the Throne

On Tuesday the 24th of June, 2014, Elizabeth the Second, by the Grace of God of the United Kingdom of Great Britain and Northern Ireland and of Her other Realms and Territories Queen, Head of the Commonwealth, Defender of the Faith, was invited to sit upon the Iron Throne of Westeros while visiting the sets of Game of Thrones. She declined the honor, perhaps because she did not feel herself properly robed for the occasion; but I have read that it is the ancient tradition of her line that the English monarch does not sit upon foreign thrones. It might also be observed that occupancy of that seat of power tended to bode ill for one's survival prospects, but this did not discourage many claimants from fighting for it, just as Elizabeth's predecessors waged the Wars of the Roses to gain what is now her seat.

And the throne of Jesus? Our thoughts first turn to the images of the Revelation, in which the word “throne” appears forty-four times in twenty-two chapters. This is the testimony of John:

And I beheld, and I heard the voice of many angels round about the throne and the beasts and the elders: and the number of them was ten thousand times ten thousand, and thousands of thousands; saying with a loud voice, “Worthy is the Lamb that was slain to receive power, and riches, and wisdom, and strength, and honour, and glory, and blessing.” And every creature which is in heaven, and on the earth, and under the earth, and such as are in the sea, and all that are in them, heard I saying, “Blessing, and honour, and glory, and power, be unto him that sitteth upon the throne, and unto the Lamb for ever and ever.” And the four beasts said, “Amen.” And the four and twenty elders fell down and worshipped him that liveth for ever and ever.

And this is the prophecy of Isaiah:

In the year that king Uzziah died I saw also the Lord sitting upon a throne, high and lifted up, and his train filled the temple. Above it stood the seraphims: each one had six wings; with two he covered his face, and with two he covered his feet, and with two he did fly. And one cried unto another, and said, “Holy, holy, holy, is the LORD of hosts: the whole earth is full of his glory.” And the posts of the door moved at the voice of him that cried, and the house was filled with smoke.

This is kingship in our mortal understanding: the monarch of heaven and earth, whose glory is beyond human toleration; whose rule is absolute; whose power the angels make manifest from creation to the world's doom. The temptation to arrogate these to ourselves is so very strong: to rule over others, to demand worship and servitude, to revel in wealth and pomp is so very appealing, even consuming; and when poisoned by our sin, so very cruel and destructive. Besides those of nations and states, we make thrones of industry and commerce, that we may rule over the work of others and command the fruits of their labors; even in our households, we establish our tyranny. We lust after power, and thus subjugate others; we lust after goods, and thus make slaves whose labor we exploit; we lust after adulation, and demand toadies and sycophants. Our kingship is entirely of this fallen world: cruel, greedy, arrogant and tyrannical. The glory of the throne of heaven we cannot reproduce, try as we might. But there is another throne, not welded of swords as in Westeros, nor cunningly wrought of stone or fine woods covered in gold and gems as in halls of state. This throne is made of two rough boards and a few nails, and he who reigns from it was crowned not with gold or silver, but with thorns. He who hung upon it (for it offers no seat) was not there worshipped, but mocked; wielded no sword nor scepter of power and authority; received no comfort or riches beyond a drink of ruined wine, but instead suffered under the greatest physical cruelty the state could devise. This throne was not to be desired for wealth or power or renown, but indeed delivers only (as the world sees it) humiliation, helplessness, pain and finally death. It is the ultimate expression of the world's contempt for its king.

And yet in this throne, the cross, there is all the power of the ages. In the cross there is exaltation and victory, abundance and life without measure. The cross is more glorious than every royal throne, every boardroom, every presidential desk, every seat by which men and women lord it over others; and its glory is in precise proportion to the world's contempt. It is from the cross that Jesus, the Son of the Father Almighty, the Lamb of God, the Word made Flesh, reigns over this age, so that in the age to come the throne of the Most High may blaze with the glory of a creation remade through his death.

And John tells us, in the mystery he relates, that there are other thrones in the new heaven, thrones for men and women reborn in Christ. If His throne be the cross, so must ours also be, and therefore he calls us to take up our crosses and follow him. The path to salvation gives, not power, not riches, not comfort, but death to the old life of sin—and life to those who so die. Thus our reign on earth is one of sacrifice, of relinquishing the rule which we so very much desire. It is to give and not to seize, to serve and not to dictate; this is the rule we are given, and our realms are not ours to command and exploit, but instead belong to the weak and powerless and hungry and abandoned and despised to whom we are called to minister.

This is not to say that I think that a Christian is forbidden to be a politician or a business executive or a bureaucrat or any other position of authority and title. Jesus numbered among his followers members of the Sanhedrin, Roman officers, and others of privilege and power, and while he asked of one young man that the latter abandon his wealth, it is not something he asked of all. On the other hand, I cannot say the opposite either, for Jesus did after all say that a rich man's passage to heaven is like unto that of a camel through a needle's eye. But surely if we are wealthy, if we are powerful, if we have others at our command and service, the way in which we exercise such office must reflect the service and sacrifice Jesus made of himself. If we must command and accumulate, we must be mindful that in the end it cannot be to our gratification and magnification, but to God's. I note that for all of the Crown's wealth and panoply, Queen Elizabeth's job is to serve through taking her presence to her people, a duty that by all accounts she takes with great seriousness. Even on her own, literal throne she is merely the mouthpiece of others; it was thus an entirely appropriate symbol that she refused the seat of the murderous, arrogant tyrants of Westeros, mere prop though it may be.

The thrones we erect on earth are likewise but imitations, nay, idols of that of heaven. Our own rule is still sinful, for while we are still of this earth, we carry its taint even as we also manifest the glory of its creator; and that earthly rule shall perish not only as we do, but in the lake of fire which will consume all that is false on the last day. But we may, through grace, extend the rule of heaven as its ministers, by giving up our lives to its service, and walking in righteousness and holiness all our days. And in so doing, we may enthrone King Jesus in our hearts, where he may live and reign forever, with the Father and the Spirit, in glory everlasting. Amen.

Prayers and Bargains

For Year C Proper 12, using the Genesis 18 reading

We pick up from last Sunday's reading in Genesis, with Abraham speaking to the men, the presence of the Lord, as they prepare to go to Sodom and Gomorrah. And Abraham is concerned, because Sodom is where his nephew Lot is living. And thus we have one of the most peculiar prayers in scripture: negotiations for the fate of those cities, negotiations which seemingly are completely successful and yet which are in the end utterly futile. For the men arrive at Sodom, where Lot takes them into his house, where the men of Sodom try and fail to break in for the express purpose of raping the divine guests. Lot and his family are made to flee, and the two cities are made the, um, fire and brimstone standard of the Lord's wrath, becoming watchwords through scripture both of wanton and willful immorality, and of divine retribution.

Abraham's deal-making with God is not listed among the seven types of prayer which our church commends to us. We are most familiar with petition (that is, asking God to do things for us) and intercession (asking him to do things for others), and I suppose that Abraham's bargaining could be classified as some form of the latter. We participate in other prayers on a Sunday, even if we do not name them as such: adoration (that is, worship), praise, thanksgiving, oblation (which is to say, making offerings), and penitence are all elements found in our liturgy, and they too are all ways of praying. But as a rule, the church does not encourage attempting to cut deals with the Lord God, and in reading on the subject, one is inclined to agree that it is unwise.

As to how we should pray: first, Jesus gives us the example of the Lord's Prayer, as related in Luke rather than the more familiar version from Matthew. But it is set in a different context in this gospel, for in Matthew it is delivered as part of the Sermon on the Mount, in the center of a longer passage on praying in general. Luke, however, relates it very briefly, and then follows it with a parable on the efficacy of praying. The Father, he says, will hear us and give us what is good, an egg, not a scorpion, and not because we merit it. Indeed, Jesus say, if a man will give another what he asks for simply to get rid of his persistent begging, how more so will the Father grant us out of love.

It is a statement to justify faith, a statement of hope. But it is also one of the hardest statements of the gospel, because so often it seems that nothing is forthcoming, not even no. Now in Matthew we are told not to make a public spectacle of our praying, and several other commands besides, but even those are not enough to account for the many times we sit on our beds, and beg and plead with God, and receive a silence that is not even stony, but only empty. Over the years many have tried to explain this, to provide reassurance, and even to deny that it represents any scandal. I will do no such thing, but only return to the oaks at Mamre.

Abraham's prayer is answered, oh, yes, more immediately and personally than any of us have a right to expect. And the Lord God does not go back on his word. And yet, the men arrive at Sodom, and are accosted, and they all but drag Lot and his family out of the city. The divine wrath rains down, and Sodom is no more. For all the fashionable universalism of our day, the warning is always there, that we must show our faith through our works to be truly faithful, as James writes; else, there is the fate of Sodom, and of the tares harvested with the wheat.

But one last look at the parable. A man goes to his neighbor, and his neighbor grants his prayer. And is it not so with us? God's purpose is not carried out only in miracles; we ourselves are his hands (as St. Teresa wrote), and we are the answers to the prayers of others. If the poor are to get their daily bread, then it is we who are well-endowed who must provide it; they must not be forced to rely on manna from heaven. It is we who can comfort, and can heal, and nourish. It is we who can refrain from wrath, and contempt, and treachery. It is our sin that is the cause of many of the world's ills—indeed, from the teaching of Genesis 3, we are responsible for all of it. But as we repent and refrain from sinning, we are also advancing the kingdom, so that “your will be done” can be realized in our daily lives.

We are not always answered as we please; we do not always hear the answer. And yet we are reassured, there is an answer, if we would but talk to God, the God who knows our needs before we ask, and what in our blindness we cannot ask. Therefore, I ask of you, pray without ceasing, to the Father who sees all, and hears all, and loves all through his Son, Jesus Christ, in the power of the Spirit. AMEN.

Antique and Holy Advice

Beloved in the Lord: Our Savior Christ, on the night before he suffered, instituted the Sacrament of his Body and Blood as a sign and pledge of his love, for the continual remembrance of the sacrifice of his death, and for a spiritual sharing in his risen life. For in these holy Mysteries we are made one with Christ, and Christ with us; we are made one body in him, and members one of another.

Having in mind, therefore, his great love for us, and in obedience to his command, his Church renders to Almighty God our heavenly Father never-ending thanks for the creation of the world, for his continual providence over us, for his love for all mankind, and for the redemption of the world by our Savior Christ, who took upon himself our flesh, and humbled himself even to death on the cross, that he might make us the children of God by the power of the Holy Spirit, and exalt us to everlasting life. But if we are to share rightly in the celebration of those holy Mysteries, and be nourished by that spiritual Food, we must remember the dignity of that holy Sacrament. I therefore call upon you to consider how Saint Paul exhorts all persons to prepare themselves carefully before eating of that Bread and drinking of that Cup.

For, as the benefit is great, if with penitent hearts and living faith we receive the holy Sacrament, so is the danger great, if we receive it improperly, not recognizing the Lord’s Body. Judge yourselves, therefore, lest you be judged by the Lord. Examine your lives and conduct by the rule of God’s commandments, that you may perceive wherein you have offended in what you have done or left undone, whether in thought, word, or deed. And acknowledge your sins before Almighty God, with full purpose of amendment of life, being ready to make restitution for all injuries and wrongs done by you to others; and also being ready to forgive those who have offended you, in order that you yourselves may be forgiven. And then, being reconciled with one another, come to the banquet of that most heavenly Food.

And if, in your preparation, you need help and counsel, then go and open your grief to a discreet and understanding priest, and confess your sins, that you may receive the benefit of absolution, and spiritual counsel and advice; to the removal of scruple and doubt, the assurance of pardon, and the strengthening of your faith.

To Christ our Lord who loves us, and washed us in his own blood, and made us a kingdom of priests to serve his God and Father, to him be glory in the Church evermore. Through him let us offer continually the sacrifice of praise, which is our bounden duty and service, and, with faith in him, come boldly before the throne of grace.

The words I have just read to you come from your prayer book. They replace a set of three such exhortations from the previous book, the first of which was to be read on the first Sunday of Advent and of Lent, and on Trinity Sunday, and the other two to be read the Sunday prior to when communion was to be offered. In those days, before the eucharist was designated as “the principal act of Christian Worship on the Lord's Day and other major Feasts,” it was common that communion occurred perhaps monthly; but then, in Roman Catholic churches from medieval times until relatively recently, people commonly received only once or twice a year, though the mass was said every week.

In the middle ages, the people's part was to see the offering made, a theology rejected by the reformers; yet infrequent communion remained a feature of Protestant worship until the liturgical movements of the last century. I remember as a Presbyterian child attending communion only four times a year. But the reexamination of our rites which led up to the adoption of our current prayer book has overturned all that, so that weekly communion is the rule in most of our parishes. And thus, the typical Episcopalian, accustomed to a routine of Eucharists, week after week, likely finds this exhortation obscure, and its advice perhaps antique. Week after week, we come to church expecting to sing some hymns, hear some scripture and a sermon (hopefully brief), say the creed and some prayers, and then approach the altar for a fragment of bread and a sip of wine, with nary a qualm about the whole routine.

But perhaps we should be having qualms. The habit of weekly communion: this is commendable, as is any practice which cultivates prayer as part of life's pattern. But habit can become mechanical, and the weekly miracle can fall into the other kind of routine: ordinary, mechanical, lifeless. Paul writes that we who partake need to discern the body, or call down judgement upon ourselves. And surely Paul does not mean a literal vision here, for who among us can see divinity—or at that, who could withstand the vision? But equally surely, he must mean that our participation in the rite needs to go beyond simple consumption, and ought, within the bounds of your faculties, to be founded in an awareness of what it is that we do, with all the reverence and worship that this implies.

For consider this: for a moment, you will hold something of Jesus in your hand, and sip something of him from the cup. Christians over the years have argued exactly how this is so, and we Anglicans have refused to commit to a single theory of how this is so, which to my mind is a prudent reflection of the limits of theology as a product of human thought. I would venture to say that taking these theories too seriously may be condemned as fostering the factions and divisions which Paul condemned. But as a church we Anglicans have always held to the faith that Jesus is Really present: however spiritual, however material, however mystical, we do not hold communion to be only symbolic. Jesus is there, on the plate and in the cup, and Jesus is therefore in us, and we are united with him again as we are united in the church, which is also his body.

But even as these are truths, they are also images which can be made the objects of various sorts of idolatry. We can for example come to think of the altar rail as a sort of divine filling station in which we get our heavenly tanks topped off every week. And this much is true: we do need God every week, for we need God every minute of every day. But even to the degree that the Jesus is in the substance of communion, even to the degree that it feeds us, the analogy between His food and our daily bread tends to reduce the former to the latter, an ordinary transaction which we are wont to take for granted—especially the majority of us, whom I would wager never seriously want for nutrition.

Likewise, there is the risk of taking communion as a sort of religious insurance policy, so that we may go about the rest of our week indifferent to the gospel demands, secure (we think) in the armor with which our rites surround our souls. We sin, not in order that grace may abound, but simply because our routine includes a great deal of routine sinning, which we cannot be bothered to notice and or rein in. We know that we are good people, because we go to church and take Jesus into us each Sunday. Well, as you may recall, Jesus commended the Pharisees—barely—for their scrupulous observances; it was what went on in between that he condemned. We have improved upon this slightly, for we at least know that we hold the right moral and political and economic positions (as God appears to have taught us through the mouths of our secular leaders). But really, when examined seriously, our lives show contempt and hard-heartedness and lust and greed and every other sin on a daily basis. Yet we may be saved, but for the repentance which is not part of this routine.

It is this repentance which leads to a confession of sin have been made a part of the eucharistic liturgy. And the church, in her wisdom, has appointed that her priests may offer the grace of pardon not only corporately, but one-to-one. Indeed, in the larger church catholic, it has been the norm to insist that this be done in preparation for partaking. Anglicans have not made such a rule, but the rite has been commended, both in cases where a rite of personal contrition has seemed called for (as the exhortation suggests), and as a regular practice, seeing as how we sin as regularly. But at least we should approach the rail knowing and admitting our own failings, and also confident in the grace which washes sin away and makes us fit to stand before our God.

Therefore, I say this: if the words I read at the beginning sound antique, the instruction they give is ever current. We travellers through this modern century have not passed beyond their advice, but instead should heed these words all the more, in a world which teaches that God is neither there nor anywhere else, nor is sin of consequence nor of any reality at all. Tonight, and at each eucharist, I bid you take some time to pray before and after you approach the altar, and consider the implications of how you are fed with the substance of divine love, the holy food and drink of new and unending life in Jesus Christ our Lord.