Sisterhood of the Traveling Liturgies (Mid-week Reflection)

 Constantine, St. Helena, and the True Cross

 

The Sisterhood of the Traveling Liturgies

Holy Week begins this coming Sunday, called Palm or Passion Sunday in the Church’s calendar. Christians who celebrate these eight days all get a sense that these ceremonies are very ancient.  There is a lot to take in.

On Sunday April 1, we reenact the entry of Jesus into Jerusalem before his death by processing with palm branches, chanting “Hosanna, Blessed is the One who Comes in the Name of the Lord,”  and then will read a lengthy and moving Gospel on his sufferings and death.  

Varying liturgies and programs on the Passion are traditional Monday through Thursday in Holy Week, including the beautiful and solemn Tenebrae Service, and meditations on the Words of Christ on the Cross.   On Monday April 2, we will hear Haydn’s Last Seven Words of Christ with the Ariana String Quartet (which will also be with us on Palm Sunday). 

On Thursday April 5, we begin the “Three Day Liturgy” (Triduum) of Easter proper with a commemoration of the Last Supper and the first Eucharist.   We will recall Jesus’ instructions to his disciples at that meal to love one another (the “New Commandment” or “novum mandatum,” hence the name Maundy Thursday).  We sing the hymn Ubi Caritas et Amor, Deus Ibi est (“Where true Charity and Love are, God himself is there.”) We remember the example he gave them in this, by washing their feet, by washing one another’s feet.   We then have Eucharist, and finally remember his abandonment and betrayal in Gethsemane by stripping the altar, opening and emptying the aumbry (the Tabernacle where we keep the consecrated elements of the Eucharist), and leaving the Church in darkness.  We will keep overnight Vigil that night in the Church, with the reserved Sacrament for viewing and meditation.  Keeping with the solemn, stark tone of the Church after the stripping of the altar, we will keep the Sacrament in the Church on a simple paten (plate) and covered with fine linen in what is called an Altar of Repose rather than in an ornate Monstrance.

On Good Friday, April 6, we do not celebrate the Eucharist:  our focus on this day is the one, perfect sacrifice once made by Christ on the Cross rather on the repeated sacrifice of praise and thanksgiving that is the Eucharist.    During the Good Friday Liturgy, we will have Veneration of the Cross,  where we pay respects and give God our prayers while touching a large wooden representation of the instrument of Jesus’ death. 

In the Evening on Holy Saturday, April 7, we hold the long and richly symbolic Easter Vigil Service, which begins with a Paschal bonfire, a process of the Paschal candle, the singing of the ancient Easter hymn the Exsultet, a reading of scenes from our race’s salvation history, a service of Holy Baptism, and the first Eucharist of Easter.  On Easter Sunday morning, April 8, the three-day liturgy concludes with the Festival Mass of Easter Day, the greatest Feast of the Christian calendar.  

These rites are ancient, but do not all go back to the earliest period of Christianity.  Rather, most go back to the fourth century and two important but very different women who separately went on pilgrimages to Jerusalem and popularized the local Easter commemorations they found there.  

The first is St. Helena, the mother of the first Christian Roman Emperor Constantine, who as soon as Christianity had become a legal religion favored by the Empire in the fourth century went to Jerusalem to recover relics of the era of Jesus and the apostles.  She reputedly found the miraculously preserved Cross upon which Jesus had died and then provided for the building of the Church of the Holy Sepulcher over the site of his burial, and started a ceremony of publicly honoring the True Cross. 

The second is a relatively little-known Spanish nun named Aetheria or Egeria, who wrote a travelogue of sorts about a pilgrimage to Jerusalem she took at the end Fourth Century shortly after Helena had begun these traditions.  Writing home to her sister nuns, she told of a liturgy of shaking palm branches in the streets of Jerusalem on the Sunday before Easter as the bishop enters the city riding a donkey, and of other practices commemorating the events of that last week of Jesus life, including a large public rite on Good Friday giving honor and reverence to the Cross Helena had found, the Adoration of the Cross. According to Egeria,

“As the eleventh hour draws near … all the children who are [gathered at the top of the Mount of Olives], including those who are not yet able to walk because they are too young and therefore are carried on their parents' shoulders, all of them bear branches, some carrying palms, others, olive branches. And the bishop is led in the same manner as the Lord once was led… From the top of the mountain as far as the city and from there through the entire city … everyone accompanies the bishop the whole way on foot, and this includes distinguished ladies and men of consequence.”

Egeria's description includes the first eyewitness account of the practice of venerating the cross—in her case, the "True Cross" recently discovered by St. Helena—on Good Friday.  Awed at worship on the spot where Jesus is said to have been crucified, Egeria described carefully to her sister nuns back home everything she saw in what is now the Church of the Holy Sepulcher:

“A throne is set up for the bishop on Golgotha behind the Cross, which now stands there. … The gilded silver casket containing the sacred wood of the Cross is brought in and opened. … It is the practice here for all the people to come forth one by one, the faithful as well as the catechumens to bow down before the table, kiss the holy wood, and then move on.”

Holy Week owes many of its rites to these two women pilgrims, St. Helena and Egeria.    Other commemorations, like the Via Dolorosa or the “Way of the Cross,” and the fourteen “Stations of the Cross” also in part stem from them.    The accounts by both these pilgrims and travel writers sought to make the events of Holy Week available and accessible to people unable to make the pilgrimage to Jerusalem.  By creating the cult of the “True Cross,” and the practice of “Veneration of the Cross,” and popularizing the “Liturgy of Palms,” they both helped make the commemorations available to people far removed in time and space from the Jerusalem of Jesus, including us today. 

Grace and Peace,

Fr. Tony+ 

Draw All People Unto Myself (Lent 5B)

“Draw All People Unto Myself”

Fifth Sunday of Lent (Year B)
25 March 2012; 8 am Spoken Mass; 10 am Sung Mass
Homily Delivered at Trinity Episcopal Church

Ashland, Oregon  

The Rev. Dr. Anthony Hutchinson

Jeremiah 31:31-34; Psalm 51:1-13; Hebrews 5:5-10; John 12:20-33

Now among those who went up to worship at the festival were some Greeks. They came to Philip, who was from Bethsaida in Galilee, and said to him, "Sir, we wish to see Jesus." Philip went and told Andrew; then Andrew and Philip went and told Jesus. Jesus answered them, "The hour has come for the Son of Man to be glorified. Very truly, I tell you, unless a grain of wheat falls into the earth and dies, it remains just a single grain; but if it dies, it bears much fruit. Those who love their life lose it, and those who hate their life in this world will keep it for eternal life. Whoever serves me must follow me, and where I am, there will my servant be also. Whoever serves me, the Father will honor.  Now my soul is troubled. And what should I say-- `Father, save me from this hour'? No, it is for this reason that I have come to this hour. Father, glorify your name." Then a voice came from heaven, "I have glorified it, and I will glorify it again." The crowd standing there heard it and said that it was thunder. Others said, "An angel has spoken to him." Jesus answered, "This voice has come for your sake, not for mine. Now is the judgment of this world; now the ruler of this world will be driven out. And I, when I am lifted up from the earth, will draw all people to myself." He said this to indicate the kind of death he was to die. (John12:20-33)

God, take away our hearts of stone and give us hearts of flesh. Amen.

My second son David was very precocious.  He occasionally asked very hard questions. When he was about nine, he said, “Why did God have to kill his Son Jesus to pay for our sins? Doesn’t that make him a very bad Father? Why couldn’t he have just been bigger-hearted and forgiven us when we’re sorry? Isn’t that what he expects from us? Besides that—didn’t he forbid human sacrifice? And it all seems so unfair, even if Jesus agreed.”

I tried answering him by citing the normal “Law versus Mercy” and “need for an eternal atoning sacrifice” used by people who quote scripture without wrestling with it.  But David would have none of it,” “Look,” he said, “if God is really in charge of everything, he can make things the way he wants. So why did he make them so that he had to kill off his own Son?” 

It was several years before I got the tools needed answer his question: the doctrines of the Holy Trinity and the Incarnation, of God becoming flesh and dwelling among us in the person of Jesus.  These mean that in a real sense God the Father did not have to “kill off” his Son to satisfy some law he had set up.  

Rather, the death of Jesus on the cross “for our sins” was in fact God himself giving himself freely to heal us and rescue us from our own failings and shortcomings and all their effects. St. Paul phrases what he thought was going on in the life and death of Jesus in this way, “God was in Christ reconciling the world unto Himself, no longer counting against them their over-stepping of bounds, but rather giving to us what it is that reconciliation really means” (2 Cor 5:19). 

Today’s Gospel reading describes a scene that is a turning point in the Gospel of John. Several times previous to this, John has said that things we expect to occur in the story didn’t happen right then because, Jesus’ “hour had not yet come” (John 2:4; 7:30; 8:20).  With the arrival of Jesus in Jerusalem, and with the coming of Greeks asking to see him, suddenly Jesus declares that “the hour has come for the Son of Man to be glorified.”

The Gospels of Matthew, Mark, and Luke all portray Jesus’ suffering and death as the painful but necessary prelude to his being raised in glory from death.   But for the Gospel of John, Jesus being raised up on the cross itself is the moment of true glory. John’s Jesus in today’s Gospel uses a parable to describe this: “unless a kernel of wheat falls to the ground and dies, it remains only a single seed. But if it dies, it produces many seeds.”

The passage from Hebrews we read today says that “Jesus offered up prayers and supplications, with loud cries and tears,” for God to “save him death”  (Hebrews 5:5-6).  The three other Gospels—Matthew, Mark, and Luke—describe Jesus the night before his death begging in prayer in Gethsemane to be spared from the cross, and ultimately accepting “not my will, but thine.”   But John’s Gospel omits any prayer in Gethsemane. Rather he has Jesus say in today’s reading, “What shall I say? ‘Father, save me from this hour’?  No, it was for this very reason I came to this hour. Father, glorify your name!’”

Last week, we saw that John’s Gospel portrays looking to Jesus lifted up on the cross the means of salvation just as Moses’ serpent lifted on a pole was a means of healing.   Again, in today’s reading, John’s Jesus says, “But when I am lifted up from the earth,” that is, lifted up on the cross, “I will draw all people to myself." Just as Paul says God was in Christ reconciling the world to Himself, John says Jesus on the Cross draws all people to him. 

Now the fact is, some people get very uncomfortable when you point out that the four Gospels tell very different stories about Jesus, and that John's Gospel tells a story that is in great part at odds with the other three's version.

But I have always taken this as an occasion for great hope. You see, Christians were a diverse lot from the very beginning. The ministers of the Word and the Gospel writers who told these stories so close to the actual events made the stories their own and let themselves be moved by the Spirit in ways appropriate to each of them.

And the Church has not insisted that we harmonize this, or censor all the versions into one. The Church has let the four Gospels stand in glorious disharmony, wonderful diversity. “I will all draw all people unto me,” says Jesus here. That means the Church ought to have diversity, ought to have a variety of keys in which the Gospel tune is played.

Because of the Church's history of identifying heresy and trying to control it, we often lose sight of this. It is important to remember that as the early Church sought to define its faith, there were individuals who wanted to eliminate all diversity and possible disharmony in scripture. Some, like Marcion, wanted to get rid of the Old Testament. It was just too distasteful for him.  Others wanted to reduce the New Testament to a single theological viewpoint.  One of these was Tatian the Syrian who created a single harmonized Gospel (the Diatesseron) and wanted it to be recognized as Scripture instead of the Four Gospels the Church finally settled on.

The Church Fathers, seeking to truly reflect the deposit of faith given in the apostolic age, declined Tatian's offer and rejected his single Gospel along with several other Gospels that bore the marks of having come from a period after the first couple of generations of Christians. The apostolic faith thus defined included the diversity we see in the New Testament.

So how does this relate to how it is that that it was for us that Jesus died? 

Though the early Church defined our doctrine of Christ and the Godhead in numerous councils and the creeds that we recite to this day, and though it defined which books were reliably recognized as God’s Word and which ones weren’t, the Church never defined the mystery of Christ’s suffering on Cross. 

The undivided Christian Church has never defined its doctrine of the atonement.  The Nicene Creed says that it was "for us and our salvation" that Christ came down from heaven and became fully human, and that it was “for our sake” that he was crucified.  But it does not tell us how this was so.  In one of the earliest recorded statements of Christian faith, St. Paul quotes the tradition he had received from earlier Christians: “Christ died for our sins"  (1 Cor 15:1-5), but again, does not tell us what he means by this.  Does it mean, “as a result of how badly we treated him,” or “in order to accept the punishment for our individual violations of God’s Law,” or “in order to correct our tendency to go astray by his good example,” or “by accepting our lot of being subject to and part of an unfair world,” or something else? 

We Christians, in all our variety and diversity, have given various answers to the question.   Some today would say that substitutionary punishment is the only way this can be seen.  My nine-year-old son’s image of the child-abusing, murderous Father-God is, alas, all-too-common.

But it is wrong. My son’s questions ring true to me, and cannot be discounted as a naughty choirboy’s dirty joke. 

The myth of redemptive violence is common in our world today.  In movies, we want the good guy to blow away the bad guys and make things right.  In our foreign and military policies, we think that violence, applied in a smart and timely fashion, will fix things.  In our criminal justice, we think that executing a murderer somehow fixes things.   But violence does not make things right. 

I do not believe the doctrine that Jesus suffered violent punishment on our behalf, in our stead, to save us from getting it ourselves from an angry, vengeful Deity.   It is a twisted and wrong image, seen through the narrow and distorted lens of human limitation.

The birth, life, death, and bodily reappearance of Jesus in victorious glory after his death is actually the Great Mystery of Love Himself descending below all things to save, redeem, and heal his pitiful creatures from the nasty fix we find ourselves in.

And in this pain-filled yet joyous mystery, the Cross stands central. 

In a 10th century North African hymn, we see the way some Africans have reflected on the theme of today’s Gospel reading, the cross of Jesus as the moment when glory, salvation, and hope arrived for us:

The cross is the hope of Christians
the cross is the resurrection of the dead
the cross is the way of the lost
the cross is the savior of the lost
the cross is the staff of the lame
the cross is the guide of the blind
the cross is the strength of the weak
the cross is the doctor of the sick
the cross is the aim of the priests
the cross is the hope of the hopeless
the cross is the freedom of the slaves
the cross is the power of the kings
the cross is the water of the seeds
the cross is the consolation of the bondmen
the cross is the source of those who seek water
the cross is the cloth of the naked.
We thank you, Father, for the cross.

Note here that the theology of the cross is not one of sorrowful suffering, but rather of triumphant life even within suffering. And that is how St. John sees the “Hour for the Son of Man to be lifted up, to be glorified.”  While not minimizing the sufferings of our Lord nor the hardships each of us faces in this world, this theology of the cross is one of joyous and loving mystery.

As we begin our final preparations for Holy Week, Good Friday, and Easter, may we reflect on Jesus’ love for us, and see in it God the Father’s love for us as well.  May we be more comfortable with diversity and differences, with change and new things.  And, with Jesus, may we welcome the whole world, whom our Lord, this God on the Cross, draws unto Himself.

In the name of Christ, Amen.

Mid-week Message March 21 2012 -- Teilhard's Prayer

Teilhard de Chardin, S.J.

Mid-Week Message

March 21, 2012

Fear and Faith in the Aging

Recently, I have been making a lot of visits to parishioners who are ill, some of whom are direly ill and preparing to die. Again and again, I have seen how fragile our lives are, and how dependent we are on God and others for our well-being, health, and balance.    In extremis, in the depths of suffering, we often find ourselves challenged in our trust in God, but then find our trust reaffirmed when our hope in God is all that remains when everything else seems taken from us.  This is a matter that Fr. Morgan Silbaugh’s Thursday Bible Study, which just finished the Book of Job and now has moved on to the Book of Qohelet (Ecclestiastes), has seen again and again in those texts. 

Teilhard de Chardin was one of the great anthropologists and theologians of the early 20^th century.  He was one of the discoverers of the Peking Man pre-human fossils and the author of The Phenomenon of Man, one of the great progressive theological efforts to place Christian faith in the context of modern science.  Teilhard died in 1955 at the Jesuit House in New York City.  He died after a long degenerative dementia.  When he first encountered its early signs and knew that he was going to lose the intellectual skills that he so valued, he wrote the following prayer.  It expresses very well the interplay of fear and trust, of hope and faith in old age’s illness. 

When the signs of age begin to mark my body
(and still more when they touch my mind);

when the ill that is to diminish me or carry me off
strikes from without or is born within me;

when the painful moment comes
in which I suddenly awaken
to the fact that I am ill or growing old;

and above all at that last moment
when I feel I am losing hold of myself
and am absolutely passive within the hands
of the great unknown forces that have formed me;

in all those dark moments, O God,
grant that I may understand that it is you
(provided only my faith is strong enough)
who are painfully parting the fibres of my being
in order to penetrate to the very marrow
of my substance and bear me away within yourself.

Peace and Grace, 

Fr. Tony+ 

Snakes and Angels (Lent 4B0

 

Michelangelo's Moses and the Brazen Serpent, Sistine Chapel Ceiling Fresco

 

Snakes and Angels

Fourth Sunday of Lent (Year B)
18th March 2012

Laetare Sunday
8 am Spoken Mass; 10 am Sung Mass
Homily Delivered at Trinity Episcopal Church, Ashland, Oregon

   The Rev. Dr. Anthony Hutchinson, homilist  

Numbers 21:4-9; Psalm 107:1-3, 17-22; Ephesians 2:1-10; John 3:14-21

From Mount Hor the Israelites set out by the way to the Red Sea, to go around the land of Edom; but the people became impatient on the way. The people spoke against God and against Moses, "Why have you brought us up out of Egypt to die in the wilderness? For there is no food and no water, and we detest this miserable food." Then the LORD sent poisonous serpents among the people, and they bit the people, so that many Israelites died. The people came to Moses and said, "We have sinned by speaking against the LORD and against you; pray to the LORD to take away the serpents from us." So Moses prayed for the people. And the LORD said to Moses, "Make a poisonous serpent, and set it on a pole; and everyone who is bitten shall look at it and live." So Moses made a serpent of bronze, and put it upon a pole; and whenever a serpent bit someone, that person would look at the serpent of bronze and live.  (Numbers 21:4-9) 

God, Take away our hearts of stone, and give us hearts of flesh.  Amen.

When I was about 8 years old, I first heard in Sunday School the story from the book of Numbers we read today.  It was a scary story, not the least because of the snakes raining down from the sky, “fiery serpents” in the translation my teacher used.  The people of Israel had been “murmuring” against God and their religious leader, Moses, and so God punishes them.  The lesson my teacher drew from the story was clear:  don’t complain about things at Church, don’t disagree with your hierarchy, or God will rain fiery snakes down on you!   That approach to Church polity in the Church in which I was raised was one of the things that lead me into the Episcopal Church.    Of course, this was before there was any discussion about an Anglican Covenant! 

The Hebrew text here says Yahweh sent saraph snakes upon the Israelites.  This is probably a name for a type of poisonous snake.  Saraph means “burning one,” and that presumably was the effect of the snake’s venomous bite.  The word shows up in Isaiah as a name for a light-filled heavenly being hovering on six wings around the throne of God and singing Qadosh, Qadosh, Qadosh (Holy, Holy, Holy).  It is this from kind of burning one that we get the name seraphim for one of the orders of angels.

But it is not an image of a seraph angel that Moses places on the pole as a wonder-working anti-venom.  The copper figure is plainly identified as a snake in the text. 

When I heard the story as a boy, even then I knew that something was the matter in this story.  You don’t cure snakebite by looking at magic talismans.  And the angry, nasty Deity who sends flying snakes to punish you for bad-mouthing your Sunday School teacher seemed far, far away from the loving father of Jesus’s parables.  I expressed this to my teacher, but she got very upset, saying that we needed to accept God’s word without question, otherwise we’d end up like the children of Israel, buried in flying, fiery serpents.

When I told my father about this, he said that the story was indeed strange, but that the bronze snake on a pole was actually a prefiguring of Christ.  He pulled out the New Testament and read the passage from St. John we read today as the Gospel.  He added that the snake on a pole image was also known in the pagan world, and had been a symbol for the Greek god of healing, Asclepius, and that’s why it showed up on hospital and doctor offices signs.  “So not all snakes are bad,” he said, and then added, thinking of my run-in with the Sunday School teacher, “and not all so-called good things are good.”    Since the word seraph means an angel as well as a poisonous snake, I would rephrase my father’s idea a little more succinctly, “Not all snakes are bad, and not all angels are good.” 

I later ran into the story again many years later as a graduate student in Biblical Studies.  There I learned that the story had its origins in a Canaanite snake cult that was fostered in early Israel along with Yahwism until the great reforms of King Hezekiah in the eighth century B.C.E. associated with the promulgation of the Book of Deuteronomy.   There is ample archeological evidence of such a cult, associated with fertility and the cure of snake-bites.  We read in 2 Kings 18:4 that Hezekiah, “demolished local shrines, shattered the pillars” honoring Baal, “cut down the poles” honoring Asherah, and “smashed the copper serpent called Nehushtan that Moses had made, because up to that time the Israelites were burning incense to it.”    2 Kings and Numbers both have apparently taken an object of earlier Israelite snake worship, stripped it of it cultic associations, and placed it squarely in the context of the worship of Yahweh by giving it a founding myth of Moses healing the recalcitrant Hebrews with the copper snake on a pole.   

“Not all snakes are bad, and not all angels are good.”

Here was a pagan, idolatrous image that had been “baptized,” as it were, by the scriptural writers at the time of Hezekiah.  By pulling out the snake’s pagan fangs, they had made it a symbol of Yahweh’s healing power.   God approaches us where we are, and can redeem seeming bad things. 

We have seen such “baptism” of so called bad things often through the centuries.  Modern Christian hymnody started when, in the early years of the Protestant Reformation in Germany, Martin Luther and his followers created a new style of religious song, sometimes drawing on Gregorian chant tunes, but more often from folk songs and popular melodies.  These previously profane tunes were baptized and became the Lutheran chorales like "A Mighty Fortress" and Genevan psalter tunes like "Old Hundredth," still sung as hymns in churches today.  The style was so infectious that the style was adopted in part by the Catholic Reformation.

Yesterday was St. Patrick’s Day.  The historic Patrick did not drive snakes from the Emerald Isle, despite the legends.  Most scholars agree that a large part of Patrick’s success in bringing pagan Ireland into Christianity was his willingness to Christianize the old pagan Celtic religion rather than stamp it out:  carve crosses on old druidic pillars instead of pulling them down, build Christian churches and monasteries on Celtic holy places, recognized by the people as the “thin places” between this world and the spirit world.  Not all snakes are bad, and Patrick if anything probably turned them Christian instead of driving them away.  Elsewhere, even the great Christian celebrations of Easter and Christmas were originally pagan celebrations of the seasons that were baptized by Christian missionaries like Patrick as Christian feasts. 

So pagan practices can be redeemed, and snakes be turned into symbols of healing.  Not all snakes are bad.  The bronze serpent lifted up on a pole thus became a symbol of Yahweh’s healing presence.  It is this image that is taken by the Gospel of John and applied to Jesus lifted up on the cross.

If bad things can be redeemed, and turned into good things, what about good things?  If not all snakes are bad, are all angels good? 

Archbishop of Canterbury Thomas Cranmer, 

author of the first Book of Common Prayer

The preface of the 1549 Book of Common Prayer begins with these words, “There was never any thing by the wit of man so well devised, or so surely established, which (in continuance of time) hath not been corrupted.”  Cranmer was referring to the corrupted liturgy of the Roman Church in his day, and the need to reform it.  But the words, I think, have a broader application and also can be seen as speaking to the corruption of good ideals by any group.  Much of Jesus’ announcement of the arrival of the Reign of God was aimed at denouncing the corruption of the religion and faith of his age. 

Not all angels are good.  Buddhist darhma teaching gives this concept a very clear form when it discusses emotions that reflect God, what we would call virtues.  Each is seen as having a polar opposite, as well as an opposite that mimics but falsifies the virtue.  The polar opposite is called a “Far Enemy” of the virtue, while the distortion that mimics the virtue is called its “Near Enemies.” 

In mainstream dharma teaching, there are four principal divine emotions:  Loving-kindness, Compassion, Joy with others, and Equanimity. Loving-kindness is selfless good will and love for others.  Its polar opposite, obviously, is hatred or ill-will.  Its near enemy looks like love, but is distorted and sick:  it is selfish attachment or the so-called “love” that seeks to control and establish dependence.  Compassion is empathy and sympathy for others.  Its far enemy is cruelty.  Its near enemy is pity.  Where compassion looks on a suffering person as an equal, pity looks down on the sufferers, sees them as inferiors.  Joy in others is opposed by resentment or envy, while its near enemy is mere exuberance in social settings.  Equanimity is the ability to see and feel about yourself as you see and feel about others, and is what I would call humility.  It polar opposite is envy or jealousy while its near enemy is simple indifference, not caring about yourself or others. 

       

 The Fall of the Rebel Angels; right hand panel of

 Hieronymus Bosch's The Haywain Triptych, c. 1500

The Book of Revelation puts this idea of distorted goods into a mythical form when it talks about a war in heaven, when rebel angels fight against St. Michael the Archangel and his host, lose, and are thrown down upon the earth to become the Devil and demons (Rev. 12:7-9).  Not all angels are good.  

We are in the season of Lent, when we talk about repentance.   Repentance too has its near enemy.  Not all angels are good.  Jesuit theologian Gerard W. Hughes, in his gem of spiritual direction, The God of Surprises, says the following:

“True repentance frees us from self-pre-occupation because our trust is in God’s goodness working in us.  In his light we see our darkness.  False repentance immerses us in self-preoccupation.  We delight in what we consider our virtue but are irritated at our vice, refuse to acknowledge it and project it on others.” 

True repentance brings joy and inner freedom.  False, anxiety and defensiveness.  True, it welcomes and learns from criticism. False, it is touchy about and learns nothing from criticism. True repentance brings understanding, tolerance, and hope.  False, … a rigidity of mind and heart, dogmatism, intolerance, and a condemnatory attitude.  True, it shares God’s laughter and frees the mind to see the humor of all situations; false, it is overly serious and cannot laugh at itself.  In true repentance, a person feels drawn to God.  In false repentance, a person feels driven from God. (adapted)

Fr. Hughes applies this to the Church and nation as well: 

A Church with the spirit of true repentance will be concerned primarily with its mission, not its maintenance.  It will encourage the critical and mystical gifts as well as the institutional gifts of its members.  A Church with a spirit of false repentance will be primarily concerned with its own maintenance, whether of its own doctrinal or moral orthodoxy, or its prestige in society, and will emphasize the institutional at the expense of the critical and mystical. 

A nation with a spirit of true repentance will pay attention to the quality of life of all its members compatible with the quality of life of other nations.  It will abhor narrow nationalism.  A nation with the spirit of false repentance will be chiefly concerned with its own wealth, power, and international status.  And it will compromise religion to confirm its national security policies.   (adapted)

Sisters and brothers of Trinity, not all snakes are bad, and not all angels are good.  We need discernment to sort out where God’s grace can apply, and where we imaginatively and joyously expand the scope of holiness and grace.  We need discernment to distinguish between the divine and its near enemies as well.   Jesus, lifted up on the cross like that snake on a pole, stands ready to help us. May we seek God’s will in how we may best show God’s grace to others, and make the common holy, creatively redeeming the various snakes we might encounter in life.  And may we seek to sort out our angels, good from bad, and follow the better angels that guide us.  

 
In the name of God, Amen.