Convention vs. Tradition (Midweek Message)

Fr. Tony’s Midweek Message

Convention vs. Tradition

May 31, 2017

There are pitfalls aplenty for any person who would cultivate virtue and avoid vice.  Jesus’ critique of the corrupted religious establishment of his day is summed up in the single word “hypocrites.”  Buddhist darhma teaching discusses the corruption of virtues into vices with its idea of “far enemies” and “near enemies.”  Each virtue has its polar opposite, but also an opposite that mimics but falsifies the virtue. Love has as its polar opposite, hatred or ill-will.  Its near enemy, looking like love but at heart distorted is selfish attachment, the so-called “love” that seeks to control and establish dependence.  Compassion’s opposite is cruelty; its near enemy, condescending and demeaning pity. 

Trappist monk Thomas Merton applies this distinction to Christian monastic and worship experience this way:

“We must carefully distinguish between tradition and convention… Convention and tradition may seem on the surface to be much the same thing.  But the superficial resemblance only makes conventionalism all the more harmful.  In actual fact, conventions are the death of real tradition as they are of all real life.  They are parasites which attach themselves to the living organism of tradition and devour all its reality, turning it into a hollow formality.  Tradition is living and active, but convention is passive and dead.  Tradition does not form us automatically:  we have to work to understand it.  Convention is accepted passively, as a matter of routine.  Therefore convention easily becomes an invasion of reality.  It offers us only pretended ways of solving the problems of living—a system of gestures and formalities. Tradition really teaches us to live and shows us how to take full responsibility for our own lives.  Thus tradition is often flatly opposed to what is ordinary, to what is mere routine.  But convention, which is a mere repetition of familiar routines, follows the line of least resistance.”  (No Man is an Island)

In a liturgical church like ours, we daily are faced with the question of how to breathe life and fervency into prayers and forms that we have received through the ages. It is easy to go through the movements only, think ourselves “traditional” and “orthodox,” but this is the near enemy of those very virtues.   It is also a temptation to tire of what we have received, and simply go off in the search for attractive and exciting “new” forms of worship.  This is the polar opposite of tradition.

In our worship as in all things, we must seek the genuine article and learn to identify its cheap destructive imitation or its sworn enemy.  It is important to rid ourselves of delusion and self-congratulatory images of how good, or kind, virtuous, traditional, or innovative  we are.  We likewise should eschew images of how mean, loathsome, wicked, heretical, or trendy we are.   The standard should always be the truth that Jesus calls us to, and where our choices and actions are leading. 

Grace and peace. 

--Fr. Tony+

Gone from Our Sight (Easter 7A)

“Gone from Our Sight”
Seventh Sunday of Easter (Year A)

 May 28, 2017
Homily given at 8 a.m. Said and 10 a.m. Sung Mass
Parish Church of Trinity, Ashland

The Rev. Fr. Tony Hutchinson, SCP, Ph.D.

Acts 1:6-14; 1 Peter 4:12-14; 5:6-11; John 17:1-11; Psalm 68:1-10, 33-36

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

Thursday was Ascension, the feast commemorating when the resurrected Jesus left the disciples after the forty-day ministry, going into heaven to be seated at the right hand of the Father.  Ten days later, next Sunday, is the feast of Pentecost, when the Spirit descended in tongues of fire and the life of the church truly began.

When I was a boy and I heard about the ascension, I pictured it very literally:  Jesus took an invisible elevator of sorts up, up, up until he was beyond the sight of his disciples.    The two angels came and added, “you saw him go that way, and that’s the way he’ll come back.”  I understood this to mean Jesus taking the celestial elevator down, down, down, back to us here.   The descent was accompanied with appropriate clouds and lightning, and angelic choirs providing an adequately stirring sound track. 

 

When I was eight years old (this dates me), my literalism ran into a problem named Yuri Gagarin, the first person to orbit the earth.  A Soviet Cosmonaut, he was used by his officially atheistic nation’s propaganda machine.  He was famously quoted as describing the earth from orbit in the heavens as a stunningly beautiful blue, and then adding, “I looked and looked but I didn't see God.”

 “Well of course,” I said to myself.  “He was up in the sky, not in heaven! He was in space, not where God and Jesus are seated!” 

That was probably the start of me moving from the literalist doctrines of my childhood denomination to becoming an Episcopalian.  I had learned in a small way that the Bible tells its truth mainly through stories composed of images and metaphors:  had Commander Gagarin’s heart been right, maybe he would have “seen God” (note the metaphor) in the stunning beauty of the earth from space.  Only after the collapse of the Soviet Union and the end of the Soviet propaganda machine were we to find that in fact Gagarin was a hidden believer, saying daily with his family the prayers of Russian Orthodox devotions.   The words of militant atheism had been put onto his lips by the authorities for public consumption. 

 

The readings for the Feast of the Ascension, one from the Book of Acts and one from the Gospel of Luke, were both written by the same author.    Acts is volume two of a two part series of which the Gospel of Luke is volume one.   Luke, a meticulous author whose Greek style is the best of the New Testament, wrote them.    The Gospel Reading has the resurrected Jesus ascending to heaven the evening of Easter Sunday after he has appeared to the disciples and eaten fish with them and then walked with them out of the city as far as Bethany (Luke 24: 42, 50).  The Acts passage, which was our first lesson for today, places it forty days after Easter (Acts 1: 3, 9).   In the original publication of Luke-Acts, before the Gospel of John was interposed, these two passages were juxtaposed against each other in glorious disharmony.  Why? 

Luke at the beginning of his Gospel says he will give an “orderly account of events that have been fulfilled among us, just as they were handed on to us by those who from the beginning were eyewitnesses and servants of the word” (Luke 1: 1-2).   Luke imposes an order upon his retelling of stories of events by eyewitnesses passed on through the early preaching in the Church.  It is not intended to be a chronicle of events.  The detail in Jesus’ saying in Acts’ Ascension story, “You will be my witnesses in Jerusalem, in all Judea and Samaria, and to the end of the earth” gives the narrative plan for the Book of Acts:  stories of preaching in Jerusalem, Judea, and Samaria, and then through the gentile world, even to Rome, then called the “end (note singular) of the earth.”  

Luke’s juxtaposing the two stories of Ascension is deliberate.  The first one concludes the Gospel narrative and brings that volume to an end.  The second one begins the narrative of the Church after Jesus.   For narrative purposes, he places it after a period of Jesus “appearing to them forty days, and speaking about the kingdom of God” (Acts 1:3).

The detail “forty days” tips off any sensitive reader that Luke’s editorial hand here is bringing “order” to the stories he has received.  The number is symbolic of a completed period in God’s hand:  forty days and night for Noah’s flood, forty years wandering in the desert, forty days and night in the wilderness fasting, etc.  

The point is this:  When Jesus died, everyone knew he was dead.    And everyone knows without a doubt that when you’re dead, you’re dead.  Dead people don’t come back, except maybe in people’s imaginations, dreams, or as some kind of spectral vision, as the “ghosts” of folk traditions.  They don’t come back as such. 

But when Jesus was killed, about a day and half later he came to his disciples in such a form that they had a very hard time figuring out what was going on.  Here was a Jesus much more tangible, much more alive than they had ever seen him.  It took several of them a time before they even recognized that this new, more-than-alive being before them as Jesus (Luke 24:16; John 20:14; Matthew 28:17). 

Reflecting on their experience and their scriptures, they later associated what had happened with an image in the later prophetic books and the image-rich, coded persecution literature called apocalyptic, books like Daniel and the later Revelation of John.  The image is that at the end of time, when God acts definitively to set things right in this messed-up world of ours, God will bring to life again the people who had suffered horrible deaths only because they had been faithful to God, the martyrs.  They would be created anew, fully alive and happy, in a new world, where everything is as God truly intends.  The Book of Daniel says they come forth from their graves and “shine like the stars of heaven” (Dan. 12:3).  Jesus’ disciples found that this obscure image—the resurrection of the martyred righteous at the end of time—described the strange thing they had seen in Jesus’ death and subsequent bodily reappearances.   “Resurrection” is not resuscitation of a corpse; it is God’s act of populating the new creation he intends to replace this defective world.   

One of the earliest formulations of this faith in the New Testament is found in the letter to the Corinthians (15:3-9):  there Paul says he passes on what he was taught, that 1) Christ suffered and died for us in accordance with the (Hebrew) scriptures, 2) on the third day he was raised, and 3) that he appeared, first to Cephas (Peter) and the Twelve, then to James and the apostles, then to over 500 Christians in a single gathering. This earliest citation of the early apostolic preaching tradition makes use of the technical “was raised from the dead,” a reference to this idea of the coming forth of the martyred righteous at the end of time. 

The image of Jesus “going back up to heaven” early on became a symbol for when such appearances generally stopped.  Various authors in the New Testament treat the matter differently. 

The later, longer ending of Mark has the risen Lord sitting at a meal with disciples, after which he is “taken up into heaven to sit at the right hand of God” (Mark 16:19). 

Matthew has the disciples return to Galilee where they see the risen Lord on a mountain and he gives them what we call today the “Great Commission” to preach the Gospel to every nation (Matt. 24:50). 

Luke in his Gospel places it on Easter evening in Bethany; in Acts he places it forty days later and ten days before the descent of the Spirit at Pentecost. 

John, as always, is the maverick.  For him, the moment that Jesus is lifted up into glory is the moment of his suffering and death on the cross (John 3:14; 8:28; 12:32).  On Easter evening Jesus breathes his spirit onto his disciples (John 20:22). 

The different writers make the same point in different ways:  Jesus may be hidden from our sight, but this is because of our defective sight, not because he is not here.  In Acts’ image of the clouds surrounding the Ascension, it is because we are unable to see through the bright clouds that surround him. 

So the next time someone belittles you by saying they take the Bible literally while you do not, just remind them that the Bible itself often asks us to read it in non-literal ways.  

And may we all pursue the spiritual disciplines of daily prayer and reflection, and quiet but steady amendment of life, to help us have the kind of hearts that can see through the clouds, even the bright ones, and see Jesus seated at God’s right hand.   

In the name of Christ,  Amen

Ki-chang Kim, Ascension of Jesus, 1953

From Whom no Secrets are Hid (midweek)

From Whom No Secrets are Hid

Fr. Tony’s Midweek Message

May 24, 2017

As a priest, I have had the occasion over the years of talking with different people who had suffered harshly because of misconceptions they had about God or what God expects.   One felt she had been pressured by friends and professional caregivers to give up hope on and relinquish a loved one to palliative care before the family was ready.  She thought that the pressure had amounted to bullying, because the people giving the advice felt that there was only one proper decision, the one they had made.  Despite this, she confessed to feeling a sense of guilt for not making that very decision.  As it turned out, the extra time provided by the decision to wait meant that all family members had the chance to say farewell, and all agreed with the decision to terminate care when it was finally made.  But the feelings of guilt—first for waiting and then for waiting no more—were painful, and the relationships put under stress by the pressure tactics were very long in healing.  Another came to me in tears wondering why God hated him.  He had been told that God found some things about him abominable, and that he must change or be consigned to Hell.  When unable to change, he had lost hope altogether, and any sense of connection with God.  I reminded him that Scripture teaches that God is love, and that God never willingly afflicts anyone.  God made us.  When he finishes creation he says, “It is very good.”  I also told him that in my experience, the image of “God’s wrath” expresses a sense of our own alienation from God, and not at all the heart of God.  The main task set before us by Jesus is recognizing the love of God that is already in us and around us (“The Reign of God is in your midst!”) and then showing forth that love to others.  

We have too little time in our lives to be misled by noxious and twisted images of God or God’s will.    Those who use the Bible to prove that God is hateful or stingy, or scrupulously picky, are looking only at the parts of the Bible that were included by way of giving us bad examples to contrast what is at its heart: God is a loving Parent, who would not give his children a snake or scorpion when they ask for fish, or a stone instead of bread.  God is so loving that by human terms we might think he is a bit crazy and without any sense of self-respect of shame (like that father of the Prodigal and his testy brother).

Know you are beloved.   God is crazy about you.  As a result, he demands great things from us, but nothing that he cannot give us the power to do.  He expects us to fall naturally into his ways of love, never bulldoze ourselves or others into them. 

Grace and Peace.     –Fr. Tony+

Orphans No More (Easter 6A)

 

 

C.S. Lewis and Joy Davidman

  Orphans No More

21 May 2017

Sixth Sunday of Easter Year A

Parish Church of Trinity, Ashland (Oregon)

8:00 a.m. Said and 10 a.m. Sung Mass

Acts 17:22-31; 1 Peter 3:13-22; John 14:15-21; Psalm 66:7-18

God, give us hearts to feel and love,

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

Amen.

Loss.  Grief.  Regret for what is no more.  This is all part of time and life, just as much as joy, love, and growth: death, as much as birth.  But the experience of loss and grief can be overwhelming and drive out of our hearts and minds any sense of the moments of joy.  The worse part, I think, is the sense, overwhelming in its obvious truth, that things will never be the same again.  What’s past is past.  C.S. Lewis, grieving the death of his wife, Joy Davidman, wrote:

I know that the thing I want is exactly the thing I can never get. The old life, the jokes, the drinks, the arguments, the lovemaking, the tiny, heartbreaking commonplace. On any view whatever, to say, ‘[She] is dead,’ is to say, ‘All that is gone.’ It is a part of the past. And the past is the past and that is what time means, and time itself is one more name for death, and Heaven itself is a state where ‘the former things have passed away.'   Talk to me about the truth of religion and I’ll listen gladly. Talk to me about the duty of religion and I’ll listen submissively. But don’t come talking to me about the consolations of religion or I shall suspect that you don’t understand.

Unless, of course, you can literally believe all that stuff about family reunions ‘on the further shore,’ pictured in entirely earthly terms. But that is all unscriptural, all out of bad hymns and lithographs. There’s not a word of it in the Bible. And it rings false. We know it couldn’t be like that. Reality never repeats. The exact same thing is never taken away and given back. How well the spiritualists bait their hook! ‘Things on this side are not so different after all.’ There are cigars in Heaven. For that is what we should all like. The happy past restored.

And that, just that, is what I cry out for, with mad, midnight endearments and entreaties spoken into the empty air [from A Grief Observed.]

Loss.  Grief.  Regret for what is no more.  Loss is devastating, whether it is of a relationship, a job, or even the decline and death of a loved one.  Doubt, fear, and uncertainty take the place of the joy and comfort we once had.   Even when we expect it, loss can turn our lives inside out, breaking our hearts and dashing our hopes.  Sometimes the pain is so great, we shut down all feeling and seem to lose our humanity and life itself.   Elena and I have been watching the BBC series “Call the Midwife.”  In one touching scene where a major character has lost the one she loves, she uses the words of a patient recovering from catastrophic loss, “I must go one breathing until I can live again.”  But sometimes loss seems to take away even our breath itself. 

In today’s Gospel reading, Jesus friends are afraid and more and more clear about his impending death.   Jesus says goodbye.  Everything they had hoped for—the in-breaking of God’s Reign, a close community with a kind and loving leader who stood by them, healed them, and gave them hope, who advocated for them, and for all—all this was evaporating before their eyes. 

How could they breathe?  How could they live?  How could they hope?  How could they do anything but howl? 

In this scene of loss and grief, Jesus tells his friends, “I will not leave you orphans.” His departure is not the end of the kingdom or the life together.  He is not abandoning them or the work they have been doing together.

Jesus says he is going away, but will come back.  “I will ask the Father, and he will send you another in my stead, whom you may call upon and who will stand with you no matter what.”  Parakletos is the word in John’s Greek, from para-kaleo to call to one’s side.   This idea is expressed in Latin as ad-vocatus, behind the word used in the translation we used today, advocate.  The King James expresses it as “comforter.”      

Jesus has been the one who has been comforting us, standing by us, defending us, proclaiming the presence of God’s Reign.   Jesus has welcomed all to his table, and healed the sick with no judgment.   Jesus has been not just a teacher and healer, but the very Spirit of Truth in our midst, the breath of life. 

Jesus promises us, in face of all regret, grief, and loss, that the Father will send us another advocate, a comforter, life and breath.  Remember, breath in Latin is spiritus, or Spirit.  When the risen Lord comes to the disciples three days later in John’s Gospel, in that closed room on the evening of Easter, he breathes upon them and says, “Receive the Holy Spirit.”  The coming of the Spirit is Jesus being made present to us once again. 

The Risen Jesus is not a replay from the past.  He is not present with us as he once was.  He has those scars from the cross.  He is new enough to be unrecognizable at first to the disciples on the road to Emmaus and to Mary in the garden tomb.  He passes through walls.  As Lewis said, “Reality never repeats. The exact same thing is never taken away and given back.”  But he is the same Jesus, nonetheless.  And his presence in the form of the other advocate and comforter is just as real and affirming as he ever was in his mortal life.  He comforts and reassures us, and in this we recognize him and know him our own. 

Sisters and brothers, I have felt this comfort and this support of this one called to our side.  I believe many of us here have at different times.  The comfort and succor given by this holy breath is as real and vivid as that given by any flesh and blood companion or friend, in fact, more so. 

As he promised to return in this other comforter, Jesus reminded his friends what they must continue to do.  “Follow my teachings and example.  Love, really love, each other, just as I love you.”  That’s how the breath comes, how we keep on breathing until we find life and joy again.  Not the same old life and joy once lost, but new, deeper, and not touchable by death and grief at all. 

Thanks be to God. 

Rogation Days (Midweek Message)

Fr. Tony’s Midweek Message

Rogation Days

May 17, 2017

Rogation Days are an ancient practice seen rarely now in the Roman Catholic Church, but still observed in many parishes of the Episcopal Church and the Evangelical Lutheran Church of America.  “Rogation” comes from the Latin word rogare “to ask.”  Rogation Days are four spring days where we pray for successful harvests and ask for God’s blessing for the whole natural world. April 25 (also the Feast of St. Mark) is called Major Rogation; the Monday, Tuesday, and Wednesday preceding Ascension Thursday (this year, May 25) are called the Minor Rogations.

Rogation Days were first observed as such in 5^th century France.  Mamertus, bishop of Vienne from 461 to 475, responded to nearly continuous plagues and natural disasters by calling for prayer and fasting on the days leading up to the Feast of the Ascension: “We shall pray to God that He will turn away the plagues from us, and preserve us from all ill, from hail and drought, fire and pestilence, and from the fury of our enemies; to give us favorable seasons, that our land may be fertile, good weather and good health, and that we may have peace and tranquility, and obtain pardon for our sins.”  The practice caught on quickly elsewhere when the string of disasters ended after the first rogation days.  In 511, a local church council required all churches in France to observe the three days. Pope Leo III in the 800s extended the practice to the entire Western church.

These days in England later became the occasion of the “beating of the bounds,” where the congregation led by the priest walked the boundaries of the parish, blessing with holy water all its “marker” trees and stones, and chanted the Great Litany or a Litany of the Saints.  Few parishes still observe the full rite, but many Episcopalians in private devotions pray for a bountiful harvest on Rogation Monday, commerce and industry on Tuesday, and the natural world on Wednesday.  Most cathedral churches and many parishes hold outside prayers for all of these on the preceding Sunday, called Rogation Sunday (this year, May 21).

This coming Sunday is Rogation Sunday, and, as we have for the last few years at Trinity, we will have Rogation prayers at 9 a.m. in the Labyrinth.   Our rite celebrates our gardens, farms, and the natural world, and gives us a chance to remember the symbolism of all the features and plantings in the Trinity Garden and Narthex Garden.   It lasts just a little over a quarter hour. 

All are welcome, and I would encourage you to invite neighbors and friends to attend as well.  It is a sweet and affirming ritual, and is all about recognizing God in creation. 

Grace and peace.  –Fr. Tony+

Living Stones (Easter 5A)

 

The Western ("Wailing") Wall, sole remnant of the podium on which the Jerusalem Temple was built. 

 Living Stones

14 May 2017

Fifth Sunday of Easter Year A

Parish Church of Trinity, Ashland (Oregon)

8:00 a.m. Said and 10 a.m. Sung Mass

Acts 7:55-60 ; Psalm 31:1-5, 15-16 ; 1 Peter 2:2-10 ; John 14:1-14

God, give us hearts open to change and growth,

Ground us in You, Our Rock and Unshakeable Refuge.

Amen.

Most of our readings today have stones or rocks in them. The Psalm says, "O God, You are my Rock!" The Epistle talks about Christ being a stone giving us life, the capstone of the Temple, though once rejected in the quarry as flawed, and of us believers all being stones infused with Christ’s life in a Temple—the House of God—built to give acceptable offerings to God. The Gospel talks about that House of God where Jesus invites us to follow him:  “In my Father’s House, there is more than enough room.  Otherwise, why do you think I’d invite you to come there with me? I am the way to that House, the truth, and the life.”  He might as well has said, “I am the Rock all this is built on.”  And the first lesson—that horrible story of the murder by stoning of one of the first seven deacons of the Church, Stephen.

In today’s Acts story, some people are unhappy with the competition the deacon Stephen presents them.  They accuse him of blaspheming the House of God and the Law of Moses that it embodies, saying that Jesus of Nazareth will come back to destroy the Temple and change the Laws.   Stephen, “looking like an angel,” reacts in kind, harshly saying “you are … always opposing the Holy Spirit, and killing the prophets as your ancestors did” (Acts 7:51-53).  “You” and “Us.” Clear divisions between good guys and bad guys, whether you are on Stephen’s side or his opponents’.  Stephen’s accusers pick up stones and kill him.   How could they not be bad guys? 

Dividing the world into “good guys” and “bad guys” may be satisfying for telling a riveting story and stirring the fires of tribal and family attachment.  But it is contrary to Jesus’ teachings:  “Be wholly complete like God—who impartially gives the blessing of rain and sunshine equally to the ‘righteous’ and the ‘wicked’” (Matt. 5:44, 48).  “The first will be last and the last first”… the ‘good guys’ will be turn out to be bad, and the ‘bad guys’ turn out good (Matt. 20:16).   A pillar of righteous living goes to the Temple to pray and so does a notorious sinner—the Pharisee and the Tax Collector—and guess who goes home right with God? (Luke 18:9-14). 

If I owe my neighbor love, who is my neighbor?  Who is on this side of that line?   Jesus replies with a story of hated foreigner showing compassion while the religious stalwarts walk on by.  You create neighbors by being compassionate with them, not by drawing lines between our tribe and its barbarian enemies.

 “Forgive others as you would want to be forgiven.” Then, on the cross, a line that is quoted by Stephen as the stones begin to rain down upon him: “Father, forgive them, for they do not know what they are doing.”

Every single one of us is a mixture of good and bad.  We are all God’s creatures.  Labeling a whole person or group as “Good” or “Bad” only confuses matters.  The line between good and bad is not between groups of people, but runs down the middle of each and every human heart.    So we need to pray even for our enemies.  We are all in this together. 

In the Harry Potter books, Harry’s Godfather tells him, “We've all got both light and dark inside us. What matters is the part we choose to act on. That's who we really are.”  His mentor Professor Dumbledore tells him:  “It is our choices, Harry, that show what we truly are….” 

If these stories are not about good guys vs. bad guys, why do some people in these stories accept Jesus as the Rock, and others pick up rocks to kill people like Stephen?  What is it in our hearts that allows some of us to accept the apostles’ witness, yet others to reject it and try to stamp out this belief even by murder?   What makes some of us cry “Joy!” and others, “Blasphemy!” What in our hearts leads us to be living stones or to pick up stones of death? 

There are some hints in the Hebrew Scriptures that 1 Peter quotes, all with references to rocks and stones.  1 Peter quotes from Isaiah about those who try to seek a sense of security by deceiving themselves: 

 “Look! I am placing a foundation stone in Jerusalem, a firm and tested stone, a precious cornerstone, safe to build on.  Whoever trusts in it need never be  shaken. I will test you with the measuring line of justice and the plumb line of uprightness.  Since you have made your refuge out of lies, a hailstorm will knock it down.  Since it is made of deception, a flood will sweep it away. [Not so, the Rock I offer!]”  (Isaiah 28:15-17). 

 This was probably the passage Jesus was thinking about when he gave his parable of the house built on a rock and when he gave Peter his name, meaning “Rock,” after his declaration of faith in Jesus. 

Faith based on the Rock is grounded in truth, not self-deception.   It must respond to the realities of our experiences.  And its ultimate measure is justice, fairness, and right dealing with others.  Not bullying or high-pressure sales tactics, just gentle, loving truth. 

1 Peter also quotes a Psalm of praise to God from someone who had been in horrible straits, set upon by persecutors until almost dead, whom God surprisingly rescues.  The turnaround is described this way: 

^17-20 I didn’t die. I lived!
    And now I’m telling the world what Yahweh did.
…^21-25 Thank you for responding to me;
    you’ve truly become my salvation!
The stone the masons discarded as flawed
    is now the capstone!
This is Yahweh’s work.
    We rub our eyes—we can hardly believe it!
On this day, Yahweh has acted!

    let’s celebrate and be festive!  (Psalm 118:17-24)

Christians ever since the beginning have used this Psalm to describe the resurrection of Jesus. It is a mainstay in our Easter liturgies.  The very fact that Jesus’ case was so hopeless—dead and buried in a quarried tomb—is why Peter uses this image of a flawed quarry stone once cast away, but wondrously now a finished, precious, capstone of a great building. 

Peter adds a final passage to tell us of this mystery of the heart, another oracle from Isaiah: 

¹⁴The Holy One can be either a Hiding Place
    or a Boulder blocking your way,
The Rock standing in the way of the willful …
A net preventing trespass…
¹⁵Many are going to run into that Rock
    and get their bones broken,
Get tangled up in that net
    and not get free of it.”  (Isa 8:14-15)

I do not know why sometimes we are able to joyfully accept new things from God and other times we aren’t.

Part of it comes from enjoying and loving what we have received from God in the past.  New things present themselves as strange, risky, and possibly a betrayal.  Sometimes in these matters, bitterness can grow where we are feeling uncertain, on shaky ground.   The Rock we thought was unshakeable has turned out to be unstable.   We perhaps talk to others rather than to the one we think is strange.  As seen in this Synagogue in Acts, gossip and grumbling thus can become the first step on the possibly deadly road of faction and schism.  We begin by trying to relieve our own anxiety and fear by labeling the others as bad guys. 

It is important to honor and value where we have come from.  This is why we must not demonize or belittle Judaism.  It is also why we must not belittle or demonize Eastern Orthodoxy or Roman Catholicism, or the great insights of the Reformation.  We must in this all be open to God doing a new, wondrous act.

C.S. Lewis wrote famously, the one prayer that God can never grant, will never grant, is the prayer after we have received grace and light from God, the prayer that says, “Encore!”

 

We need to base ourselves on Jesus as the living Rock, have full assurance of being beloved by him, and no fear.  Only thus can we serve as living stones for others.  Only thus can the House of which we are part make truly acceptable sacrifices to God. 

In reflecting of these stories this week, I invite us all to apply Isaiah’s standards of truth, justice, and fairness with others when looking at our own attachments to the past.   Are our feelings in any of these matters firmly grounded in confidence in Jesus who will never let us down?  Or does it grow from fear of losing what we once enjoyed, and that now find fading or gone?  Do we choose to label and draw lines, rather than take responsibility for our feelings and enter into uncomfortable conversations with the strange?

Do we choose to be living stones, or stones of death?  

In the name of God,  Amen.

Life Abundant (Easter 4A)

 

The Good Shepherd, 5th century mosaic in the New Church of St. Appollinarus, Ravenna

Life Abundant

7 May 2017

Fourth Sunday of Easter Year A

Homily Preached at Trinity Parish Church, Ashland Oregon

The Rev. Fr. Tony Hutchinson, SCP, Ph.D.

8 a.m. said and 10 a.m. Sung Eucharist

Acts 2:42-47; Psalm 23; 1 Peter 2:19-25;  John 10:1-10

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

It’s been a sad week.  Three deaths in the parish: Dale Muir, beloved of Vicki Gardner, Barbara Brand, after years of loving and joyful home visits from Eucharistic ministers and friends in the parish, and Rachel Wagner, beloved of Dan Wagner.    Many parish members continue to struggle against life-threatening or long-term debilitating illness.  In the larger community, we have seen a general loss of hope and turn to fear in our country after the House of Representatives passed a Medical Care Act seen by many as an abandonment of human decency and compassion.  One op-ed writer in the Washington Post said, “If there has been a piece of legislation in our lifetimes that boiled over with as much malice and indifference to human suffering, I can’t recall what it might have been.”  And this abomination was principally drafted by and shepherded through Congress by our own Congressional District’s representative, Greg Walden.    

Debility.  Disease.  Death.  Fear about finding the care we need, and if we find it, how to pay for it.   Despair about the fact that death comes for each and every one of us, regardless of how well we have made choices.  The grim reaper comes to all alike: holy and wicked, wise and foolish, kind and mean, old and young, rich and poor.

We often think these feelings are the plague of the modern and post-modern era.  But the Psalmist summarized these same feelings this way, about three millennia ago: 

“We can never buy back ourselves,

Or deliver to God the price of our life.

For the ransom of our life is so great,

That we should never have enough to pay it.

In order to live for ever and ever,

And never see the grave. 

For we see that the wise die also;

Like the dull and stupid they perish

And leave their wealth to those who come after them.

Their graves shall be their homes forever,

Their dwelling places from generation to generation,

Though they call the lands after their own names. 

Even though honored, they cannot live for ever,

They are like the beasts that perish…

Like a flock of sheep they are destined to die. 

Death is their shepherd;

They go down straightway to the grave.

Their form shall waste away

And the land of the dead shall be their home.”  (Psalm 49:6-14) 

Bengt Ekerof as Death in Ingmar Bergman's The Seventh Seal (1957)

Like a flock of sheep we are destined to die.  Death is our shepherd.  The Grim Shepherd comes for us all.  Like beasts, we will die.   No hope, other than an expectation of oblivion and fading away. 

At least, that is how is seems to us in our bad moments.

But then, the Psalmist also expresses hope, despite it all.  Just after saying “the land of the dead shall be their home,” he adds, “But God will ransom my life.  He will snatch me from the grasp of death” (Psalm 49:15) 

And then there is today’s Psalm.  Here is how I translate it:

“It is the Lord who is my shepherd; I shall not be in need. 

It is in green pastures that he has me lie down. 

It is by still waters that he leads me.

He refreshes my life,

And, because of who he is, leads me in right pathways. 

Though it may be through the darkest death-filled chasm that I must trudge,

I shall not fear any harm. 

Because you are with me. 

I get comfort from your crook and your walking-stick. 

You spread out a great feast for me even when I face persecutors. 

You have poured calming lotion on my head,

And the cup before me overflows with wine.

I am sure that with you, kindness and compassion will always be at hand for me as long as I live,

And that it is in your house that I will make my home forever.” (Psalm 23)

Faith is trusting in the goodness and compassion at the heart of things.  Faith is having a heart rooted in hope despite the Grim Shepherd, the Valley of the Shadow of Death, enemies and persecutors, and the certainty of loss of control and life. 

Faith is a giving of our heart to the heart of love in creation.  

This is what the Gospel of John has in mind when it has Jesus say “I am the good shepherd. I am the gate into safe pasture.”  This is not the shepherd death.  This is the shepherd who brings us through danger and death.   

When it says “the other ones are thieves,” I think this merely means that in this grim world, we have many ways of reassuring ourselves, but ultimately they too are revealed again and again to be part of this system of things. They end in death, the Grim Shepherd. Despite the good they do and the temporary hope they give, they are unreliable.  Respite they may provide, but in the end, they fail us.

But Jesus is someone apart.  This is because after enduring the Grim Shepherd, he came into victorious, glorious life.  That is why, in the words of today’s Gospel, he says, “I came that they may have life, and have it abundantly.”

Abundant life!  Joy in the face even of the Grim.  Confidence that in the end, all will be well, and all manner of thing will be well.  And if things aren’t well, that means it is not yet the end. 

Irenaeus of Lyons

Blessed Ireneaus of Lyons, the great second century theologian who was one of the first Church fathers to write in Latin as well as Greek, said “Gloria Dei est vivens homo” “God’s glory is a living human being.”  We often hear this expressed “The glory of God is a human being, fully alive.”  This captures, I think, what Irenaeus intends:  it is the living person that reflects God’s intention and creation, not a dead person, or one who is impaired and distorted by the Grim Shepherd.   Irenaeus is talking about the afterlife, but he assumes that the life of the resurrected Lord is powerful and contagious, and already is present in us here and now when we hear his voice and follow him. 

Sisters and brothers, there is so much in this world to rejoice in and be thankful for.  Jesus is our good shepherd, our healer, the one who brings life to us and us to life.  Life, and that abundantly, is what he offers us.  Thanks be to God.