Gerard Manley Hopkins on Easter

 

Fr. Tony’s Midweek Message

Gerard Manley Hopkins on Easter

March 30, 2016

The few days after Easter are recovery time for clergy, liturgical servers, altar guilds, and Church musicians. We put a lot into the Three Day Liturgy, and we often are exhausted come Easter afternoon.  But it is worth it.  Thank you to all who contributed time, talent, and gifts to make Holy Week work.  Here is a wonderful poem on the subject by Roman Catholic priest Gerard Manley Hopkins: 

Easter

Break the box and shed the nard;

Stop not now to count the cost;

Hither bring the pearl, opal, sard;

Reck not what the poor have lost;

Upon Christ throw it all away;

Know ye, this is Easter Day.

Build His church and deck his shrine,

Empty though it be on earth;

Ye have kept your choicest wine—

Let it flow for heavenly mirth;

Pluck the harp and breathe the horn:

Know ye not ‘tis Easter morn?

Gather gladness from the skies;

Take a lesson from the ground;

Flowers do ope their heavenward eyes

And a Spring-time joy have found;

Earth throws Winter's robes away,

Decks herself for Easter Day.

Beauty now for ashes wear,

Perfumes for the garb of woe,

Chaplets for disheveled hair;

Dances for sad footsteps slow;

Open wide your hearts that they

Let in joy this Easter Day. 

Seek God’s House in happy throng;

Crowded let His table be;

Mingle praises, prayer, and song,

Singing to the Trinity. 

Henceforth let your souls always

Make each morn an Easter Day. 

Grace and Peace,

Fr. Tony+

Whom do you Seek? (Easter C)

Whom do you seek?   
The Rev. Fr. Tony Hutchinson, SCP, Ph.D.

Easter C
27 March 2016 8:00 a.m. and 10 a.m. Sung Eucharists

Parish Church of Trinity, Ashland (Oregon)

Isaiah 65:17-25; Psalm 118:1-2, 14-24;1 Corinthians 15:19-26 ; Luke 24:1-12

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

A few weeks after Easter last year, I went on pilgrimage to the Holy Land with my Anglican religious order, the Society of Catholic Priests.  I was moved again and again by the various sites we visited, dozens of them. It was all very meaningful, but I always had the haunting question of how many of the sites were identified by 4^th century pious imagination or actually had real claims to be where events took place in the first century.    

The most certain of all, I think, were the sites associated with the night of Jesus’ arrest.  Gethsemane still has 4 trees that were alive when Jesus prayed and was arrested there.  From the garden, it is about a 45 minute brisk walk down the Kidron Valley and up a long flight of stone steps from the first century that have been excavated and are still extant to the site of the High Priest Caiaphas’ palace: on a promontory across a valley looking out onto the Temple Mount and the Roman governor’s palace.   At the top of that flight of steps that a bound Jesus was forced to march up, there now stands the Church of Gallicantu, the Church of the Cock’s Crow.   In the stone plaza between the Church and the stairs there stands a statue of a rooster singing the morning and of a weeping St. Peter, where almost certainly that sad tale is set.  In the crypt of the Church, four or five stories down through 2,000 years worth of built up dust, rubble, and dirt is a warren of 1^st century cells carved out of the stone beneath the now long-lost palace.  When archaeologists excavated the crypt caves in the 1800s, they found 2^nd and 3^rd century Christian graffiti, still visible, crosses carved into their walls marking the site as one of early Christian special devotion.  Almost certainly, it was in one of these cramped, unlit, and forgotten pits that our Lord spent his last night before his death.

Standing in the lowest cell, I felt the claustrophic and pressing fear that the lights might be extinguished.  I could only imagine what fears beset Jesus there, knowing almost certainly what awaited him in the morning. 

We talk here at Trinity a lot about the Celtic idea of thin places: where the veil between this world and the spirit world is so thin that it is almost transparent.  We feel awe and inspiration in these glorious mountains around us and the nearby ocean, and realize that there is something deep beneath all this. We often feel it in places like the isle of Iona or Skellig Michael, or in the great cathedrals.  Many of us feel it in small intimate churches like Trinity.  It is thin places that give most of us the kernel of our faith, make us willing to listen to stories like those we heard today. 

But there are other thin places, places that touch the darkness rather than the light:   Vimy Ridge, in France, where hundreds of thousands died in trench warfare in 1916; Auschwitz, in Poland; the Road of No Return (for Slaves) in Benin; the Choeung Ek "Killing Fields" in Cambodia; Hiroshima and Nagasaki in Japan; the Pearl Harbor monument; the Memorial to the Victims of the Rape of Nanjing in China. That ancient little cell in Jerusalem, in its dark, dank way, participates in such dark thinness.

Our lives, as wonderful as they are, can be haunted by such darkness.  Just as the bright thin places give us glimpses of the joy and love beneath creation, these dark thin places point to the pain of human existence: war, hatred, famine, selfishness, abusive power, and ultimately death, the great leveler of all.   Think about this last week with murders in the name of God:  Grand Bassam in Ivory Coast; Brussels; Nigeria and Iraq, again. The U.S. political season sinks to ever-new lows:  fear and hatred of the alien, boastful pride, almost exultant bullying, lying, and willful disregard of demonstrable facts seem the currency of the realm.

The reality of that cell, of the unjust arrest, torture, and execution of Jesus touched me as I was in that dark, thin place.    In it I recognized an old acquaintance:  fear of meaninglessness, of random ugliness, and horror.  Fear that might makes right, that looking out for number one in the here and now is the only reasonable life strategy in a world where death is the final destination. 

I never felt quite the same connection to the events at the sites of the crucifixion, resurrection, and burial.  Perhaps this is because the Church of the Holy Sepulcher is located on sites identified only in the 4^th century by St. Helena, mother of Constantine, and have been politically controlled and contested hot properties ever since.   Perhaps it is because the actual stories of the crucifixion and resurrection in our Gospels include many elements that seem to be later meditations on and legendary narrative additions to the earliest apostolic preaching. 

Such preaching, dating only 20 years after the events, is found in St. Paul: that Christ died for our sins, that he was buried, that he was raised from the dead, and that he appeared to Cephas and the Twelve, more than 500 believers, to James and the apostles (1 Cor. 15:5-7).   

So I ask myself, where can I find a thin place that connects me to the resurrection like that cell connected me to Jesus’ death?  

Here in this theater town, Ashland, it is worth noting that today’s reading from the Gospel of Luke was the basis of one of the earliest precursors to modern theater.  One of the great liturgical texts of the Middle Ages was the core of the Miracle Plays performed in public spaces outside cathedrals in that era.   It is a dialogue between the Marys who come to the tomb and the angels who interrupt them: 

Quem quaeritis in sepulchro, o Christicolae?

The angels: Whom do you seek in the tomb, O dwellers in Christ?

Jesum Nazarenum crucifixum, o caelicolae.

The Marys: Jesus of Nazareth, who was crucified, O dwellers in heaven. 

Non est hic; surrexit, sicut praedixerat. Ite, nuntiate quia surrexit de sepulchro.

The angels: He is not here; he is risen, just as he foretold. Go, announce that he is risen from the tomb. 

Another Gospel and other forms of the Miracle Play add the line “why do you seek the living among the dead?” 

Quem quaeritis?  Whom do you seek?  If you are a dweller in Christ, why seek him among the dead?  We are no longer talking here about the historical Jesus, but the Cosmic Christ.   Do not seek him in his tomb. 

I think the thin place here for us in the Table that Jesus invites up to, where he said his body and blood, life-giving nourishment, are to be found.  It is found in the coming together of his followers to pray, encourage, and eat the gifts offered on that altar-table.  It is found in communion. 

Our Presiding Bishop Michael Curry said in his Easter message a few days ago: 

This week called Holy, the season called Easter, the remembrance of death and the realization of resurrection, this is not a fairy tale, but the revelation of ultimate reality.  Now the truth is it’s easy to dismiss or discount …  this as naïve, nice, but naïve.  It’s easy to dismiss it whether consciously or unconsciously as a great hope, a wonderful ideal, but not realistic in a world like this.  Maybe, parts of us I suspect wonder, maybe [only] the strong … survive, maybe might does make right, maybe you better look out for number one. I suspect we all share those feelings once in a while.

But, I have to ask myself a question.  …  “How’s that workin’ out for ya?”  How’s that workin’ out for the world?  The truth is, the way the world very often operates is not working out.  It’s not sustainable.  It’s not the way to life.  Jesus has shown us the way.  He has shown us that unselfish, sacrificial love, love of God, and love of the other, is the way to life.  That, my friends, is the ultimate reality.  And that’s not a fairy tale.

… Jesus … showed us what love looks like.  That’s what we call the Way of the Cross.  And that Way is the way of life and hope.  And when He died, His closest followers feared that maybe the strong do survive.  Maybe might does make right.  And maybe we better look out for number one.  ‘Cause maybe the world has won.

But three days later, something happened.  Unexpected.  Undreamed of.  Unheralded.  Three days later their world turned upside-down which is right-side up.  God raised Him from the dead.  And you could almost hear God thundering forth in that resurrection.  Love, in the end, love wins!  Love is the way!   Trust me!  Follow me!  Believe in me!  This resurrection is real!  This is not a fairy tale!

Sisters and brothers:  Christ died for our sake.  He was buried.  One and a half days later, he came forth again, and he appeared to his disciples. He appeared in such a way that they knew he was no resuscitated corpse no ghost, no dream, nor wish-fulfillment.  It was wholly unprecedented and the disciples clearly had problems finding adequate language to express what they had seen, felt, and experienced.  The details in the later stories only underscore this process.    

He was more alive than he had ever been, and more lively and free as a subject and actor.  This is why they quickly hailed him as Lord and God.   

Christ is raised.  And this changes everything in our world.   

In the name of Christ,  Amen. 

Hard to Believe Hope (Midweek Message)

He Qi, Risen Christ with Fish

Hard to believe Hope

Fr. Tony’s Midweek Message

March 23, 2016

Tomorrow is Maundy Thursday, the start of the Three Holy Days that retell in liturgy and story the compassion and passion of the Christ, and that great reversal of derailed humanity and nature, the Resurrection.    The story comes as a package:  last supper, passion, death, resurrection.  And in this, there is a great truth:  in the final analysis, we cannot separate our pains and sufferings from our joy. 

Madeleine L’Engle wrote the following about how hope begins in the despair of crucifixion: 

“But God, the Good Book tells us, is no respecter of persons and the happy ending isn’t promised to an exclusive club, as many groups, such as the Jehovah’s Witnesses believe.  It isn’t—face it—only for Baptists, or Presbyterians, or Episcopalians.  What God began, God will not abandon.  He who began a good work in you will carry it on to completion…  God loves everyone, sings the Psalmist.  What God has named will live forever, Alleluia!  The happy ending has never been easy to believe in.  After the Crucifixion the defeated little band of disciples had no hope, no expectation of Resurrection.  Everything they believed in had died on the cross with Jesus.  The world was right, and they had been wrong.  Even when the women told the disciples that Jesus had left the stone-sealed-tomb, the disciples found it nearly impossible to believe it was not all over.  The truth was, it was just beginning.”

I invite you all to observe a holy Three Days.  See you in Church. 

Fr. Tony+

For Our Sins (Palm/Passion Sunday)

“For Our Sins”
Palm/ Passion Sunday C
20 March 2016 8:00 a.m. Said and 10 a.m. Sung Eucharist

Parish Church of Trinity, Ashland (Oregon)

Isaiah 50:4-9a ; Philippians 2:5-11 ; Luke 23:1-49 ; Psalm 31:9-16

God, give us hearts to feel and love,

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

When my second son David was about nine, he asked me: “Why did God have to kill his Son Jesus off 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?”

 
I tried to give an answer, something like that of the Evangelical Alpha Course:  God is just and fairness demands that sin be punished.  We are sinners.  It was God’s mercy and love that demanded that he send Jesus to suffer such punishment in our stead if only we have faith in him.  

David would have none of it: “If God is really boss of everything, he can make things any way he wants. So why did he make them so that he had to kill his own Son?  It just isn’t fair, and it certainly isn’t loving.”   

I replied that Jesus and the Father enjoyed unity in the Godhead, and this meant that actually God himself was volunteering to die for us on the Cross because of his love.  No go: “Then why does Jesus pray, ‘Please don’t let this happen to me?’” 

David was thinking of the prayer of Jesus in Gethsemane.  He wasn’t alone in seeing the problem.   John’s Gospel, alone among the four, drops any reference to Jesus’s prayer in Gethsemane from the Passion story it has received.  Rather, just after Jesus arrives in Jerusalem in the triumphal parade of palm branches, Jesus baldly declares, “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!’ (John 12:27)

As we go into Holy Week it is important to remember that many of the images, affirmations, and thanks we express in these stories are symbolic, using metaphors, limping and imperfect, to express what is beyond our ability to conceive of, let alone express.

From the beginning, we Christians have seen the death of Christ on the cross as not simply a case of miscarried justice or persecution, but something much more.   St. Paul, writing just 20 years after Jesus’ death, quotes the apostolic tradition that he received from others and affirms, “For I delivered to you as of first importance what I also received: that Christ died for our sins” (1 Cor. 15:3-5) and “in Christ, God was reconciling the world unto Himself” (2 Cor. 5:19).  But Paul never says exactly how this was so.  And neither has the Church. 

The idea that the Cross was transferred punishment, Jesus tortured and put to death in our stead to satisfy the honor of, or placate the anger of a Deity demanding violence and blood, is never taught as such in the New Testament, nor defined by any of the early Councils of the Church.   The idea first arose in the late Middle Ages in the writings of St. Anselm of Canterbury.  In Anselm’s society, a feudal lord’s honor could only be upheld by a social equal.  For him, God became man because man couldn’t satisfy the debt of honor to God caused by human sin.  Anselm’s theory of Atonement is known as “satisfaction”; this later evolved into a doctrine of judicially transferred punishment.  But the feudal idea is still at its core.  The idea is not biblical, but it became a cornerstone of Calvinist and Evangelical doctrine. 

The hymn “In Christ Alone” puts it this way, “… on that cross as Jesus died, the wrath of God was satisfied, for every sin on Him was laid, here in the death of Christ I live. ”

I now reject this doctrine, root and branch.  It sees God as bloodthirsty and unrelentingly demanding violence as a way of fixing what is wrong with the world.   Further, it confuses and corrupts the idea of the self-sacrifice of Jesus.   The ancients never viewed ritual sacrifice as a transfer of deserved pain and suffering onto the sacrificial victim.  Sacrifice was never about suffering.  Rather, it was food offered to God to create a common sharing and reconciliation.  Jesus’ self-sacrifice in his pursuing the kingdom even at the cost of his own life is far from this.  Early Christians felt it was like a ritual sacrifice because in it God in Jesus shares with us and we humans in Jesus share with God, all as a means of creating communion and reconciliation between us and God.  Calling Jesus’ death a sacrifice was never intended to be some sort of sick expression of Mel Gibson-esque sado-masochism and suffering for suffering’s sake.

I would prefer that hymn read, “...on that holy cross so blessed, God’s love for us was manifest: our savior died as one of us, here in the death of Christ, I live.”    

When the New Testament says “Jesus died for our sins,” it does not means “died to pay the punishment for our sins” but rather, “died because of our human failings, our systems of imperial power, our desire always to divide and to scapegoat, and our violence.”

The New Testament uses many differing metaphors to try to get a handle on what Christ accomplished for us and in us:  

·      justification (declare or make morally upright),

·      salvation (rescue on the field of battle),

·      reconciliation (restoring a personal relationship),

·      expiation (driving away ritual impurity or 
            ‘covering over’ guilt),

·      redemption or ransom (purchasing someone 
            back from slavery or prison into freedom),

·      liberation to freedom (restoring full-citizenship 
           to someone)

·      new creation (being made anew)

·      sanctification (being made or declared holy)

·      transformation (changing shapes)

·      glorification (being endowed with the light 
              surrounding God)

None of these are completely adequate descriptions of what “Christ died for our sins” means.   But they all agree that Jesus’s death and resurrection is the great victory over what is wrong with us and the world, a mystery just too glorious to reduce to a single image.  

The fact is, the “wrath of God” describes more how our relationship with God feels to us when we are alienated from God than it describes God’s heart.   And it is we human beings who tend to think that violence can make things right, not God. 

In this light, our belief that Christ “died for us” takes on deep meaning. In Jesus on the Cross, we see God suffering right along with us, dying as one of us; in Jesus in Gethsemane, a human being alongside us, praying fervently with us, and, with us, not getting what he asks for.  

Today’s reading from Philippians is one of the earliest passages in all the New Testament. Paul quotes an early Christian hymn describing Christ lowering himself. Such emptying, kenosis, understands the Cross as part of the same act of God we call the Incarnation. 

Though Christ was in the form of God,
he did not regard equality with God
as something to be grasped at,
but emptied himself,
taking the form of a slave,
being born in human likeness.
And being found in human form,
he humbled himself
and became heedful to the point of death--
even death on a cross.
Therefore God also highly exalted him
and gave him the name
that is above every name...

Paul quotes this hymn to say we must cultivate the same mind that Christ had.  Kenosis is something we too must make a lifetime practice.  Empty ourselves, humble ourselves, become heedful and attentive in all things, even when it may lead to the worst possible outcome.  It is in emptying ourselves that we are filled, in being heedful that we find empowerment.   It is in losing ourselves that we find ourselves, it is in dying that we are born to life.

When it says that Christ was “obedient, even to the point of death on the cross” it is not saying that God willed the death of Jesus.  It is simply saying that Jesus accepted the inevitable.   The Greek word hypokuo means “to listen attentively” under the authority of someone or something other than ourselves.   If David asked me that question today, "Why did Jesus have to die?", I would answer, "because God become fully human in him, and all human beings must die." 

Attentiveness and kenosis means accepting hurt. But it is not about the suffering or the horror.  It is about the continued heedfulness through it all.   As Paul writes, it is about the mind of Christ: the Christ who emptied himself and left the realms of light to become one of us, and then beyond that, actually lowered himself beneath us all.

Kenosis says God emptied himself to become human, and then further emptied himself to descend far below what most of us humans expect.  Christ himself went beneath all things so that no matter how far we might fall, he is always there beneath us to catch us. As St. Athanasius said, "God became Man so Man could become god," or according to 2 Peter, that "we might become partakers of the divine nature" (2 Peter 1:4).   

Let us follow Jesus to dark Gethsemane and stark Calvary.  May the same mind and heart that was Christ’s be ours.  Thanks be to God. 

Being Present with Jesus (Lent 5 C)

Tatian the Syrian

Being Present with Jesus
Lent 5C
13 March 2016 8:00 a.m. Said Eucharist

Parish Church of Trinity, Ashland (Oregon)

Isaiah 43:16-21; Philippians 3:4b-14; John 12:1-8; Psalm 126

 God, give us grace to feel and love.

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

In the second century, there was a great churchman named Tatian.  He was converted to Christianity because he hated the messiness of paganism.   He wanted his new faith to be clean and orderly, and in an effort to help the Church, he took the four Gospels and digested them into a single reconciled account, the Diatesseron (the 4-fold story). It was wildly popular.  For over two centuries its text was read in Eucharist as the Gospel in the Eastern Church.  As an older man, Tatian veered into a weird sect that hated the human body and demanded celibacy from all.  When it came time in the fourth century to decide what books were accepted as the standard for faith, the Church in council decided that the Four Gospels themselves, and not Tatian’s Harmony, were to go in the Bible.   They had been uniquely authoritative from the start, and this was why Tatian had used them.  So the Church accepted Mark, Matthew, Luke, and John in all their messy disharmony and inconsistencies, and rejected Tatian’s consistent single Gospel.

Today’s Gospel reading is an example of the messiness that Tatian tried to clean up. It is a messy story, both in the scene that it describes and the various forms it has come down to us in the Four Gospels.  All four Gospels tell a story of a woman who anoints Jesus.  The story takes one form in Mark and Matthew and very different forms in Luke and John.

In Mark and Matthew the scene describes a prophetic act by an unnamed woman who anoints Jesus’ head with extremely expensive perfumed oil and thus proclaims him as the ‘Christ’ (or Anointed One).

In Luke, an unnamed prostitute in a very different setting performs an overwrought act of gratitude for being forgiven of her sins.  She weeps, the tears falling on Jesus’ feet.  She wipes his feet dry with her unbound hair, and anoints his feet (not his head) with the precious ointment.  

In John, the woman is named.  She is Mary of Bethany, sister of Martha and Lazarus, whom Jesus had raised from the dead.  Humbly standing at Jesus’ feet, she anoints them with the precious perfume and then wipes off the excess with her hair:  the act of loving devotion by a true follower of Jesus. 

A little background-- 

The ointment at issue is worth about $30,000 U.S. by today’s standards.   So the complaint about the waste of money found in Mark, Matthew, and John is not trivial. 

The unbound hair has social significance—a proper woman just did not appear in public with her hair unbound.   Luke clearly means it to identify the woman as a “sinner”; in John, it may just show that Mary is lost in what she is doing.

Matthew and Mark both have Jesus saying that wherever the Gospel is proclaimed, this story will be told “in memory of her.”  A measure of the misogyny of the times is that neither actually preserves her name.

The Gospel of Luke doesn’t name the prostitute, but in the verses that follow the story he mentions one “Mary of Magdala from whom Jesus had cast out seven demons.”  This is why many people, whenever they hear any version of the story, think that the woman is “Mary Magdalene,” even though the Mary in John is from Bethany, not Magdala. 

All these stories understand that this woman’s action is socially unacceptable, given women’s marginal status in that society.  This is true especially in Luke, where she is a publicly known sinner to boot.  Mark and Matthew see the woman as a prophet of the truth who sees what the so-called leading disciples (all men!) can’t yet see.  Luke sees her as a model for the penitent believer.  John sees her as a hero in faith.  But all describe her as expressing her emotions and devotion to Jesus in a totally over-the-top, socially inappropriate, and shockingly extravagant way. 

That’s why in all the stories someone complains about her.  The disciples in Mark and Matthew complain about the waste of money that could have gone to the poor.  The Pharisee host in Luke complains that Jesus can’t be a prophet if he is so unaware of the woman’s past that he lets her come in and actually touch him.  And Judas in the Gospel of John complains about the loss of money for the poor while the narrator tells us that what he was really after was his own cut of the money.    In all four, the woman’s act is extravagant, out of proportion, embarrassing, and questionable morally. 

But in all these stories, Jesus defends the woman.  He does not criticize her extravagance, but loves her for it.  The woman is an example of the truth in several parables, “The kingdom of God is like the case of a laborer who having found a treasure in the field, in his joy goes and sells everything he has and buys the field; or like the merchant who having found a pearl of great price, goes and sells everything and buys the pearl” (Matthew 13:44-46).   In accepting Jesus’ love, no cost is too much, no expression of thanks too extravagant. 

That is the point I want us to take from the story today.  We must be present, and give Jesus our whole being.  Standing back and taking on a critic’s role—that woman is a sinner!  Why was this money wasted and not given to the poor!—means not being able to be present for Jesus.   

We human beings seem to be hard-wired that we can either be present, active, doing something, living our life, or we can observe, analyze, criticize, and offer our commendation or complaint.  We might be able to shift back and forth between these two modes of being—doing or observing—very quickly, but we cannot do both at once.  Despite the commonly held view, we are not really able to multi-task.  Rather, we at best are able to single task in rapid order, switching between these modes.  That’s why texting while driving seems to make us about as able to drive as a person with three times the legal blood-alcohol limit.  That’s why one of the quickest ways to kill the mood of romance and love-making is to start to analyze what is going on and worry about how we are doing.   You can either do, or you can observe and analyze.  But you cannot do both at the same time. 

That’s the contrast I see in today’s Gospel between Mary and Judas.  Mary is in the moment, carried by her emotions, and acts extravagantly to show love to Jesus, to prepare his body for burial even before his last suffering begins.  Judas analyzes it, and offers his criticism.  And there is no quicker way to kill one’s experience of faith than to begin to criticize and offer judgment on how we or others act our their faith. 

Tears and extravagance are what each of us must give Jesus if we truly understand what he offers us.  The woman comes to Jesus and offers all she has, including her dignity.  Her ego and self-seeking are dissolved in the wash of tears and the outpouring of the costly perfume.  She comes to Jesus just as she is, with no pretense to herself, to him, or to others.   And, being human, there is plenty for others to criticize in her "just as she is."  

But Jesus sees her heart.  And he loves her for honesty, her sincerity, for her desire.   Her love reflects his love.  If it’s a waste of money, so be it.  If it’s inappropriate, embarrassing, or morally dubious, tough.  If its extravagance reflects in its own little way the extravagance of God's love toward us, good.  What counts for Jesus is the woman’s intentions, as flawed as she or they might be. 

Jesus’ defense of Mary is no excuse to ignore the poor, or think that Jesus did.  After a ministry focused on the poor he says, “The poor are always with you, but I am not always with you.”  Jesus is saying that caring for the poor is important, but must never be placed in zero-sum competition with caring for the beloved before you.

The fact is, maybe we do not have to get everything just right before the Lord accepts us or looks at us with favor.  He loves us so much that, like the father in the parable in last week’s Gospel, he will come out running with arms outspread if we simply turn to him. 

Tears of gratitude warm Jesus’ heart and refresh our soul.  The fragrance of expensive perfume, extravagantly offered by a humble heart, can fill not only a house, but the whole world.  Accepting ourselves and offering our whole selves, including our disabilities and weaknesses, to God is necessary for this to happen. 

Contrast this with those who look on with hard hearts and calculators, and criticize, who complain, criticize, and whine about the failings of those who wash the feet of Jesus with their tears, and anoint him with expensive oil just because it feels right to do so.    Contrast it with Tatian, who preferred a clean, harmonized Gospel, to the messy ones that God saw fit to deliver to us, and who preferred an orderly world filled with ascetics rather than real human beings. 

Let us all try to be a little more honest with ourselves and with God as we pray.  Let us recognize our failings and not loathe ourselves for them, but love and thank God all the more for delivering us from the hopelessness of life without Jesus.  Let us be a little easier on ourselves and more comfortable in the presence of a loving God.  Let us be extravagant in showing our gratitude. 

In the name of God, Amen. 

In the Midst of Life, We are in Death

St. Notker window, Kirche St. Martin, Jonschwil Switzerland

In the Midst of Life, We are in Death

12 March 2016

Homily preached at 2 p.m. Sung Rite I Funeral with Eucharist

For Eric George Bunn

Parish Church of Trinity Ashland (Oregon)

God, give us hearts to feel and love. Take away our hearts of stone,

and give us hearts of flesh.  Amen

The Benedictine monk was out in the monastery farmlands, working the fields.  Orare et labore “prayer and work,” described the monk’s days.  He paused, contemplating the beautiful Swiss scenery about him.  He noted lay workmen building a stone bridge, a high span over a deep chasm cut by the river running alongside the monastery grounds.  Long before the days of laws demanding safety harnesses for workers, the monk saw the workmen precariously pursuing their construction hundreds of feet above the abyss floor.  “That’s not safe!” he said to himself.  Then, the contemplation triggering his imagination, he realized, “but then, nothing is safe.  Life is terminal.  No one gets out of here alive. Those workman pursue their labor in danger, and earn their bread by courting death.”  The Latin words came to him: Media vita in morte sumus “in the midst of life we are in death.”

The monk was named Notker.  He was surnamed lovingly “the Stammerer” by his brother monks because of a severe speech defect that he had from youth.  Despite his impediment in speaking, Notker was extremely gifted in writing.  He developed the line that came to him and wrote an antiphon, using older liturgical fragments.  The anthem is still used in Rite I Burial at the graveside before the remains are committed to their resting place: 

In the midst of life we are in death;

of whom may we seek for succor,

but of thee, O Lord,

who for our sins art justly displeased?

Yet, O Lord God most holy, O Lord most mighty,

O holy and most merciful Savior,

deliver us not into the bitter pains of eternal death.

Thou knowest, Lord, the secrets of our hearts;

shut not thy merciful ears to our prayer;

but spare us, Lord most holy, O God most mighty,

O holy and merciful Savior,

thou most worthy Judge eternal.

Suffer us not, at our last hour,

through any pains of death, to fall from thee.

Notker I of Saint Gall died on April 7 in 912, his saintly feast day in the Roman and Eastern Orthodox calendars.  The Sarum rite, the usage of Salisbury Cathedral that is the basis of much of our Prayer Book rites, appoints this antiphon to be sung in Evening Prayer after the Nunc Dimitis during this time of year, the third and fourth weeks of Lent.   We will end our service today with the Nunc Dimittis as the final anthem.

Notker’s antiphon expresses an important Christian idea that was assumed for many centuries but that we seem to have sacrificed on the altar of modernity: that death is about life, and life is about death. 

The common modern and post-modern view is perhaps best summed up by Ludwig Wittgenstein in his Tractatus logico-philosophicus (6.431): “At death, the world does not alter but comes to an end … Death is not an event in life: we do not live to experience death” (6.4311).  This view, that death is the opposite of life, the annihilation of the individual person, and the final destruction of consciousness is the opposite of the Christian view, which has always seen death not as the end of life. In the words of our Prayer Book funeral service, “Life is changed, not ended.” 

Eternal life in Christian doctrine does not start at death.  Rather, it always exists.   We begin to participate in it as we hear God in our hearts and respond to Jesus’ call to us to follow him, knowingly or unknowingly.   Eternal life is timeless, but so overwhelmingly full of life that our biological deaths cannot touch it.  Death is indeed in the midst of life. 

Eric died relatively young and most certainly unexpectedly.  But he did not die unprepared.  Over his entire life, he responded faithfully to the sense of duty, the deep desire to pursue with vigor the course set for him to run, that God placed in his heart.  I think one of the reasons he preferred Rite I was the line at the beginning of the canon of the mass, that giving thanks to God “is meet, right, and our bounden duty.”  This touched his heart because it corresponded so well to his experience. 

Eric was one of those gifted few in our society who created jobs and wealth for others, through his passionate and skilled pursuit of his family development business.  For 37 years, he was a faithful husband to his beloved Georgia; he was a doting and dedicated father to his son Daniel; and foster father to many.  His home was a center of stability and hospitality for his larger family and community. 

Georgia told me that Eric reveled in visiting the great historic churches and cathedrals of the East Coast, Britain, and Europe, all with Georgia and Daniel in tow.   

An introvert by nature, he was always brought into community with family and associates by his sense of joy and wonder at it all.  I found him a kindred soul, a guy with a nerdish and wonkish streak as wide as my own.  But all was tempered by his sense of doing the right thing.   

Now he is one of those whom “we love, but no longer see.”  The separation will be hard for those of us who knew him and love him. 

Stephen King, in his novella “Rita Hayworth and the Shawshank Redemption,” says “Get busy living or get busy dying.”  The sentiment, as useful as it is in life-denying situations like prison or addictive/obsessive disorders, misses the point that living well makes us free to welcome death when it eventually comes for us.  The wonderful secret that Eric discovered in his youth is this:  if you live life as life is intended, you will find satisfaction and joy. Death is no longer something to be feared.  Inevitable, and painful for its separations and loss of so much joy we find in life, it nevertheless is still life, changed, not ended.  It is a fuller life, a more joyful life, and one which will eventually encompass all the good and joy that we may temporarily have lost.  When duty is honored and the love of Christ embraced, we begin to see our body’s dissolution as the old friend that St. Francis of Assisi called, “Sister Death”:  “Be praised, my Lord, through our Sister Death, from whose gentle embrace no living person can escape.”

In the midst of life, we are in death. 

This very traditional funeral, requested by the family, is a Mass of the Resurrection, a celebration of hope in the face of death, of confidence in the face of human frailty, and of grateful joy in the face of all it means to be human, good and bad. 

Thank God for such hope, confidence, and joy.  And thank God for our brother Eric.

In the name of Christ, Amen.