God’s Meaning, Intention, and Self— Fully Human
John 1:1-18
Homily delivered First Sunday of Christmas (Year B RCL TEC)
28th December 2008: 8:00am Said and 10:15am Sung Eucharist
Parish Church of St. John the Baptist, Seattle Washington
Readings: (Isa 61:10-62:3; Ps 147, Gal 3:23-25; 4:4-7; John 1:1-18)

God, let us not accept the judgment that this is all we are. . . . Inflame our hearts with the desire to change—with hope and faith that we all can change. Take away our hearts of stone and give us hearts of flesh. Amen. (adapted from Dorothy Day)

I am very grateful for Fr. Peter’s invitation to preach here this morning. Though I count West Seattle as my home in the U.S., I currently live in Hong Kong where I am a deacon in the Anglican/Episcopal Church there, the Hong Kong Sheng Kung Hui, preparing to be priested this September. I currently serve as a chaplain at the Cathedral of Saint John the Evangelist and a lecturer in Biblical languages and literature at the Anglican Seminary there, Minghwa Theological College.

My wife and I are visiting Seattle for the holidays to be with our children and grandchildren during the holidays. All the time we have been spending with three year old Emma and six month old twins Delia and Elsie has made both of us very thoughtful this Christmas about that universal human experience, babyhood. And our need to use borrowed vehicles and snow shovels has reminded us of how much relying on others makes you closer to them. Together, the experience has made me reflect on just what it means when we Christians worship the Baby Jesus.

Frankly, it is something of a scandal. “O Come, Let us adore Him,” we sing, without a thought about what we are saying. Worship a baby? Barely born and in diapers? (That’s basically what the “swathing bands” were for.) Worship a little creature with a brain that is just beginning to organize sensory input and is still years away from rational thought? How can this be?

But other lines of carols seem to have given the matter some more thought: “Veiled in flesh the Godhead see, Hail the incarnate Deity,” “Of the Father’s Love begotten, ere the worlds began to be,” and “God from God, Light from Light Eternal, Lo he abhors not the Virgin’s womb. Very God, begotten, not created. O Come let us adore him.”

Gerard (Gerrit) van Honthorst (1590–1656), Adoration of the Children (1620),
Uffizi Gallery, Florence. Italy.

The Gospel reading today is the prologue of the Gospel of John. It cites an early Christian hymn, whose rhythm and balance is clear once you remove the interposed verses that talk about John the Baptist. The text is the source of the Christian doctrine of the incarnation, and contains a sentence that sums the doctrine up: “And the Word became flesh and lived among us, and we have seen his glory, the glory as of a father's only son, full of grace and truth.”

The doctrine of the incarnation, of God becoming a human being, was a scandalous idea from the start. The basic problem is simple—we tend to define the word God by what we are not. We are contingent; God is sufficient. We are changeable; God is unchanging. We are masses of conflicting urges and desire, most of them selfish but none of them formed by a self that is in any way complete or whole. God is being itself, pure intention, pure love. We are incomplete and sick, God is wholeness and health itself. We are sinners; God is perfection itself. We can be pretty benighted and false; God is light and truth. How can these two polar extremes be reconciled, let alone combined?

The Church during the first six centuries of its existence dealt with these issues in a series of ugly arguments that are called the “Christological controversies.” In this discussion, the Church looked again and again to our text in John and to the description of Christ in Hebrews 4:15: He is wholly able to sympathize with our weaknesses because he was tested in every way, suffered every trial just as we—yet was without sin.

Icon of the Emperor Constantine and the Holy Fathers at Nicea.

The doctrine of the united Church—the one, holy, catholic and apostolic Church that we confess in the Creed—was worked out during those controversies and by those Councils. The Creed itself, together with the list of what books we accept as the Holy Bible, stand as the primary legacies of those Councils.

I can’t go into the detailed history and doctrinal differences here. What the Church gradually recognized is that in the person of Jesus of Nazareth, the Love and Power that brought the universe into existence and still sustains it embraced and took on in every way the weakness, limitation, handicaps, and contingency of being human. The Councils declared that Jesus Christ was fully God and fully Man, 100% God and 100% Human being. He was not a 50-50 mix, half God and half human being.

To those who stressed the oneness of God at the expense of the divinity of Jesus, the Creed states, “We believe in one Lord, Jesus Christ, the only Son of God, eternally begotten of the Father (that is, there never was a time when he was not thus begotten), God from God, Light from Light, true God from true God, begotten, not made, of one Being with the Father. Through him all things were made.” It is the Creed that the carol quotes when it says, “God from God, Light from Light Eternal,” and “Very God, begotten, not created.”

At the other extreme the Creed also sought to correct those who stressed the divinity of Christ at the expense of his humanity. Some believed that Christ was fully God and thus only seemed to be human. The letters of John in the New Testament condemn these people because they “do not acknowledge that it is in the flesh that Jesus Christ came” (2 John 1:7). Later Gnostics even split the human Jesus from the divine Christ, and pictured the unsuffering, unmoving Christ looking down upon Jesus on the Cross, laughing that people would mistakenly think that he, the Christ, had suffered. To all of these, the Creed states, “We believe in one Lord Jesus Christ, . . . he became incarnate (that is, took on flesh) from the Virgin Mary, and was made man. For our sake he was crucified under Pontius Pilate; he suffered death and was buried.”

Mural of the Emperor Constantine and the Holy Fathers at Nicea.

Popular Christian legends from those early years show some of the confusion that prevailed—many of the infancy Gospels rejected by the Councils for inclusion in the New Testament portray not a helpless, speechless baby Jesus, but one that can give his Mother sermons the day he was born and that as a child has an unfortunate tendency to miraculously kill off his playmates when they are mean to him and then equally miraculously to resurrect them when his Mother would tell him it was not nice to kill one’s playmates.

Against all these views, the Church teaches that as difficult as it may be to understand, Jesus Christ was both truly God and truly Man.

Reconciling the seemingly irreconcilable natures—divine and human—is only part of the problem, however. The changing ways people had of understanding the historical Jesus himself was the root of the problem.

It was only over time that the people around Jesus came to understand his unique character. Today’s Gospel was a key part of that process.

From fragments here and there preserved in the Gospels, we know that the people who actually knew Jesus while he was alive had no problem seeing his human nature--

In Mark 3 we read a story about Jesus’ family trying to get Jesus to come home and start acting normally after he began his public ministry. They do this because they believe he has gone insane. Later in the chapter we read about Jesus publicly disassociating himself with his mother and brothers and saying “Whoever does God's will is my brother and sister and mother.”

His family wasn’t alone in thinking that he was behaving in unexpected, if not inappropriate, ways. In Matthew 13 people from his home town wonder how on earth Jesus could be so wise and work such wonders, since he was just a local boy whose father, Mother, brothers, and sisters they all knew.

Even those who followed Jesus had a great difficulty coming to an understanding of who he was. When Simon confesses Jesus as the Messiah at Caesarea Philippi, this is seen as unusual. Jesus praises Simon’s acceptance of the witness of Heaven about Jesus’ identity by giving him a new name—Peter—that plays on the idea that such acceptance is the solid foundation of faith, (“You are a little stone—Petros, and upon this Bedrock—petra—I will build my Church…”)

It is about those who rejected Jesus’ mission because they could see only his human side that today’s Gospel says, “he came unto his own, and his own people rejected him.”

Clearly, Jesus’ bodily reappearance after what they all knew was his death made his disciples reconsider things and start reinterpreting what they had experienced with Jesus. After all, he was for many a close family member and friend who had said that somehow God was actively present in his person, who called God, “Father,” and said that their being right with God somehow depended on how they reacted to him.

In the Book of Acts, we read that shortly after Jesus’ death, reappearance, and final departure, his Mother and brothers had finally joined together with his disciples (Act 1:14).

Because of Easter, Jesus’ followers recognized that their Master was at the very least what the prophets of Israel had promised-- the ideal King of Israel anointed by God’s spirit to save his people and establish a kingdom of justice and peace. But this anointed one, or Messiah, had turned out to be not exactly what they had expected. He had not overthrown the foreign invaders, not brought history to an end, not set up the everlasting peaceable kingdom they had hoped for.

So their ideas of what the Messiah would have to change. They began to use one of the less common honorific terms for a king of Israel to describe him—Son of God. In the Psalms God says to the King of Israel, “You are my son, this day I have begotten you.” They now remembered that Jesus had repeatedly referred to God as “Father.”

They thus only came to recognize his true nature gradually, and as time moves on, they understand more and more, and the earlier they think it is that Jesus’ divine sonship was clearly established.

Saint Paul, whose writings are the earliest ones we have preserved in the New Testament, in about 50 C.E. says that Jesus Christ was “constituted as Son of God” as of his resurrection from the dead (Rom. 1).

About two decades later, the earliest Gospel, Saint Mark, says that the “beginning of the Gospel of Christ, the Son of God,” was at his baptism by John the Baptist, when God’s voice declared “You are my beloved Son,” the Spirit descended upon him.

Another decade or two later, in the late 70s and 80s, the Gospels of Matthew and Luke each tack on to the beginning of Mark’s story a couple of chapters of very divergent legendary material about the birth of Jesus.


But despite the unharmonizable differences differences in the legendary details, both Matthew and Luke agree in proclaiming the Jesus was Son of God from the moment of his conception in Mary’s womb.

You see the direction of the development? The more time goes one, the earlier it is that Christians believe that Jesus was constituted as Son of God: Paul says as of his resurrection; Mark, as of his baptism; Matthew and Luke, as of his conception and birth.

The latest Gospel in the New Testament, Saint John, was written around 100 C.E. Today’s Gospel reading says that it was not at Jesus’ resurrection, nor his baptism, nor his conception, that he was constituted as God’s Son. John says that it was always that way. Jesus was always in God and of God.

The hymn to Jesus Christ as the Logos, the eternal word of God, in John chapter 1 begins: “In the beginning was the word.”

This translation misses the richness of the Greek en arche en ho logos. Another way of translating might be, “At the start, at the root of all, the logos existed.” The writer is referring to a word with a long background and heavy baggage, both classical and Semitic.

The Greek word logos is where we get out word logo, our word logic, and our words analogue and dialogue. It means much more than just “word.” At its root, it means whatever it is that makes or conveys meaning or sense, whether in our minds or on our lips. The word logos in some ways includes the meanings of both the Latin words oratio “speech or utterance” and ratio “intelligence, rationality, sense.” Thus, a good way to translate the first verse is, “At the root of all things, there existed Meaning.”

But the Logos is not just meaning and utterance of meaning. In order to build a fence around the Law and avoid uttering “in vain” the name of God, Jews had begun to find ways of referring to God without using God’s name. The first action of God in creation is Genesis chapter one is speech. “God said, Let there be light, and light came into existence.” And so the creative active speech of God became one circumlocution for God proper, just as hashem, the name, did. But Dabar ha-Elohim “the word of God” became a powerful image of the power of God manifested in history and in personal lives as well. Later, the Aramaic term Memra “the word” became one the ways of referring to God as present, active, and discernable in the world.

I am sure that John has both images of logos, the Greek and the Semitic, in mind when he quotes this hymn about the logos who in the beginning is with God and is God.

The hymn says that the Word/Meaning/or Active Principle of God took on flesh and “dwelt” among us. The choice of the word “flesh” is almost certainly deliberate. In Semitic culture, basar “flesh” was the physical, earthy part of a person that you could see, touch, and smell. It was a key part of you, and not that separable from your mind or spirit. The symbol for a man to be part of the covenant that God made with Abraham was that he be circumcised in his flesh. For Greeks, sarx “flesh” was the changeable, impermanent part of a human being. For some Greek philosophers, it was the part that resisted reason and had a mind of its own, the part that I think we would identify by talking about addictive, obsessive, or compulsive behaviors. It was in this sense that Saint Paul had occasionally used the word—sarx for him sometimes is shorthand for that part of a human being that resists God’s intentions for us.

When the prologue of John says the logos became sarx, it means that Reason itself, Meaning itself, God’s Active Intention itself took on all it means to be a human being: all the limitations, all the doubts and fears, and the ignorances, all the handicaps.

The hymn softens this by adding “he dwelt among us.” The word used for “dwelt” is eskenasen: he “pitched his tent” among us. The image is of a temporary habitation, like the Tent of the Meeting or the Tabernacle of the ancient Israelites, where God Himself was made manifest to Moses. I usually translate it as “he dwelt for a time in our midst.”

The hymn adds, “and we saw his glory, as of the Only Son of the Father, full of Grace and Truth.” Perhaps a better way to express this would be “we saw his glory, as of someone from the Father who was absolutely One-of-a-kind, someone full of Grace and Truth”

It is here that for me, at least, the conflict between divine and human is resolved--Grace and Truth. For despite all our limitations, we human beings can on occasion transcend ourselves and open ourselves to Grace and Truth. On even fewer occasions, we can even become the instruments by which Grace and Truth can be given to others.

“We saw the glory of God made flesh, we saw the Glory of Meaning Itself placed within this apparently meaningless world—and we recognized that glory as Grace and Truth.”

Here is the squaring of the circle and the reconciling of the polar opposites—God revealing Himself as Grace--undeserved, unconditional, one-way love, and Truth—the acceptance of things as they are with a willingness to conform to things as they ought to be. It was in this that John says Jesus was recognized as the Logos from all eternity. But he adds-- Jesus was monogenes—one-of-a-kind. We occasionally can transcend ourselves. Despite all the limitations his humanity imposed, He is Transcendence Itself.

John affirms in his prologue that Jesus was in God, with God, indeed, was God from the beginning. This is part of larger effort in the Gospel to play down the earthly origins of Jesus and the patent humanity he enjoyed in order to make what really mattered stand out.

In John chapter 7, some of Jesus’s opponents complain that he could not be the Messiah because they knew he was from Nazareth, and they believed a tradition that the Messiah’s origin’s. Later in the chapter, other opponents say he cannot be the Messiah because they know he is from Galilee and they believe that the Messiah will be born in Bethlehem, the city of David. To the former, Jesus replies that the people around him do not truly know where he is from—he is from the Father above, and those about him don’t see this. To the latter, he does not say, “Oh yeah, well I was secretly born in Bethlehem, not Nazareth.” What he does say is this: “You have no idea where I am from.” Again, the point is clear: he is from above, from the bosom of the Father.

The hymn to the Logos ends by saying, “The law indeed was given through Moses; grace and truth came through Jesus Christ. No one has ever seen God. It is God the only Son, who is close to the Father's heart, who has made him known.”


In his Christmas Day sermon of 1611, the great Anglican divine Bishop Lancelot Andrewes commented on this chapter. Andrewes was a scholar, and was a major translator and editor of the King James Version of the Holy Bible, published earlier that year. This is what he said about the incarnation of Christ, the word being made flesh:

“I add yet farther; what flesh? The flesh of an infant. What, Verbum infans, the Word of an infant? The Word, and not be able to speak a word? How evil agreeth this!”

He uses the original Latin meaning of the word “infant,” namely, a person who is not yet able to speak, and thus portrays the Word made flesh as “the Word that cannot even speak a word.” There is something wrong in this to Andrewes: had he been speaking modern English, “how evil agreeth this!” would have been “This just isn’t right.”

The word that is unable to speak—Andrewes meant by this two things: the utter helplessness and powerlessness of God made man in a little baby, and the inexpressible depth of the revelation of God thus made.

Andrewes continues (I have updated his language a bit),

“And how was He born, how welcomed? In a stately palace, cradle of ivory, robes of estate? No, (here he borrows from the Gospel of Luke), but a stable for His palace, a manger for His cradle, poor clouts (rags) for His array. This was His fleshly beginning. But follow Him later on in life, it gets no better. Shivering when weather is cold; sweaty and faint when it is hot. Suffering hunger, thirst, and exhaustion. And is His end any better? It sums up his whole life—what is His flesh then? Scourged and beaten, black and blue, bloody and swollen, rent and torn, thorns and nails sticking in His flesh. When John says “became flesh and was made a human being” this is what the word “flesh” means. If the ever-lasting Word of God had been made head of all the angels, that would have been an abasement; to be a lesser angel, even worse. But listen to Old Testament passages applied to our Lord in the flesh that he was born to, “he was despised, rejected among the people,” and “I am a worm, and not even a human being.” “Born thus, clothed thus, housed thus, treated thus—this is as bad as it can get. He truly was among the lowest of the low. By thus being “made man” He was unmade. To take on this flesh, he had to lay aside much, and not merely play at lowness, but to suffer lowness by being low. I want you to think on this—why ever would He have done such a thing? Why such great indignity? What was it that made the Word thus to be made flesh? Certainly not some human motivation or principle. That already is flesh, and thus cannot provide a motive to become flesh. It was God alone, and in God nothing but love. Love alone did it. Love, as Saint Paul says, is not jealous, does not keep score, is not worried about status. And this emptying out of self is the core characteristic of love. This Love did not count costs, and thus did not worry about what flesh it would be made, but rather, how it would remake flesh.”


This helpless baby was God made one of us. We must treat all the helpless with the respect and compassion. The Ultimate Meaning of the universe found a place in human flesh, in the person of this speechless and helpless baby, who was only beginning to enjoy the good things life offers. But he was also just beginning to suffer everything that life can throw at any of us. Yet despite it all, he remained ever steadfast. This only Son of God offers us Grace and Truth, and gives us the chance to be adopted as Children of God. As helpless, pathetic fellow human beings, let us accept what he offers, and in Love offer the same Grace and Truth to those around us.

In the name of God, Amen.

A Voice in the Desert

St. John the Baptist

A Voice in the Desert
Isaiah 40:1-11; Psalm 85:1-2, 8-13; 2 Peter 3:8-15a; Mark 1:1-8
Second Sunday of Advent (Year B)
Homily delivered at St. John's Cathedral, Hong Kong
7th December 2008: 2:00pm Said Eucharist

God, let us not accept the judgment that this is what we are. . . . Inflame our hearts with the desire to change—with hope and faith that we all can change. Take away our hearts of stone and give us hearts of flesh. Amen. (adapted from Dorothy Day)

The readings for this Sunday and next tell us about the voice in the wilderness, John the Baptist. They see John as the forerunner of Jesus, the beginning of the fulfillment of the hope of the Hebrew Scripture: the hope for a day in the future when God will destroy and punish all that is wrong with the world and set up in its place a new world, one of justice, peace, fullness of life, and joy, where all that is right with our current world will continue, a world renewed and purified, where good things are no longer mixed with the bad as we see in most of our daily life now. In the Hebrew Scriptures, those who suffer under this world’s injustices and yearn for the good will rejoice at the coming Day of God as a Day of Vindication, Freedom, and Justice. Oppressors and those who oppose God, however, fear the Day of God as a Day of Wrath, of Burning, of Condemnation.

A key idea in today’s readings is the image of a messenger bringing the “good news,” or “happy tidings” of the nearness of this Day of God.

The Gospel passage opens the Gospel of Mark. It depends on a play on words. The word Gospel in Greek is euangelion, good news, happy tidings, a message of joy (whether a victory in war, and end to a war, or a royal birth). The word messenger in Greek is angelos (from where we get our word angel). Mark begins, “The beginning of the message of joy (euangelion) about Jesus Christ, the Son of God. As it was written in Isaiah (Mark also quotes Malachi here)—‘Look, I am sending my messenger (angelos) ahead . . . [to] prepare your way; the voice of one crying out in the wilderness: ‘Prepare the way of the Lord, make his paths straight,’”

Mark sees these words fulfilled in the appearance of John the Baptist, whose preaching in the wilderness of Judea near the north of the Dead Sea preceded the ministry of Jesus. Mark sees John the Baptist as the messenger sent before the Lord to prepare his way, a voice of comfort and joy, bringing a message of happy news, a gospel. In this sense his story is the beginning of the good news of Jesus.

But oddly, this picture of a happy messenger seems to be the opposite of the way John himself is actually portrayed. In all four of the Gospels, John is portrayed as a somewhat stern and forbidding character-- more a voice of judgment calling for repentance and amendment of life rather than a messenger of joy with glad tidings.

The contrast brings into sharp focus this question—how can a day of wrath and judgment be the occasion for joy?

Since we read these texts during Advent, we tend to use the two-fold nature of the season as a means of avoiding this key question. In Advent, we look back to the things anticipating and leading to the coming of Jesus in the flesh, his life, death, and resurrection. But we also look forward to the great and terrible day when Jesus will come again in glory, to judge the living and the dead, just as we affirm every week in the creed. Advent, then, celebrates both the once and future comings of our king. Because of this, we tend to think that it is all about then, either past or future, and not now. That is how we bracket away the question of why joy and judgment seem to be confused in these texts.

What we do is this: we lump all the happy feelings—the message of Joy—in with the first coming of Jesus. After all, in a couple of weeks, we’re going to be celebrating Christmas, and singing “Joy to the World,” “tidings of comfort and joy,” and “Peace on Earth, Goodwill to Men.” We wrap the stories of Jesus’ coming 2000 years ago in a package of warm and fuzzy sentimentality, and rob the stories of the real challenge and risk they presented when they were told originally.

The coming Day of Judgment, on the other hand, is not usually seen as a day of joy. It is the ultimate disaster—the end of civilization and history. It is the day when we who have pierced Jesus will look upon his glorious scars, recognize them as wounds we inflicted upon him, and weep. Even the old English name of the day—Doomsday—means for us a day of horror and doom and gloom, rather than its original sense of the day on which all scores are settled, all accounts cleared.

As a result, we tend to bracket out Judgment Day by placing it into what seems an almost mythological future, or at least to a future that just seems to get further and further away the more time goes on. And as to the founding of God’s country, the establishment of true and universal justice and prosperity, the setting up of the peaceable kingdom—we treat these as mere metaphors. It refers to the Church—after all, don’t we call it “God’s Kingdom on earth?” Or perhaps we use it to refer to our efforts at establishing social justice or economic fairness, political movements, after all, that only partially embody the ideals yearned for in the stories. In so doing, we cheapen the images and tame them, and make them available as tools for self-justification, or possible ways to sell our own political schemes or religious preferences.

But this is not really how we should react to these stories.

The Prophet Isaiah (from the Sistine Chapel ceiling frescoes by Michelangelo)

First, let’s look at the Isaiah passage. “Comfort, O comfort my people, says your God. Speak tenderly to Jerusalem, and cry to her that she has served her term, that her penalty is paid, that she has received from the Lord’s hand double for all her sins” (Isa. 40:1-2).

The setting is the end of the Exile in Babylon of the Jewish people. In 586 BCE, a great national disaster overtook ancient Judaism—Babylonian King Nebuchadnezzar II conquered and destroyed Jerusalem and transported its inhabitants en masse to Babylon. All that Jews had hoped for, their confidence that God would keep his promise that the Davidic royal house would continue uniteruppted forever, their desire that God would repeat against the Babylonians his miraculous delivery of the city against the Assyrians a century before, their hope that if they turned to God, God would turn to them and save them—all of this was crushed with the destruction of the city and the deportation of the nation’s leading classes.

In Babylon, Jews found other grounds to hope in God, and Judaism reformed and deepened. After the Babylonians themselves had been defeated by the Persians, a return to Palestine was possible.

The oracle starts as a dialog between God and the members of his court on high—the Hebrew verbs are in the plural, as you will notice from the King James’ version, “Comfort ye, Comfort ye, my people.” God is telling the angels to prepare things for the consolation of Judah: “Comfort my people, speak tenderly to them that their term is ended, that they have received double for all their sins.”

The angels are to reassure the Jews they are still God’s own, “my people.” God does not disown them, despite their sins. Their punishment is over, and they are now ready to be forgiven and restored to their homeland and Jerusalem.

An angelic member of the court now responds to God’s announcement of liberation and cries out, “In the wilderness prepare the Lord’s road, make straight in the desert God’s highway” (40:3).

The angels pronounce that the return will be easy and swift—symbolized by a highway from Babylon to Jerusalem that runs straight through the desert, with all the hills and valleys smoothed out. The exiles, being dragged in chains to Babylon, had stumbled and fallen over the high mountains, the deep valleys, and the dry desert on their way to a city they hated. Now, they are returning to the city that they love, but returning over a highway going through a country marvelously leveled by God—every valley shall be lifted high, and every mountain and hill flattened. “Prepare” and “make straight” means “to remove all obstacles.”

This return to Jerusalem is portrayed as the future Day of God. He not only makes the way easy for his exiled people, but he also expects his people to prepare for his intended kingdom (62:10) “The glory of the Lord shall be revealed, and all people shall see it together, for the mouth of the Lord has spoken” (40:5). God’s liberating work is not intended only for Judah, but for all peoples. Those nations will see the miraculous deliverance of God’s people from Babylonian bondage and their unlikely return. So they too will join in the celebration, and embrace Yahweh and his kingdom of peace, justice, and prosperity for all.

And here is where Second Isaiah’s commissioning begins. A member of the angelic host commands him to “Cry out”. And for the first time, the prophet speaks. “What shall I cry?” (40:6)

We expect him to cry out joy and happiness at God’s great act.

And he does not. Once he has found his voice, the prophet continues not immediately with a message of joy or comfort, but a pronouncement of the sorry condition we find ourselves in. “All people are grass, their constancy is like the flower of the field. The grass withers, the flower fades, when the breath of the Lord blows upon it; surely the people are grass” (40:6b-7).

Second Isaiah’s proclamation of judgment at the moment of joy and restoration provides a counterpoint to the question about why John the Baptist—who proclaims judgment and demands repentance—is portrayed as a messenger of joy.

HOW CAN WE REJOICE AT THE PROSPECT OF JUDGMENT? WHY PROCLAIM JUDGMENT AT THE MOMENT OF JOY AND RESTORATION OF HOPE?

Second Isaiah’s answer to this question is not “Rejoice. We were oppressed, and now the oppressors are getting their just deserts. Let’s take pleasure in their punishment, now at long last!” It is not the petty satisfaction of a child vindicated or a plaintiff recompensed.

It is also not “We were punished. What we have suffered is our just deserts! Now God owes it to us to restore us.”

It is not “How can I share this joyful news with my people? This Babylonian exile has proven to them how completely helpless, vulnerable and incompetent we really are.”

The Great Isaiah Scroll from Qumran (1QIsa)

Rather, he declares that all people are grass, not just those who are about that have the tables turned in their favor. His argument is about all human beings, regardless of their condition. “All people are grass. We are about as constant as wildflowers that last a day.”

His point is that the Exile has shown a truth that is universal about all people—even the Babylonian victors who carried the Judeans off, they themselves have been conquered in turn.

To be human is to be temporary. To be human is to have a life span than is shorter than your imagination. To be human is to fall short, to be imperfect, to be powerless about ultimate things.

Human glory passes away. But so also does human suffering. We in a very real way are all helpless, vulnerable, incompetent, and devastated. The fate we suffer is as variable as a wind, a breath from God.

In the most essential way, we are all victims of our mortal condition. This does not mean that the wrongs we commit, the oppressions we practice, are in any way less serious or in need of being set to right.

But it does mean that it just might be possible that the Day of God—the Day which will set all things right—in some way should be expected to benefit not just what we call “the wretched of the earth.” For in some ways, all are wretched.

Then comes the most powerful line in the story. Second Isaiah, or maybe one of the angelic host replying to him adds—“The grass indeed withers; the flower certainly fades– but the word of our God will stand forever.”

God’s word—his active meaning in the world, his meaning that acts in the world, his intention that spoke the universe into existence, that proclaimed to Pharaoh “Set my people free”, that created a people out of social outcasts and marginals, that word now proclaims return to Jerusalem as a sign to the whole world of God’s never-failing promise of assurance to all victims.

So the return to Jerusalem, to Mount Zion, is a sign of hope for all: “Get you up to a high mountain, O Zion, messenger of happy news; lift up your voice with strength, O Jerusalem, herald of good tidings, lift it up, do not fear; say to the cities of Judah, your God is at work here!” (40:9). “He feeds his flock like a shepherd; he gathers the lambs in his arms, and carries them in his bosom, and gently leads the mother sheep.” (40:11).

In this passage, the return from Babylonian exile is seen not so much as a release from bondage as God’s giving us a new opportunity to come to him and fulfill the measure of what he intended in creating us—to create upon the earth people, a nation and a worldwide humanity living in the way God calls us to live –God’s Kingdom on this earth. “The glory of the Lord shall be revealed, and all mankind shall see it together. For the mouth of the Lord has spoken.” (40:5).

It is the very fact that we recognize our helplessness and our hopelessness that allows the joyful news to make any sense to us. Only when we know we are grass, mere wildflowers, only when we have heard and truly believe, “you are but dust, and to dust you shall return,” can we truly hope for the salvation of God. Only then are we willing to do anything necessary to receive it. Only the hungry truly appreciate food. Only the downcast and the oppressed rejoice in news that finally things are being set at right.

The first letter of St. John says “in Love, there is no judgment.” That is true in every sense. If it is truly love, there are no conditions, and no implied standard against which you are being measured.

But the fact remains that we are so made that without a reciprocal condition-free response, without our total surrender, we cannot receive love when offered. And for most of us, the feeling of despair caused by judgment is a prerequisite for us to surrender to accept love. As St. Augustine says, those who have their hands full cannot accept a gift.

Second Isaiah transcends nationalism and sectarianism by seeing the return as not merely a national restoration or a religious rebirth, but also God’s act of invitation to the whole world. This is one of the reasons Mark uses it as a type to introduce the forerunner of Jesus, John the Baptist.

When we turn to the opening verses of Mark, we see how the theme has been adapted and expanded, both by the author of Mark and by the character of John the Baptist.

John preaches in the wilderness of Judea, near the north of the Dead Sea. He is within a few kilometers of the community that wrote the Dead Sea Scrolls, and there are clear links between him and that community.

The Judaisms of the period all agreed that ritual and moral impurity could be driven away by following the prescriptions of the Law of Moses—for many of these the remedy was to wash in pure water and wait until sundown. As a result, mikvehs, or ritual baths are common objects in the Jewish archaeological sites from that period. Since there were many gentiles interested in Jewish monotheism, and some of these wanted to become Jews, the various schools of Judaism of the period began to practice washing purification rites for people desiring to join to God’s people to purge the general impurity of living as a gentile. This was in addition to circumcision for men. Such proselyte baptism was basically another kind of ritual washing provided for in the law, albeit one practiced for the first time and as an initiatory rite.

A Mikveh from Khirbet Qumran.

The sect at Qumran rejected the validity of the Temple priesthood and sacrifices, and as a result practiced their own washings and purity rules. Simply being born Jewish wasn’t enough, you had to accept the right belief system and practice the right ritual system. As a result, it appears that they practiced some form of proselyte initiatory washing for even other Jews who joined the community. There is even a passage in the Qumran Manual of Discipline that says that this washing had to reflect a change of heart in the person if it were to be valid. It states that a person cannot become clean if he fails to obey God's commandments in addition to following the cleansing rituals. "For it is through the spirit of God's true counsel concerning the ways of man that all his sins be expiated," observes the Manual, "and when his flesh is sprinkled with purifying water, it shall be made clean by the humble submission of his soul to all the precepts of God."

Members of the Qumran community also had a clear hope for a cataclysmic future intervention by God on their behalf. Having endured centuries of foreign rule, these Jews longed for freedom from oppression, and their writings pine for the arrival of Israel's messiah. The Manual requires that those wishing to enter Qumran "shall go into the wilderness to prepare there the way of Him; as it is written, Prepare in the wilderness the way of the Lord, make straight in the desert a path for our God."

It is this same passage from Isaiah that Mark quotes and applies to John the Baptist, and in a way very reminiscent of how the Dead Sea Scrolls quote Hebrew Scripture.

John was baptizing in the Jordan just a few kilometers from the Qumran mother House. The fact that both John and the Qumran covenanters fled to the desert to escape what they saw as the corruption and false religion of Jerusalem stems from the importance of the image of the desert in Hebrew biblical history. It was where God met with his people and/or with the “man of God” to help form and shape him into the one God had called him to be. God meets Moses in the desert (Exodus 2:11—4:31), and purifies his people there as they wander for 40 years after the Exodus. He meets Elijah there (I Kings 19:1-18).

And the wilderness is important in another sense. The wilderness represents the “periphery”, the “margins”, the “edge of the world” to Jew and Gentile alike. To Jews, the hub of the world where everything of significance happened was Jerusalem. And the center of Jerusalem was the Temple. It was the Temple that was the symbol to all Jews, not only of the religious center of worldwide Judaism, but its political and economic center, as well. It was the abode of those who were the leaders of Israel and of the systems that both governed Israel and set the priorities of the Jewish presence in society. If the center had become corrupted, it was only from the periphery that reform could come.

St. John the Baptist

It is here that John appears, nearly as a wild man, clothed in camel hair and a leather belt, eating wild honey and locusts. He preaches a “baptism of repentance unto the forgiveness of sins.” A better way to translate it, I think, would be, “a washing or immersion signifying your change of heart that results in the setting aside of your sins.”

It is something like what the Qumran sectarians practiced, but popularized and meant for all, not a hermetic ritual into an exclusive sect. People flock to Jordan and crowds accept his teaching. But he is not preaching a cheap grace.

He charges the people he has thus washed to “go out and produce fruit worthy of repentance.” What he is saying is, “Go and produce tangible evidence in your acts that you have indeed had a change of hearts, a change of direction. It is only thus that your sins can be set aside by God and by you.”

In the gospels in Luke and Matthew, he is quoted as giving examples of what such tangible evidence is—if you are a soldier, don’t commit unnecessary violence and take advantage of people; if you are a tax revenue agent, only collect what is required and don’t skim the proceeds to line your own pocket.

I wonder what John the Baptist would say today if we asked him to give examples in our society of tangible evidence of a change in our hearts. Would he ask us to stop walking past beggars without assisting? Would he insist that we stop paying less than living wages to those we employ? Stop abusing spouses and children? Belittling employees or subordinates? Stop making fun of those who differ from us? Would he ask us to stop frequenting enterprises or buying goods that are based on the exploitation of others? Would he simply ask us to stop doing things that bother our conscience?

John applied this need to have a change of heart, a change of mind, a change of direction, to all, regardless of condition or family background. He says (again in Matthew and Luke) “Repent! Being Abraham’s children is not enough—God can raise up children of Abraham from the very rocks if he needed to! What is needed is a change of heart!”

Some would say that Mark has misquoted Isaiah, and that John is a very different figure from the announcer of the return from Exile in Second Isaiah. I am not so sure. We are dealing with typology here, with deep images with many resonances and layers.

The fact is that God is a God who acts. And when God acts, certain patterns and issues repeat themselves.

We must not delude ourselves into thinking that we do not need to repent. We must listen to the voice crying in the desert, “prepare the Lord’s way, Make his paths straight.” It is only by our recognizing our own wrongs and oppressions that we throw ourselves, again helpless and hopeless, on this God who speaks, acts, and saves, and tenderly treats his own as a shepherd treats little lambs. God had called us as his own. He will not abandon us. It is God who moves us in our hearts as we hear his voice. We must receive his gift and heed his call.

John knew that judgment and turning from our sin was not the whole story. He calls us to give tangible evidence in our behavior that we have indeed changed our hearts.

In all the Gospel accounts, he points to one who is greater than he is that will follow, one that will baptize not just with water but with holy spirit. Again, the parallel to Qumran is clear. What he means is his washing that shows a change of heart and results in forgiveness or setting aside of sin can only purge away guilt. But what is needed is more, the actual power to live as God wants us to live. It is for that greater messenger, whose sandal straps John is seen as saying he is unworthy to untie, that he is preparing the way.

In this season of Advent, several prayers are useful in helping us hear the solemn warning, that voice of judgment that is at the same time a messenger of joy. I read some here by way of reminder for us all [taken from the Oxford Book of Prayers.]

Almighty and eternal God, who drew out a fountain of living water in the desert for your people, draw from the hardness of our hearts tears of compunction, that we may be able to lament our sins, and may receive you in your mercy.
Latin, late 14th century

O God our Father, help us to nail to the cross of your dear Son the whole body of our death, the wrong desires of the heart, the sinful devisings of the mind, the corrupt apprehensions of the eyes, the cruel words of the tongue, the ill employment of hands and feet; that the old man being crucified and done away, the new man may live and grow into the glorious likeness of the same your Son Jesus Christ, who lives and reigns with you and the Holy Spirit, one God, world without end.
Eric Milner-White, 1884-1964

One is the collect for the first Sunday in Advent, a collect we all should be repeating in our private prayers throughout the season:

Almighty God, give us grace to cast away the works of darkness, and put on the armor of light, now in the time of this mortal life in which your Son Jesus Christ came to visit us in great humility; that in the last day, when he shall come again in his glorious majesty to judge both the living and the dead, we may rise to the life immortal; through him who lives and reigns with you and the Holy Spirit, one God, now and for ever. Amen

Finally, perhaps the simplest and most important prayer of all,

Lord Jesus, Son of God, Have Mercy on Me, a Sinner.

In the name of God, Amen.

The Bible--A Mixed Bag

The Bible -- A Mixed Bag
2nd Sunday before Advent, 16 Nov. 2008
Choral Evensong, St. John’s Cathedral Hong Kong
CoE Year A Lectionary Readings appointed for additional Sunday Services
1 Kings 1.15-40; Revelation 1.4-18

God, let us not accept that judgment that this is what we are. . . . Inflame our hearts with the desire to change—with hope and faith that we all can change. Take away our hearts of stone and give us hearts of flesh. Amen. (adapted from Dorothy Day)

You have to be struck by the great variety of material that is found in what we call the Holy Bible. There are legal codes. There is religious history and the retelling of legends (sometimes multiple retellings of varying forms of the same story). There are chapters of genealogical tables of kings long dead, as well as of what appear to be legendary forerunners of humanity. In the Psalms, you find poems clearly meant to be recited in rituals of the Jewish Temple. There are also personal laments and prayers. There are stories—stories of noble people following God at great sacrifice, but more often, of typical ordinary people whose behavior falls far below even the minimal standards of “niceness” in today’s society. There is even an erotic poem, albeit one that the compilers of the collection later took to be religious allegory, the Song of Solomon.

The morality and faith expressed in differing parts of this hugely diverse collection of writings also varies widely. Frankly, we can on occasion be shocked at what we sometimes find there, even apart from the evil deeds narrated and clearly condemned by the narrator.

In the Old Testament, the holding of women and children as chattel to be used as one chooses is seen as normal and acceptable to some biblical writers. Genocide is portrayed as “holy” war required by God by another. Polygamy and concubinage by the forebears and great kings of Israel and Judah are seen in some texts as signs of prosperity and power—evidence of God’s favor. Other texts preach xenophobia and exclusion, if not outright hatred, of foreigners. The New Testament is not itself innocent here: some of its passages teach as a standard the subordination of women and slaves, and see both groups as chattels in part of a God-ordained order. Some of the four Gospels seem to seek to paper over Roman responsibility for the death of Jesus by blaming this example of the most Roman form of execution on the Jewish religious authorities; one even seems to apply this blame it to all subsequent Jews. None of these texts are examples of our best values at work.

Even in the Psalter, the poetic collection we Christians tend to see as devotional and use in our morning and evening prayers, contains some pretty harsh stuff. Psalm 137 says, O Babylon, you devastator! Happy shall he be who pays you back with what you have done to us! Happy shall he be who takes your babies and dashes them against the rock!” (vv 8-9). And each time I hear the exquisite Psalm 23, the Lord is my shepherd, I am jolted by the mean-spiritedness of the line “you spread a banquet table before me—while my enemies have to stand there and watch it!”

But there are moments of bliss and ecstasy in this collection as well, and great moments of unswerving and unsparing moral clarity. The very fact that it is other biblical authors who condemn the values held by some of them is evidence of God’s work in the world, and in the production of this collection of ancient writings. Throughout the biblical record, there is trust in a God who acts and approaches his people at whatever pathetic level they may be. There is hope in ultimate intervention by this God to change what is wrong in the world, and make things right. The New Testament Gospels tell the story of what they see as God’s definitive act to do this: the life, death, and bodily reappearance of Jesus after his death. Jesus’ teachings in the Gospels routinely condemn fear and hatred of the foreign, legalism and the use of religion to oppress others, and tell again and again of a loving God who pours out his love and grace upon all, regardless of their condition or origin.

When we read the whole of this baggy, loose, and at times contradictory collection, it becomes clear that it impossible to say that each and every statement in scripture reflects God’s will for us.

Some sayings, passages, or teachings there, though perhaps originally intended to express what the author thought was God’s will, are within the context of the whole collection clearly preserved as bad examples, or reassurance that even God’s people can be seriously flawed.

Others, in contrast, show with great clarity what God’s intention is: the parables of Jesus, the profound hope of the second half of the book of Isaiah, the stories of grace, love, and faith—like Ruth, or Job—within the larger context of human tragedy and horror. The stories of scripture, and the great variety of emotions expressed in the poetry of the Bible, tell us that it is O.K. to be human, but not O.K. to refuse to listen to God’s call to be something better than we are. Sometimes the change is immediate, like Saint Paul on the road to Damascus, sometimes a gradual process, like the gradual historical effects of God’s interaction with his people over time in terms of their belief systems.

Martin Luther talked about the need for a “canon within the canon,” when it comes to interpreting the Bible and applying it to people in present circumstances. What he means by this is that we need a sense of what books and passages should be given priority in interpreting the whole so that we can sort out and make sense of such inharmonious, if not downright contradictory doctrine and ethics that one finds in the Bible. Luther never would have argued this had he believed simply that all parts of the Bible were equally God’s word.

Scripture thus is not so much God’s thoughts written down, as they are the field notes of God’s people over the ages. They establish a dialogue with believers of all ages. It is in this sense of the Bible as a work of the believing community inspired and led by God, despite their weakness and occasional detours, that we, the believing community that produced and is also the product of the Bible, can affirm with the English reformers that the Holy Scriptures contain all things necessary for salvation.

When you look at the two readings this evening, we find two good examples of this diversity of writing style and theological framework. I’m sure that some of you while hearing them read wondered at their apparent randomness and seeming irrelevancy. Who cares about the court intrigues of a petty middle-Eastern king who reigned about 3,000 years ago? And what possible importance to us can the visions and dreams of a seer living under the persecution of the Roman Emperor Domitian at the end of the first century C.E. have?

But a common theme ties them together—God’s role in human life and history. It is an issue that remains important for us today. One has only to think of what a fix the American television evangelist Pat Robertson got himself into in 2001—trying to follow the OT prophetic model of diving God’s intention and purposes in events around us, Robertson said that the terrorist attacks on the World Trade Center and the Pentagon were punishment meted out by God on an immoral and hedonistic America. Public reaction was swift and unsparing. How could a man of God say that something so evil as deadly attacks on unarmed civilians be something that God had done? Robertson had to apologize within days, but one wonders whether he ever understood the bad theology behind his interpretation of events. More recently, I have heard some of my compatriots express their belief that the election of Barack Obama was, variously, either an act of God or the first move of the anti-Christ.

My point is that people still want to see God’s hand in history, but are very divided about how to determine where God’s hand is, and what God’s intention is.

The two scriptural texts we read this evening provide two very different examples of ways that believers in the past have answered the question “what is God’s role in history?”

Nathan, Bathsheba, Solomon and Abishag at David's deathbed.
Late Medieval Bible miniature.

The Old Testament reading about the accession of King Solomon to his father David’s throne is from the Book of Kings. This book is part of what scholars call the Deuteronomistic History—that great retelling of the history of the people of Israel from a religious viewpoint that takes up about a quarter of the Hebrew Scriptures. Starting with the book of Deuteronomy, it includes Joshua, Judges, 1st and 2nd Samuel, and 1st and 2nd Kings. It largely takes the form of narratives about the weal and woe of the nation. Its author sees the nation’s well being as depending wholly and directly upon its religious health. Its author believes that if you follow God’s commandments as found in the Law, you will be blessed directly as a result of this: you will become wealthier, healthier, more powerful, more secure, and happier in all things. If you disobey God’s Law, you will be punished for it: you will lose your wealth, your family, your health, your national peace and power.

Needless to say, this view has some problems with it—sometimes bad things happen to good people and cannot be explained. The wicked can prosper, and the righteous be oppressed and die unjust deaths. But this is the moral view taken by the Deuteronomistic History nonetheless, because in the author’s world, most religions believed there was little connection between one’s worship of a god—any god—and the need for one to follow ethical prescriptions. Religion in large part was ritual or magic, and the Deuteronomic History’s view God will bless you if you do what’s right and curse you if you do what’s wrong—though it may appear at times naïve to us and overly simple—was an important step in the historical development of ethical monotheism.

In the parts of the Deuteronomistic History dealing with David and Solomon, a major measure of the religious health of the nation is the centralization and standardization of Yahweh worship in a single location—the Temple in Jerusalem that Solomon was to build. This is seen as important to separating the worship of Yahweh from that of the various fertility and wealth deities of ancient Palestine. So the story about Solomon’s accession to the throne at David’s death was religiously very important to the author.

It is a story of court intrigue, hidden factions, and royal glory to the winners and death to the losers. To understand it, you have to go back up a bit and read the whole story.

David, at the height of his power, succumbed to his impetuous and lustful self by imposing himself on the young wife of a junior officer—a foreigner—in David’s army. Her name is Bathesheba, his Uriah. When Bathsheba becomes pregnant by David, David arranges for the death of Uriah and then marries Bathesheba. The prophet Nathan then condemns David for his adultery and murder, predicting that David’s reign would henceforth be plagued with bloodshed and disaster. The baby dies, and David repents. Bathsheba then becomes pregnant again, and gives birth to Solomon. He is clearly a minor son, child of a lesser wife. But as the narrator says, “The Lord loved him” and Nathan comes to name the child.

David’s proper heir is a man named Amnon, who in the telling of the story has all of David’s faults—impetuosity, lust—and none of his virtues. He rapes one of his half-sisters, Tamar. Her brother is another son of David named Absalom. Absalom plots revenge for two years, then kills Amnon. After a short exile, he is reconciled to David, and becomes David’s designated heir. But he can’t wait for David to die, and rebels, causing a civil war in which he himself is killed. David is sorrowful, because he loves Absalom, but causes a near mutiny among his own general staff when he is too loud in expressing his grief. His general Joab, who has done most of the dirty work in killing David’s opponents over the years, half shames and half threatens David into hiding hide his grief from his troops who have just fought a war against the dead rebel.

At the beginning of tonight’s reading, David is pictured as a dottering old man who is given a young woman as a caretaker. His impotence as king in his old age is reflected in the story by his not taking advantage of the caretaker sexually. Adonijah, Absalom’s younger half brother by another father, lays claim to the throne, gathering key people in David’s government to his side, the General Joab and the Priest Abiathar.

Nathan, the prophet who condemned David for his adultery and murder, goes to Bathesheba and encourages her to “remind” David that he had promised to give Solomon the throne. The way the story is told, it looks like the two may be reminding a half-senile old man of something that had never taken place.

The story doesn’t say why Nathan does this, but presumably it is because Adonijah, like Absalom and Amnon before him, is not “a man after the Lord’s own heart” like David. In contrast to these, Solomon is loved by the Lord according to the narrator. Again, remember that it is Solomon who will end up building the single Temple in the center of the country that the Deuteronomistic Historian wants to see putting an end to mixed and localized worship.

Nathan and Bathsheba succeed. David orders the Priest Zadok and Nathan to anoint Solomon king. That is where the reading ends.

King Solomon

What comes in the next two chapters is the bloody tale of Solomon consolidating power. Finding legal and religious pretexts at first, and then abandoning even these, Solomon puts Adonijah to death, deposes Abiathar from the Priesthood, and kills the General Joab, despite his taking refuge in the sanctuary and grasping the horns of the altar of Yahweh. He continues on until all of his possible opponents are dead or unable to cause him problems.

To be sure, the story is told from the point of view of the winner. If Adonijah or his people had narrated these events, I’m sure the story would have read quite differently. It is by no means balanced history. And its theology is flawed as well. The Deuteronomist always wants there to be a quick moral to the story-- a direct link between success and blessing and righteous living (or at least working effectively for what the narrator considers the right religious side). But in life there is no such direct link. Sometimes bad things happen to good people. That is what the Book of Job is all about.

Suffice it to say that the despite all these problems of the narrative, the Deuteronomistic author sees faltering, imperfect human beings as being used by God to accomplish his purposes. A major part of this is that they—despite adultery, fratricide, sacrilege, even murder—want to know what God’s will is and try to do this. In a word, both Solomon and David are men “after the Lord’s own heart” (1 Sam 13:14), despite all the weaknesses that become so evident in the horror of these chapters.

So what can we make of the story that is positive or spiritually uplifting? I suppose it is this—despite the wrongs of David, despite the wrongs of Solomon, both kings were able to maintain a good relationship with God, though they paid the natural price of their bad behaviors. Grace is hinted at here. God’s providence is clearly implied. There may actually be hope for people like you and me.

William Blake, The Four and Twenty Elders
Casting their Crowns Before the Divine Throne.
Pen and Water Color. 1803-05,

The New Testament reading is from the last book of the Bible, the Revelation or Apocalyspe of John, and has a very different approach to the question of God in history. The Revelation follows closely the canons and style of Apocalyptic literature. The Greek word apokalypsis means an uncovering or a revelation of what is hidden. Early Jewish writings like the Book of Daniel and the non-canonical Book of Enoch, as well as Christian writings like the Apocalypse of John, are included in the genre.

They are the product of times of serious religious persecution. They know all too well that bad things do happen to good people, sometimes for the very reason that they are good. They seek to explain God’s ultimate justice by a variety of means—the doctrine of a life after death where one will be rewarded or punished for one’s acts, good or evil, the doctrine of a day of judgment or wrath at the end of the world when all accounts will be settled justly, and the doctrine of this ultimate moral order breaking in on the current unjust world and through cataclysm and war washing it away.

Apocalyptic books are written in a code of puzzling and extravagant images so that their message can be hidden from the secret police of the day. For example-- during the 3rd century B.C. persecution of Jews under the Seleucid king Antiochus Epiphanes IV, openly saying that the Hellenistic kingdoms were rotten to the core and that you hoped God’s kingdom would come and destroy them could get you boiled in oil or worse. So the Book of Daniel, written at that time but set dramatically in the much earlier Babylonian exile, makes this same point by saying that the world kingdoms in history before the time the book was written are like a big statue., one with a gold head (Babylon), silver chest (Medes), bronze waist (Persia), iron legs (Alexander the Great), and feet of clay mixed with iron (the Hellenistic successor kingdoms) that would be smashed to bits by a rock “cut without hands” (hopefully the Jewish kingdom to be restored by Judas Maccabee’s revolt against the Seleucids) that would come rolling from the mountains, getting bigger and bigger until it filled the whole earth (Dan 2: 36-45). While the book’s hope for Maccabean success was fulfilled, its hope that this would be the perfect kingdom of God that would make all things right in the world clearly was not. It was ultimately this problem with apocalyptic hope that spelled its doom—Christians reinterpreted it in light of the life, death, and bodily reappearance of Jesus—seeing in Jesus the ultimate resolution of wrong in the world and fulfillment of all hope. After the destruction of the Temple in A.D. 70 by Romans trying to suppress a political rebellion based in Apocalyptic hopes and claims, Jews stopped paying attention to Apocalyptic and started focusing almost exclusively on interpreting and following the Law.

Contrary to a lot of popular belief, Apocalyptic books are generally about what was going on at the time they were written, and try to make ultimate sense of what at the time seems senseless and tragic. They are not predictive programs of “events to come” thousands of years in the future of those who wrote them.

The reading tonight is from the first vision in the Revelation of John, and sees the resurrected Jesus in Glory as the primary means of God’s righting of wrongs and realizing the hopes of the prophets and the writers of Apocalyptic. In this sense, it sees that the ultimate act of God in history is in the person of Jesus. But it also seeks to reassure Christians suffering under the horrible persecution of the Roman Emperor Domitian by adapting the literary form and code-language of earlier Apocalyptic. Angels fly from the presence of God; seals are broken; scrolls of the events by which God will solve all these problems are unrolled. In the end, the wicked do not prosper, and the unjust suffering of the saints is repaid. Applying this to us, I’d say we need to have faith and persevere in doing what’s right, regardless the cost and whatever problems this may cause us.

So what of the question of God’s acting in History?

We Christians believe that the definitive act of God and revelation of God occurred in the person of Jesus of Nazareth. We also believe that we must have a believing heart to recognize the grace of God, to recognize the call of God, to recognize the judgment of God, when it occurs in our life.

But we also have a lot of experience over the centuries that makes us wary of facile claims about any of these things by others. It is easy to claim that one knows the will of God; it is not so easy to actually know God’s will. It is easy to claim that God is on your side in a dispute or conflict; it is not so easy to actually be right in this claim. Kings and princes have, from ancient times, always known that getting a prophet or a seer on your side as part of your propaganda team was essential for ruling a country or winning a war. It is easy to blame your suffering or someone else’s on some wrong previously committed, and see it as punishment. But this does not make it so.

Jesus was once confronted with a question, as it were, from the front pages of the newspaper: “What do you think about those Galilieans—countrymen of yours I believe—whom Pilate’s soldiers killed in the Temple so that their blood mingled with that of their sacrifices? Jesus did not flinch at the question, but added another “newstory” of his own, “And what do you think about the 18 people killed here in Jerusalem when the Tower of Siloam collapsed and crushed them to death?” His answer on both was clear-- "Do you think that these Galileans were worse sinners than all the other Galileans, because they suffered thus? Or that those eighteen were worse than all the others so God made that Tower collapse on them as punishment? “ “NO.” He says. They weren’t any worse than other people, and it wasn’t necessarily punishment. “BUT, we should take a lesson from these stories. Unless we repent, we are certain, sooner or later, to suffer just as badly, or perish just as suddenly as they did.”

For Jesus, God’s hand in history primarily touches the human heart and the way we behave toward others. It beckons to us, one and all, to see how hopeless and helpless we really are, and tells us to surrender to God and learn from him how to amend our lives. “Take my yoke upon you, and learn from me. For my yoke is easy, and my burden is light.”

In the name of God, Amen.

Invocation Offered at the
Hong Kong Marine Corps Ball
On the Occasion of the 232nd Anniversary of the Corps
The American Club Tai Tam, Hong Kong
November 15, 2008

Almighty God, you have given us our good country, the United States, for our heritage: We humbly pray you that we may always prove ourselves a people mindful of your favor and glad to do your will. Bless our land with honorable industry, sound learning, and pure manners. Save us from violence, discord, and confusion; from pride and arrogance, and from every evil way. Defend our liberties, and fashion into one united people the multitudes brought together there out of many kindreds and tongues.

Judge of the nations, endow with the spirit of wisdom those to whom in your Name we entrust the authority of government, that there may be justice and peace at home, and that, through following law and conscience, we may become and continue to be a sign of hope and occasion for joy for all the nations of the earth. At this time of peril due to worldwide economic woes, bless the leaders of all peoples to discern how best to restore and create effective means of providing for the needs to the world’s people. In the time of prosperity, fill our hearts with thankfulness, and in the day of trouble, do not let our trust in you fail.

Lord of hosts, we commend to your gracious care and keeping all the men and women of our armed forces at home and abroad. Defend them day by day with your heavenly grace; strengthen them in their trials and temptations; give them courage to face the perils which beset them; and grant them a sense of your abiding presence wherever they may be. As we prepare to celebrate the traditions and fellowship of the United States Marine Corps this evening, we pray especially for each Marine here present and throughout the world.

Give us grateful hearts, our Father, for all your gifts, and make us mindful of the needs of others. All this we ask for your tender mercy’s sake. Amen.

Free Tickets; Expensive Event
(Matthew 22:1-14)

21st Sunday after Trinity (Proper 23), 12 Oct. 2008
Homily delivered at the Cathedral Church of St. John the Evangelist, Hong Kong

God, let us not accept that judgment that this is what we are. . . . Inflame our hearts with the desire to change—with hope and faith that we all can change. Take away our hearts of stone and give us hearts of flesh. Amen. (adapted from Dorothy Day)

In addition to being a cathedral chaplain here at St. John’s, I have another job where I regularly have to plan and organize, and often attend, big events. Here in Hong Kong, people often go to dinners, eat breakfasts, attend parties, and go sailing on junks with people they barely know, and we call these things “social.” But we are more accurate when refer to them as “obligations,” as in, “Sorry, I can’t attend. I have a prior obligation.” We are obliged to go to them because of our jobs: to network, to develop contacts and relationships, to grease the skids of our business. We all know these events-- some of us as guests; some as hosts or organizing staff; some as support staff, actually preparing or serving the food and drink, providing the entertainment, or cleaning up afterwards.

Make no mistake -- in a place like Hong Kong, “social events” are about power and money. How many of us find ourselves at events we might not have attended had the event not involved our boss, a possible major contributor, or a client? How many of us have dutifully served for hours as “party stuffers” – props to make the event look lively, full, fun, and attractive? How many of us have had to scramble to get more guests to come when we get an unexpectedly high number of “regrets” to an RSVP? How many of us have had to wear uncomfortable but stylish clothes, or funny-looking uniforms serving at such events, simply so that they “look right”?

Occasionally the events work and we actually enjoy them, which is, after all, the whole point—you make what might be an otherwise unpleasant task or adversarial relationship into something more pleasing and conducive to cooperation.

It is about just such a “social” event that today’s Gospel reading from Saint Matthew is about. Jesus recounts a parable—a comparison that tells us about our relationship with God by drawing a parallel with something from regular life—a detail, practice or story—sometimes mundane, sometimes unusual.

The parable as told here has a real edge, and at first blush appears to be about a bunch of seriously disturbed people. A king orders the senior members of his court to the prince’s wedding banquet. This provokes serious insubordination by some, who simply blow the invitation off, and outright rebellion by others, who proceed to kill the king’s messengers. At this the king flies into a rage and sends in the troops to wipe out not only the rebelling nobles but their city as well. He then orders his staff to scramble to find someone—anyone— to serve as party stuffers. Once the random passersby are seated at the party, the king notices that one of them isn’t wearing just the right attire for an event of such dignity. He again goes a little crazy, and orders his people to tie the poor man up “hand and foot” and throw him outside into the darkness, where there is nothing but “weeping and wailing, and gnashing of teeth.”

Matthew ends with a moral to the story: “Many are called, but few are chosen” that is, “the invitation may have gone out broadly, but only those who accept the invitation and come in proper clothes can stay for the whole party.”

Now over the ages there has been no shortage of capricious, erratic leaders who behave in ways that encourage rebellion, murder whole villages, abuse their staffs, and change their minds about guest lists and appropriate evening dress at the last minute. But Matthew is not trying to say that God is like one of these sadly familiar characters. His description of the original invitees’ bad RSVPs, both insubordinate and rebellious, and the bit about the poor man in the wrong clothes underscores that the story is about how the guests behave, not the king. It is about how we respond to God’s invitation and then act at the event.

The Gospel of Luke, written about the same time as Matthew, tells an earlier form of the parable, one that is also preserved in the Apocryphal Gospel of Thomas.

Here is how the original parable probably went:

A man gave a great dinner to which he invited many guests. When all was ready, he sent his servant to summon the guests. But one by one, they all began to give excuses for not coming. The servant reported this to his master, who in a rage commanded his servant, ‘Go out quickly into the streets and alleys of the town and bring in here anyone you find. I want my home to be filled for the banquet.’

When Jesus originally told the story, everyone knew that one of the great images of the Hebrew scripture for God’s saving act at the end of time was that of a great banquet. Even though there were plenty of passages that said, like today’s Old Testament reading, that this banquet would be for people of all nations (Isaiah 25:7), many of the religious teachers around Jesus taught that this would be an exclusive event limited to God’s people only.

Jesus replies to such a stingy image of God with parables. He points to the weather and says that God gives his rain and sunshine to both good and bad people alike (Matt. 5:45). He says this tells us about God’s love for all and should be a model for us in how we treat others. Jesus points to families and notes that when children ask for bread to eat, parents do not give them stones, or when they ask for an egg to eat, do not give them a scorpion. “If even average parents try to give their children good things, how much more generous will God be?” (Matt. 7:9-10; Luke 11:11-13)

Jesus’ actions matched his words. He regularly ate and drank with people that his religion told him would make him unclean. He had dinner parties with drunkards and prostitutes, much to the horror of Jesus’ “righteous” opponents. “It is the sick who need a doctor,” he would say, “not healthy people.” (Matt. 9:12)

But not everyone wanted a God as generous as the one Jesus described. They would quote scriptures that “proved” God was picky and exclusive. Jesus would reply by quoting other scriptures, where God looked more loving. He reserved his deepest anger for people he accused of “refusing to enter God’s door, and also barring the way to others” (Matt 23:13). He told other parables to explain why it was that despite God’s overwhelming goodness and generosity, some people were right with God and others were not.

One is the story of The Pharisee and the Tax Collector: a “religious” man goes to the Temple and prays, “Thank God I’m not like the sinners around me.” Beside him stands a traitor—a collaborator with the occupying Romans, a man who profits from the sufferings of God’s people. The traitor stands far off due to his shame. He won’t even lift up his eyes to God because he fears that God might give him what he deserves. “Have mercy on me, a sinner,” he prays. And Jesus says that the traitor went away right with God while the so-called religious man went away as stone-cold-hearted as he came (Luke 18:10-14).

It is in this context that Jesus tells the parable of the Great Banquet. His point is that God’s banquet is open to all, not just those originally invited. Some people, thinking they’re too important, may actually turn aside God’s love. Jesus, as a Palestinian Jew, loved and respected the Law that set his people off as God’s chosen ones. But he knew that the Law was not enough. Human beings could take even something as holy and pure as God’s Law and twist it into something ugly and oppressive. That is why he is so insistent, in his stories and deeds, on what St. Paul later calls grace and how we must be aware of our need for it.

The writer of the Gospel of Matthew is a good Jewish Christian who follows Jesus in all of this. But he is also lives in a world where the Church has already been opened up to gentiles, and trying to understand how God could have let Jerusalem and the Temple be destroyed by the Romans in A.D. 70. Matthew tends to blame this national catastrophe on the rejection of Jesus by the religious leaders—that is probably why he adds the nobles’ murder of the king’s servants and the destruction of their village. Matthew is also afraid that some Gentile Christians have taken liberties with very basic things that should not be taken advantage of. His detail about the proper wedding attire underscores that regardless how broad the Church has grown, there are still be standards for the gentile late-comers to God’s banquet.

There is nothing so holy or good that we human beings, left to our own resources, cannot manage to mess up. In his day, Jesus stressed that we can twist God’s Law into something ugly and oppressive. Matthew, in his, said we also can misuse God’s grace, and twist it into an excuse for cheap self-will. You know what I’m talking about. How many of us haven’t wondered at some point whether we might go ahead and do something we know in our heart is deeply wrong thinking “it’s O.K., I’ll repent later. God will accept me back.” Phillip Yancey, in his book, What’s So Amazing about Grace?, calls this twisting of grace into an excuse for sinning as “the loophole of grace.”

Just before and during World War II, Dietrich Bonhoeffer in his book The Cost of Discipleship used the term “cheap grace” to describe using God’s grace as an excuse for spiritual laziness or mediocrity in following Christ. He argued that we should dutifully and joyously follow Jesus out of gratitude for his grace. Such gratitude for expensive, precious grace on Jesus part requires a lifelong commitment to the way of the cross: self-sacrifice and service. Bonhoeffer had been studying and working in the United States but then returned to Nazi Germany in order to serve his fellow German Christians and witness against the wrong that was overtaking his country. Unrelenting in his witness, he was ultimately executed brutally by the Nazis.

It is precisely “cheap grace” and the “loophole of grace” that St. Matthew condemns in his image of the man caught without proper wedding clothing. This celebration can have no party poopers, no half-hearted acceptance of free tickets, no cheapening of the event by haughtiness of the original invitees or inattention by latecomers.

To summarize in other words: in order to accept the invitation, we have to be open to receive it. St. Augustine says, ‘God gives where He finds open hands.’ You can't receive the gift if your hands are already full, or are clenched tight.

In yet another parable, Jesus compares God’s kingdom to a narrow path and a tight gate, which at any given time only a few can manage to squeeze through (Matt 7:13-14). This is because in order to get through such a tight fit, people have to be willing to abandon all the baggage they are carrying, whether riches, resentments, self-will, sins, or even what appears to be good things if they are getting in the way.

This is a far cry from the loophole of grace, from “cheap grace.” Yancey tells of a friend who asks, “will God forgive me of the really bad thing I’m about to do?” After a lot of thought, Yancey answers, “Of course [God can forgive you.] . . . Forgiveness is our problem, not God’s. [But] what we have to go through to commit sin distances us from God—we change in the very act of rebellion—and there is no guarantee we will ever come back. You ask me about forgiveness now, but will you even want it later?”

Likewise, C.S. Lewis said that asking God to forgive our sins without also sincerely wanting to amend our lives is like asking God to change us without changing us. Cheap grace, the loophole of grace—these simply misunderstand what is at issue in grace, and what is at issue in sin.

What does accepting grace, freely offered, look like in practical terms? It looks like me admitting that I am helpless and hopeless. It sounds like the sincere phrase “I am sorry and I humbly repent.” It feels like a heartfelt cry, “I throw myself totally on the merits of a merciful Jesus.” None of these are payments in a transaction, or actions that merit God’s favor. None of them provide excuses to cheapen the price with which we were bought. They are simply acceptance of grace offered. In the long run, a life lived in that grace starts bearing what St. Paul called the fruits of the Spirit: we begin to follow Jesus in self-sacrifice and grace toward others.

I myself have known God’s grace. At a particular time in my life, all was hopeless and helpless, through my own “thoughtlessness, weakness, through my own deliberate fault.” Marriage was unraveling, health was fading; career was careening. I found that I had to surrender to God, and accept my own powerlessness. Then gradually, steadily, God worked wonderful changes. I am still far from what God wants. But I live each day in gratitude that I am not what I was.

I suspect that many of you have had similar experiences. If so, continue in faith and gratitude, and share the invitation to the party through your actions and words.

If you have not had such an experience, then please listen to this call to God’s banquet, you random passerby. The tickets are free. But they are not cheap. And neither is the celebration. The banquet is priceless, the bread the finest, and the wine, a vintage that makes our hearts gladder than any other.

Come to the banquet, and let’s try to wear the right clothes.

In the name of God, Amen.