Three Quotations on God and Love

 detail, St. John the Evangelist on Patmos altarpiece, Hans Memling (1433-94)

Fr. Tony’s Midweek Message

Three quotations on God and Love

June 28, 2017

“Strange that so much suffering is caused because of the misunderstanding of God’s true nature. God’s heart is more gentle than the Virgin’s first kiss upon the Christ. And God’s forgiveness to all, to any thought or act, is more certain than our own being.” -- St. Catherine of Siena (14^th  century)

“A handful of sand thrown into the sea, is what sinning is like, when compared to God’s Providence and Compassion.  Just as an abundant source of water is not impeded by a handful of dust, so is the Creator’s Compassion not defeated by the sins of His creations.”  --St. Isaac of Nineveh (7^th century)

 “Would you know your Lord's meaning in this thing? Know it well: love was his meaning. Who showed it to you? Love. What did he show you? Love. Why did he show it? For love. Hold yourself in this and you shall know and understand more in the same. But you shall never know nor understand any other thing, forever.” –St. Julian of Norwich (14^th century) 

Grace and peace.  –Tony+

The Bible as Liberator and Oppressor (midweek)

The Bible as Liberator and Oppressor

Fr. Tony’s Midweek Message

June 21, 2017

Literary critic Harold Bloom made the following comment about the role of Bible in the reformation and in our contemporary world:

“One of the great ironies of Protestant history is that the exaltation of scripture, which in the seventeenth century endowed Baptists and other Protestants with freedom from institutional constraints and with spiritual autonomy, has become, as the twentieth century closes, the agent for depriving Baptists and other Protestants of their Christian Liberty, their soul competency to read and interpret the Bible, each person by her own Inner Light.” (The American Religion, p, 221)

The early reformation’s call for Sola Scriptura (Scripture Alone!) was a political act aimed at demanding that the powers of Church and State be held accountable to something beyond themselves.  By it, the reformers sought to rid themselves of what the Prayer Book called “the enormities of the Bishop of Rome.”  Calvinists and Lutherans both sought to end the “Babylonian Captivity of the Church” by using the Bible, read without the filter of priest or pope giving the interpretation, to break the power of appeals to tradition and papal authority.   By demanding that Scripture be the sole governing authority, the reformers sought to liberate the Christian to live the Gospel without interference. 

But the appeal to “Scripture alone” was flawed.  Tradition and the authority of the Church had identified which books were included in scripture and which were not.  Scripture had always been read and understood in the context of the Church’s liturgy, worship, and teaching:  “you must understand this, that no prophecy of scripture is a matter of one’s own interpretation,” (2 Peter 1:20).   Protestants, once unmoored from tradition and moored in theory only in the Bible, broke into dozens of warring sects and different mutually exclusive understandings of the Bible they claimed was their sole authority.   

The Anglican tradition has always seen the weakness here.  So we have insisted on using scripture only for the limited purposes of establishing doctrine and making requirements of people, but also in using tradition and reason to interpret and apply scripture. 

In the end, it turned out that the Protestant take on the Bible became itself a tyrant every bit as unchallengeable as the papacy of the late middle ages.   Bible translations themselves became dependent on doctrinal formularies of such writers as Luther, Calvin, and Knox.   Take as an example the word “sin” in scripture.  When it is used today, it has a huge doctrinal and emotional baggage, including deliberate rebellion, impurity, and uncleanness.  But these overtones more often than not are not present when the Greek and Hebrew words it translates occur in the original texts.   More often, they simply mean short-comings or failures.  Another example is how the doctrine of substitutionary punishment—a doctrine found as such no where in any Biblical text—seems to be imbedded in the English translation of passage after passage. 

One of the great challenges we face as Christians in this day and age is to find the Biblical text once more liberating, and not a tool for oppression.  We need to liberate the text of the Bible.  We who preach it should preach it in its liberating power.  We who translate it must intentionally seek ways of translating it that reflect this.  We need to work to end the Babylonian captivity of the Bible.  

Our Thursday Bible study class led in the winter by Fr. Morgan knows that one way for lay people to help do this is to always learn to reply to “the BIBLE says,” with the question, “and what else does the Bible say?” 

Grace and Peace,

Fr. Tony+

Means of Grace (Proper 6A)

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James Mann, Bucking Hay, watercolor 2008

“Means of Grace”
Second Sunday after Pentecost, Proper 6 (Year A)
18 June 2017
Homily

8 a.m. Said and 10:00 a.m. Sung Mass
Parish Church of Trinity, Ashland

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

Exodus 19:2-8a; Psalm 100; Romans 5:1-8; Matthew 9:35-10:8

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

“The harvest is heavy but the workers are few; so pray the Lord of the harvest to send workers for the harvest.”   The saying on the lips of Jesus in Matthew has always spoken to me, since I grew up in an agricultural area employing many migrant laborers and students on summer break—we never called it vacation—from their studies.  There was always a special need at peak harvest times, when there never seemed to be enough workers to bring the crops in before they spoiled.   Bucking hay—throwing the bales onto the trucks to be taken into covered barns before rain mildewed it—was a big draw for boys from my high school. The farmers paid what seemed to us good money, especially when they were nervous about getting the bales in before a looming late summer storm.   Bucking hay was back breaking work, but built your muscles, and usually came after swim season was over and before school started.   

Several Biblical scholars doubt that the historical Jesus actually said this:  they say it refers to the mission efforts of the second and third generations of Christians, and thus reflects the worldview of St. Matthew more than the historical Jesus.  But I suspect they have let their own biases cloud their judgment here.  A rigorous method of establishing whether the historical Jesus said something put on his lips in the gospels is broader than identifying simply things you doubt the Jesus of your modern progressive imagination would have said.   There are several rules of thumb and on the basis of them, I think it is a strong possibility that Jesus actually said something like this. 

One such rule is dissimilarity, whether the saying at issue differs from the sayings of the Jewish religion before Jesus and the faith of the Church after him. Although the end of the world as a harvest is a common image in both Second Temple Judaism and in the later Christian Church, the image is almost always threatening and future—the harvest will spell the great day of doom at the end of the world separating the good from the bad.  Here, Jesus is describing a good, joyful harvest that has already begun. 

Another rule is multiple attestation: whether the saying is found in numerous separate traditions in early Christian writings.  This one is shared by both Matthew (9:37-38) and Luke (10:2) but not Mark.  It is thus part of the Sayings Source, or Q, behind those two gospels.  But it also appears in the non-canonical Gospel of Thomas (logion 73), where Jesus asks us to “Pray the Lord send workers for the harvest,” instead of Matthew and Luke’s “Pray the Lord of the harvest.”  It thus allegorizes the saying even more than Matthew does, by taking away the literal meaning “ask the harvest boss to send more workers” and making it refer to God alone.   Separately, a very similar image of the harvest as ripe, good, and now also appear on the lips of Jesus in the Gospel of John: after a reference to a traditional proverb, he adds, “but I tell you, lift up your eyes and see how the fields are already white, ready for harvest.  The reaper is receiving his wages and gathering fruit for eternal life” (4:35-36).   This saying has multiple attestation—Q, Thomas, and John.

Coherence with what we know about Jesus—that he was put to death by the Romans for political rebellion—as well as how a saying fits in with other sayings that are undisputedly from Jesus, is another rule of thumb, as is embarrassment—the difficulties that a saying would have caused for church leaders.  This saying about harvest does not present an embarrassment to the later church or cause heartburn to the Romans, but it most definitely fits in with Jesus’ undisputed proclamation that the Reign of God had come, and his parables about it:  the seed that grows secretly without any seeming help from a human tiller, the mustard seed that is small but produces an immense bush, and the parable of the rich soil where broadly cast seeds break into an abundant produce, unlike those in stony, shallow, or weed-infested soils.

So this saying is probably from the historical Jesus, despite its being repurposed by Matthew to talk missionary work in his age.  Such a repurposing of Jesus’ words is seen often in Matthew.  The best example, I think, it the parable of the bad personnel policy, also a parable about harvest—where workers hired at different parts of the day under the press of needing to get the crops in receive the same wage because the landowner can’t be bothered to pay on a pro-rated time basis the below-living wage pittance he gives his day laborers, causing a revolt of sorts by those who bore the heat of the day and worked long hours.   On the lips of the historical Jesus, the parable asks us to consider what is fair, and what is just.  It is part of the historical Jesus’ revolutionary critique of Imperial society and oppression of common people that ended up getting him killed by the Romans for insurrection.  But in Matthew’s Gospel, it becomes an allegory about the relationship of Jewish Christians and Gentile latecomers, and casts God in the role of the landowner, asking us to accept his abundant grace to others who seem less deserving than ourselves.   

So also in this saying of the heavy harvest and lack of workers.  For Matthew, it has allegorical overtones, with the harvest standing for the mission work of the Church, the crops standing for those ready to accept the Gospel, the workers for missionaries and pastors, and the harvest boss for God. 

But what would the simple saying have meant on the lips of the historical Jesus speaking to his Galilean followers in the early first century? 

“The harvest is heavy but the workers are few” clearly expresses a contrast like that between the small mustard seed and the huge mustard shrub, the quarter cup of yeast and the 50 pounds of flour that will be turned into bread, the few scattered seeds on good soil and the 100 fold bumper crop they produce.  Though the arrival of the Reign of God is joyful and abundant, and a very real and present thing, only a few now recognize it and enjoy it. This seed is growing secretly.  So we must pray that more and more recognize the arrival of the kingdom, that grace may abound and the small mustard seed grow into the great sheltering bush.

How can we make the Reign of God visible and present for others?  The goodness and care of God is ever present—the kingdom is here!  But in this mixed world of brokenness and wholeness, many can’t see this.  So we must be God’s hands and voice for others, giving them the answers to their prayers.  Jesus elsewhere says, “Let your light so shine before others that they may see your good works and give glory to our Father in Heaven!”

“Harvest” is a powerful image, often fear-inducing because of the urgency of acting now or risking loss of the goods.    But in itself, the image means primarily receiving the results of our actions.    “Ask the harvest boss to send more workers” means feel the urgency, but don’t fear.  Jesus says, “the Reign of God is here!  Turn around your thinking and acting so that you can enjoy it and help others to!”  Sharing the love and support of God means expanding the realm of forgiveness and reconciliation.  It breaks the cycle of suffering the loss of good things due to our bad actions.   It is the ultimate anti-karma.   Jesus teaches it regularly:  “Judge not and you won’t be judged!”  “Put the Reign of God and the justice it demands first in your hearts, and everything will fall into place!”  What Buddhists call “finding your Buddha nature” is what we call “living in Christ.”  That means proclaiming the presence of God’s Reign through our words and actions, and standing in, in our small way, for Christ in the life of others. 

St. Teresa of Avila wrote,

“Christ has no body but yours,
No hands, no feet on earth but yours,
Yours are the eyes with which he looks
Compassion on this world,
Yours are the feet with which he walks to do good,
Yours are the hands, with which he blesses all the world.
Yours are the hands, yours are the feet,
Yours are the eyes, you are his body.”

The Prayer Book’s general thanksgiving calls Jesus, “the means of grace, and the hope of glory.”  Jesus calls us to follow him:  we must be the means of grace to those about us.  We should feed their faith, not stoke their fears; nurture and support them, not compete with or condemn them; be joyful and calming, not grim and alarming; inclusive, not exclusive. 

The St. Francis prayer expresses it clearly: 

“Lord, make us instruments of your peace.

Where there is hatred, let us sow love;

where there is injury, pardon;

where there is discord, union;

where there is doubt, faith;

where there is despair, hope;

where there is darkness, light;

where there is sadness, joy.

Grant that we may not so much seek to be consoled as to console;

to be understood as to understand;

to be loved as to love.

For it is in giving that we receive;

it is in pardoning that we are pardoned;

and it is in dying that we are born to eternal life. Amen.” 

The harvest is heavy, the field is ripe.  God,  help us to show forth your presence and reign to all about us.  Make us instruments of your peace, channels of your love.  Make us the means of grace for others.

Amen.   

Gody Play for Adults (Midweek Message)

 

Godly Play for Adults

Fr. Tony’s Mid-week Message

June 14, 2017

“Rejoice in the Lord, all you lands,

Serve the Lord with gladness,

And come before His presence with a Song.” 

(The Jubilate, Psalm 100)

When I first came to Trinity six years ago, in some of our early discussions about liturgy and ceremony in worship, I made an off-hand comment to a parishioner that I “loved to play church.”  I was trying to express the joy and creativity I felt in worship and in its various forms, traditional or otherwise.  But the choice of words caused offense.  The reply was, “We are talking about worship here, not make-believe, play-acting, or something frivolous!” 

But liturgy, properly conducted and understood, does in fact share many things with children’s play:  to really work, it generally serves no purpose other than itself; it expresses joy and creativity, frees the imagination, and often is achieved by following (and sometimes breaking) strict rules agreed upon by those playing. The rules of worship are not simply something agreed upon on the spot by the congregation present; they are a mixture of traditional usages, actions and words that embody our faith and the faith of those who went on before (and will come after), as well as symbols and stories that bring forth and come from this faith.   The Holy Spirit and the Church writ large make these rules available to us.  The questions of accessibility of some worship vs. the awe-inspiring otherness of different forms, or of participative worship vs. sideline contemplative viewing or auditing, of tradition vs. innovation, of high vs. low—these are mere sideshows in the is the play that is worship. 

A child at play does not aim at anything, or have an ulterior purpose.   Play allows the child to exercise youthful power, test its limits, and express life in what might seem to be a random string of words, actions, and movement.  But it helps the child grow into the person it is intended to be, to realize its true self.   Authentic play means natural expression, even (especially?) when constrained by rules.  As a result, it is harmonious, has clearly recognizable patterns and shapes, and, if left to itself without efforts at regularizing, explaining, or moralizing the life out of it, thus achieves beauty. 

Liturgical worship operates on a deeper level than child’s play.  It allows us to stand as children at the feet of our loving Parent God.  With the help of the Spirit and grace, it empowers us to express our real selves, experience joy, and grow into the creatures God intended when God created us.   In it God uses metaphor and art to touch these deeper parts of our selves. Like art and music, it is measured, rhythmic, and melodious.  It uses counterpoint and harmony to plumb our emotions and reasoning.   In it, formal repeated gestures are clothed in colors, garments, smells, and sounds foreign to everyday life, in places and at appointed times and seasons that encompass our lives.  And it changes us for the better. 

Rationality used as a solvent acid can destroy the magic of this artful experience of God.   Playing the role of the critic, the evaluator, kills our play and the spiritual child we are before God. 

We are often tempted to kill this precious play by noxious habits of the heart and mind.   A kind of residual Calvinism of the emotions tells those of us coming from a reformed tradition—even those who have rejected doctrinal Calvinism!—that worship must be grim, stark, and joyless, or at its very least useful, directed, and explicitly explainable “edification.”  Stale canonical legalism or formal conventionalism can affect those from a Roman or Orthodox background, either by asking us to conform without joy or creativity, or by demanding that we reject traditional practices out of hand because of their association in our hearts with the power of a Patriarchal and tyrannically hierarchical Church.   The tempter in either case tells us that liturgy must eschew magic, superstition, or nonsense when in fact what we are rejecting is any sense of wonder, creativity, joy, or play.  

A story in 2 Samuel 6 is about the break up of King David’s marriage over what might be called a costume failure or an argument about appropriate liturgy.  It tells of the risks to the soul and to human relations of objectifying and judging worship.  King David is bringing the Ark of God to Jerusalem.  In the joyful procession, he sings, dances, and is lost in ecstasy.  His wife watches from a window and is thoroughly unimpressed by David’s abandon: 

“David returned to bless his household. But Michal the daughter of Saul came out to meet David, and said, ‘How the king of Israel honored himself today, uncovering himself today before the eyes of his servants’ maids, as any vulgar fellow might shamelessly uncover himself!’   David said to Michal, “It was before the Lord… that I have danced…   I will make myself yet more contemptible than this, and I will be abased in my own eyes; but by the maids of whom you have spoken, by them I shall be held in honor.’ And Michal the daughter of Saul had no child to the day of her death.” (2 Sam 6: 20-23)

We tread a very dangerous spiritual path when we presume to judge and belittle the worship of others.  Worship is play, and should be accepted in the spirit of joy and creativity in which it is offered.   To do otherwise alienates us not just from the healing empowerment that such Godly Play gives.  It alienates us from those whose play we criticize, or binds us together in unhealthy and community killing cliques with other judgers. Once I had a pastor who loved what he called "contemporary praise worship."  This is not my cup of tea, but I found that keeping an open mind and participating I expanded my experience of God.  The key was not condemning or belittling.  While we must always try to make our worship more authentic, in making suggestions and expressing hopes for improvement, we must focus on positive suggestions, and avoid negative criticism.

Grace and Peace.  

--Fr. Tony+

The Great Omission (Trinity Sunday)

 

The Trinity, from the Grandes Heures d'Anne de Bretagne, 1505-1510

The Great Omission  
Solemnity of the Most Holy Trinity

Sunday after Pentecost, 11 June 2017
Homily preached at 9:00 a.m. sung Eucharist 
Parish Church of Trinity, Ashland

The Rev. Dr. Anthony Hutchinson, Rector

Genesis 1:1-2:4a; 2 Corinthians 13:11-13; Matthew 28:16-20; Canticle 13

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

Growing up and as a young man, I always had warm, inspired feelings when reading today’s Gospel lesson: I took the command to go into all nations and make disciples for Jesus as a great sign of his love, sharing a precious thing that had made my life much more meaningful and directed.  It encouraged me to go on a two-year mission for the church of youth. But in France and Belgium as a Mormon missionary, I began to see the strengths of other traditions and faiths, and came to realize that many of my fellow missionaries were driven by a sense of the superiority of their own faith and, concomitantly, the inferiority of others.  Going out to convert the world seemed open, expansive, and welcoming.  It certainly affirmed the faith that I was calling others to.  But the insistence that there was only one true way, and this was it, and we needed to draw others to it for fear that they would be lost without it, well, that became more and more clearly to me exclusionary, small-minded, and bigoted. As much joy as I received in sharing my faith, I began to realize that much mission work was driven by a sense of superiority rather than humility.  

The more open of my brother and sister missionaries used their preparation days to visit the local historical and artistic sites and learn about the culture and world they found themselves in.  The more closed were open to new cultural things as aesthetic experiences only, and really balked at entering and learning about the great churches of that area.  The first time I saw the great altar piece triptych of Ghent I realized that there was something deep and profound going on there for centuries that my own tradition did not credit at all.   This led me, after my mission, in college to pursue classics at Brigham Young University and then Biblical Studies at the Catholic University of America. After one of our early departmental student-faculty get-togethers at CUA, Elena turned to me in the car and tell me how impressed she was with the holiness and deep spirituality of the Catholic priests, monks, and sisters with whom I studied.  She said, “I just don’t see how we can say that we’re the one true Church and everyone else should be like us.”   

Having lost the faith in the “One True Church,” we were gradually drawn into the Episcopal Church precisely because of its openness and recognition of how God was at work in other denominations and traditions.  Many of the closed points of doctrine and polity that drove me from Mormonism kept me from pursuing what the early prayer books call “the enormities of Rome.”  The key here was attraction, not promotion.   Those who gently brought us into the Episcopal Church never beat the drum or tooted the horn.  They simply lived the Gospel and let us know that if we wanted what they had, we were welcome to join them.   We knew we had become Episcopalians and left Mormonism when we joined the choir at our local Episcopal parish in DC. 

But then our parish, somewhat misled under false pretenses, called as rector a very fundamentalist priest.  He preached that Christ was the one true way, cited chapter and verse of the Bible to prove it, and taught that those who did not submit to the Bible’s truth (as he saw it) would be lost.  And again and again over a three-year period he preached today’s Gospel: it was the Great Commission, the great call to the Church.  Since salvation was offered in Jesus and in him alone, we needed to get out there and convert people because they were languishing in sin and darkness and only by converting to our beliefs could they be saved!  I noticed that he talked a lot about converting people in areas where people had darker skins.   And when Gene Robinson was consecrated, he did everything he could to use his connections with people in those areas to drag that parish out of what he called the apostate and unbiblical Episcopal Church.  He did not succeed, though he and the parish he later went to are now in the Anglican Church of North America. 

Whenever he preached the Great Commission, and it was often, I had the feeling I had wandered into a pyramid scheme sales meeting:  sell, sell, sell.  And what were we to sell?  The opportunity to become a salesman too!  In short, that one priest in three years soured me on the Great Commission and made me very gun-shy of Christians with proselytizing agendas and tracts in pockets. 

It is a very sad thing.  Both my Mormon co-religionists and this priest thought they were doing a loving, welcoming, and inclusive thing.  It was only in moments of unguarded candor about their disgust or dislike of the people or traditions they were targeting in their efforts that you could see the exclusion and bigotry that such an approach fed in their hearts. 

It took me a while to mend and heal, and reclaim the Great Commission, this gem of our faith, as my own. 

You see, this exclusionary reading of the Great Commission, and this fist-in-a-velvet glove threatening approach to mission work,  rely on a great omission in how one reads this text.  “Make disciples of all nations, baptizing them,” it says.  Disciples of Jesus, not adherents of a particular brand.  And  then it adds: “in the name of the Father, the Son, and the Holy Spirit.”   We tend to pass over this line because most of us understand on an instinctual level that a highly developed Trinitarian doctrine lacks a certain plausibility when placed on the lips of the historical Jesus.  At most, this could be St. Matthew’s placing a threefold formula onto Jesus’ lips, reflecting the experience of the early church of God as transcendent in the Father, incarnate in the Son, and immanent in the Holy Spirit.

But this phrase on Jesus’ lips here was one of the things that got the early church thinking in ways that ended up in the full blown 4^th century doctrine of the Holy Trinity found in the creeds.   And it isn’t just stage dressing. 

The Trinity, oil painting by Rom Isichei.  
 

It is important to remember that the Trinity isn't just “Three guys up in heaven,” who somehow actually are one.  The word describes a process, a dynamism, a mystery in what we call the Divine.  The doctrine of the Holy Trinity is at heart the doctrine that God is social.  And not just social, but inherently loving and respectful of difference, and affirming equality of those in the community.

I think that many of us Episcopalians tend to be shy of sharing our faith because of experiences similar to the ones I just told, ones that make us gun-shy of proselytizing because we see through it for the contempt for others found often at its heart.  This itself has turned the Great Commission into the Great Omission for us.  We just don’t want to stoop so low as to push our faith on others. 

But here’s the thing:  faith that is not shared is faith that is starved and faith that eventually withers.  Faith shared is faith doubled and trebled, affirmed, and ever growing.   Good mission theology has always seen mission primarily as service and love rather than the advancement of a brand. Good mission theology has always asked the missioners to learn from those they serve, and help them find their own authentic expression of faith. 

The modern Church has come to a less sectarian reading of the Bible passages telling that salvation comes through Jesus Christ:  the idea of the anonymous Christian, that people might be saved through Christ even without signing onto Christianity explicitly.  Bishop and theologian Krister Stendahl once said that Christ calls us Christians to be the kind of people that others want to be around, not to constantly harp at others to become like us.  We must so show the joy of the good news that others will wonder at and want what we have, whether in their own tradition or by adopting ours.   A phrase often put into St. Francis’ mouth is that we should preach the Gospel at all times and in all places, and only occasionally open our mouths to do so.  

We must avoid the siren call of the pyramid-schemers, but we must all the same share our faith.  Live it.  Let your light shine.  And then when others ask, be unafraid to share the grounds for your hope.     This is how we bring our Trinitarian faith into our evangelism, and follow Jesus’ call to always focus on the person in front of us, and share God’s love in miraculous and surprising ways. 

In the name of Christ, Amen.

A liturgical note here:  Trinity church is well named after the social interaction, love, and equality at the heart of God.   Back in January, in order to shorten the then somewhat lengthy Prayers of the People, we stopped using names of church leaders, national leaders, and many of those on our intercessory prayer list.  We also were responding to parishioners who were afraid of feeling alienated by praying by name for national leaders whom they found offensive.  In the past months, I have had many requests from various people in the parish to return to the practice of using names.   The issue is intentionality, not length.  Using names intentionally chosen helps this.  We are commanded by scripture to pray for our leaders.  And a prayer for a governmental leader is not an endorsement, but a petition that they might serve the people well, with wisdom and compassion. So you will notice in Prayers of the People starting today names included once again.  

Silence and Hope (Midweek Message)

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Fr. Tony’s Midweek Message

Silence and Hope

June 7, 2017

The Beatitudes tell us that God is there active and loving where we least expect: blessed are those who are starving, thirsty, poor and downtrodden, and mourning.   It is in the dry spots of our spiritual lives, the moments of pain when God seems to mock us with his silence, when God is most present, Jesus says. 

C.S. Lewis, grieving the death of his wife Joy Davidman wrote:

“Meanwhile, where is God? This is one of the most disquieting symptoms. When you are happy, so happy that you have no sense of needing Him, so happy that you are tempted to feel His claims upon you as an interruption, if you remember yourself and turn to Him with gratitude and praise, you will be—or so it feels—welcomed with open arms. But go to Him when your need is desperate, when all other help is vain, and what do you find? A door slammed in your face, and a sound of bolting and double bolting on the inside. After that, silence. You may as well turn away. The longer you wait, the more emphatic the silence will become. There are no lights in the windows. It might be an empty house. Was it ever inhabited? It seemed so once. And that seeming was as strong as this. What can this mean? Why is He so present a commander in our time of prosperity and so very absent a help in time of trouble?  I tried to put some of these thoughts to [a friend] this afternoon. He reminded me that the same thing seems to have happened to Christ: ‘Why hast thou forsaken me?’ I know. Does that make it easier to understand?  Not that I am (I think) in much danger of ceasing to believe in God. The real danger is of coming to believe such dreadful things about Him. The conclusion I dread is not ‘So there’s no God after all,’ but ‘So this is what God’s really like. Deceive yourself no longer.’”  (from A Grief Observed)

It is when we feel the absence and silence of God most that we need most to trust and hope.  We must not draw the conclusion that God is somehow party to the evils we are going through.  God is there to help, to stabilize, to support.  He is not a wacky great uncle, a fairy Godmother, or Santa Claus there to grant us our wishes, no matter how just and fair they may be.  His silence deepens our yearning and dependence.  The prayers he answers in ways not expected by us are evidence of ongoing love, not neglect.  The Prayer Book teaches that God will grant us, eventually, more than we can ask or imagine.

Grace and Peace,

Fr. Tony+

Living Water, Fiery Rose (Pentecost year A)

“Living Water, Fiery Rose”
Feast of Pentecost (Whitsunday); Year A
4 June 2017
Homily
Parish Church of Trinity, Ashland

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

Acts 2:1-21 ; 1 Corinthians 12:3b-13 ; John 7:37-39; Psalm 104:25-35, 37

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

Today we celebrate and commemorate what happened on the Feast of Pentecost in Jerusalem 50 days after the Passover when Jesus was killed and then bodily reappeared to his disciples.    Wearing white, a symbol of purity and of the baptisms that are often performed on this holy day, called Whitsunday, we held aloft roses as if they were candles during the reading of the Pentecost story.  At the end of today’s Eucharist, as we process out, we will act out the story once again, with the sound of the wind, and the falling of the tongues of flame, in the form of rose petals, to empower us to go out into the world and live the kingdom that Jesus preached.

Interestingly, the Gospel we read today, though about the coming of the Spirit, is not about the feast of Pentecost.  As in so many ways, the Gospel of John takes familiar themes, mixes them around, and plays them in new keys.   It begins, “On the last day of the great festival.”   The feast at issue is not Pentecost, but Succoth. 

In ancient Judaism, there were three great pilgrim feasts each year, when believers were commanded to go to the Temple in Jerusalem:  Passover, the  festival celebrating liberation, was in the spring.  About 50 days later came Shavuot, the Feast of Weeks, at the time of the first harvesting of the early wheat.  Its name in Greek is Pentecost, the Feast of the 50^th Day.  In the fall came Succoth, or Booths, the festival celebrating the main harvest and remembering God’s blessings by reenacting the children of Israel’s living in temporary shelters during the 40 years in the desert. 

All of these are about God’s care and abundance.  But they occur in different times and seasons, and like in our own life, God’s grace is poured out on us in different ways in differing settings.  

Succoth occurred in the fall, after the harvest was in, when the dry summer had already dried up all the intermittent brooks.  The hills around Jerusalem are like our own hills here and in Northern California:  brilliant green during the rainy season, but golden when it gets dry.  Succoth happened when the hills were hot, brown, and dry.   In the heat of late autumn, the people gathered leafy branches and wove them together to make shelter from the blistering sun.  These booths stood for the tents of the children of Israel wandering in the desert. 

Succoth was a great public party, marked by two great public ceremonies in addition to the normal worship of the Temple.    They assembled huge candelabra, 85 feet tall with immense torches instead of candles, in the Courtyard of the Temple giving flame and light throughout the city like the pillar of fire in the desert.   And each of the seven days of the festival, a large procession accompanied by singing, chanting, and musical instruments went down to the pool of Siloam to fetch water.  King Hezekiah at the end of the 8^th century BCE had made a secure water supply for Jerusalem under siege by building an underground aqueduct that brought in running (“living”) water from the Gihon spring in the nearby Kidron valley.  Priests and Levites would go down to the Pool of Siloam and fill immense golden water urns and then bring them up to the Temple Mount.   There, in the midst of the dry season before the winter rains began, they poured out the water onto the altar of sacrifice, along with wine. 

The joy of the harvest and the hope for the coming winter’s rains were manifest in this simple act of joyful faith:  in the midst of dryness and heat, walking down and then back up from the pool, and pouring the water out in abundance on the altar, for it to run out onto to the paving stones and seep into the earth. 

It is on this festival that Jesus says:  “Let anyone who is thirsty come to me, and let the one who believes in me drink.”  In the midst of thirst, Jesus is the water that quenches.  In the midst of dryness and shortage, Jesus is running water, water that gives life. 

The he adds: “As the scripture has said, ‘Out of the believer’s heart shall flow rivers of living water.’”   The spring that Jesus offers, the water that Jesus is, these do not run out.  The Gospel writer adds, “Now he said this about the Spirit, which believers in him were to receive.”  That’s why the Revised Common Lectionary gives us this fall harvest festival reading on the occasion of this first fruits festival in the spring. 

T.S. Eliot in Four Quartets writes:

What is the late November doing
With the disturbance of the spring
And creatures of the summer heat,
And snowdrops writhing under feet
And hollyhocks that aim too high
Red into grey and tumble down
Late roses filled with early snow? (East Coker II)

In the mystery of God’s economy, grace happens out of time, and we get glimpses of grace whenever it occurs.

That’s why we speak at Christmas of suddenly smelling the flowers of May and fresh mown grass in the stable where Jesus is born.  It’s why we speak of the incarnation at Easter as well as Christmas, and one of our great Easter anthems in daily prayer is a hymn to the Blessed Virgin: “O Queen of Heaven, be joyful!  Alleluia!  For he who was born of your body, Alleluia!.  Has arisen, as he promised! Alleluia!  Pray for us to the Father, Alleluia!”  It’s why it doesn’t really matter to us Christians whether the Spirit came 50 days after Easter as Luke describes, or on Easter Evening when the risen Jesus breathes on his disciples as John describes. The spirit comes when it comes.  And it’s why we read a Succoth story at Pentecost.   

The story from Acts tells it in a strange way:  so many people from so many different places all hear the word of the apostles “in their native language.”  Literally, it means the “tongue they were born into”, what we would call their “Mother tongue.”  And this, just after “tongues (it’s the same word) of flame” have fallen on them.    There’s something special about the language you learned first as a baby, the one your mother sang to you in.  If you speak several languages, you know your mother tongue is the one we revert to when in stress or in great need.  The coming of the spirit for these people meant that strange things were understandable, and all felt like it was home, affectionately familiar.  And that, in the midst of the sound of a great windstorm. 

The spirit can be disruptive.  But it makes all things intimately familiar.  Jesus in our hearts can burn on occasion to the point of pain.  I think that’s what he is talking about when he says we must shoulder up our cross.  But Jesus in our hearts also warms us gently.   Most importantly, he quenches us when thirsty, and makes us generous in the midst of shortage.  Living water in the dry desert!  The barren, hard wood of the cross flowers.  In Pentecost we smell roses. 

Again, Eliot writes in the Four Quartets:

And all shall be well and
All manner of thing shall be well
When the tongues of flame are in-folded
Into the crowned knot of fire
And the fire and the rose are one. (Little Gidding V). 

Thanks be to God.