Love Your Enemies (Midweek Message)

  Photograph: Peter Charlesworth/LightRocket via Getty Images

Love Your Enemies

Fr. Tony’s Midweek Message

May 29, 2019

This coming Tuesday marks the 30^th anniversary of the June 4, 1989 Tiananmen Square Massacre. 

“You have heard that it was said, ‘You shall love your neighbor and hate your enemy.’ But I say to you, love your enemies, and pray for those who abuse you, that you may be children of your heavenly Father, for he makes his sun rise on the bad and the good, and causes rain to fall on the just and the unjust.… So be whole, just as your heavenly Father is whole.” (Matthew 5:43-47)

The best sermon I ever heard in my life was given in Beijing in the late summer of 1989.  It was by a layman in a House Church, and it was on the text “love your enemies; pray for those who abuse you.” 

During the somewhat liberal period of religious openness in China prior to the June 4, 1989 massacre, local Chinese had begun attending services with expatriates. After the crackdown, the Chinese security and political control apparatus was brought to bear on Beijing’s Chinese Christians as well as any other group seen to be too closely identified with foreigners.  Old rules that had remained on the books forbidding Chinese nationals from attending “foreign” worship services started to be enforced with a vengeance, including lengthy interrogation and physical abuse.  The pressure brought to bear on our Chinese congregants became almost unbearable.  Finally our congregation decided that the local people and the expatriates in our little congregation would have to go their own ways and worship separately.  It was very hard on all of us, because we had become close friends.       

One of these Chinese members of our congregation spoke at the last service we held together. He started his sermon, in Chinese, by noting that separate worship would be hard, since “gathering together each week is like drawing individual pieces of firewood together, to make a blaze that can warm us through the week.”  Pulling apart the critical mass of fuel for the fire posed the risk of extinguishing the flame, especially if the individual pieces of fuel were isolated, put aside, and kept alone in the cold, where their flame would die for want of heat. But we had no real choice in the matter, given the pressures. 

My friend said he had always thought that “love your enemies” was a little over-dramatic, “for why should Christians have enemies?” He said he now understood the passage much better.    “If I could be so bold, I’d like to refer to a passage in Alexander Solzhenitsyn’s Gulag Archipelago.”  Since in all probability our meeting place had listening devices in the walls, most of us shifted uncomfortably.  

 Solzhenitsyn as a prisoner in the Gulag.

He told the story at length:  Solzhenitsyn is in the labor camp system in the Soviet Union.  He becomes more and more dehumanized by his torment, but then, in a chapter called ‘Resurrection,’ regains his Christian faith and begins the long road to true freedom, even within that system.  In the key passage of that key chapter, Solzhenitsyn says that he realized at that critical time that no matter how tightly his interrogators constrained him, he always had a choice—though they always eventually could force him to say what they wanted, he could do so willingly or unwillingly, cheaply or expensively in terms of the suffering he endured before giving them what they demanded. 

He also realized that they too were constrained to do what they did, and that they too had a choice in how they did what they were constrained to do.  In a system where all were compromised and all were victims in one degree of another, he realized the great truth that the line between good and evil is not found between one country and another country, between one economic class and another, between one political party and another, between one religion or another, or one race and another.  The line between good and evil is fine but very definite, and runs down the middle of each and every human heart.  It is found in that space of the heart where we exert our choices, no matter how constrained our choices may be. 

My friend concluded: 

“So Solzhenitsyn realized that he needed to pray for his interrogator, and for all of God’s creatures, even Stalin. It is where my faith begins as well.  This is the reason, I believe, that we must pray for our enemies.  They, like us, are in God’s image, and have that line down the middle of their hearts, no matter what decisions they have made before, no matter how distorted the image of God may have become in them, or how twisted or constrained the options left to them might be.”

“So we must pray to the creator to help his creatures–not that they be like us, not that they treat us more favorably, not that they choose what we wish they would choose, but that in whatever way God wants, here and now, they might opt for the good in their hearts and not the evil.  We pray that they might become what God created them to be, not what we think that they should be.  We do this because we share with them in our hearts the capacity to do great evil or great good.  Without such a belief in my solidarity with all my fellow creatures, even those who abuse me and what I believe is good, I would not have hope that God might work his miracles in my own heart, and help me to choose the right.  That is why I must pray for even Premier Li Peng, who imposed martial law, for all who ordered the military actions during the first week of June, and for those who put forward lies defending such things, like government spokesman Xuan Mu.”

And so the congregation divided, and our Chinese friends managed to do church on their own.  My friend was held hostage in his own country for two years to buy the silence of his wife, an outspoken Peking University professor who fled China for Germany in the turmoil after the massacre.  Finally, at the intervention of the German government, he was allowed to leave China.   But the words of his sermon stayed with me, and remain so to this day. 

Jesus was perhaps establishing an impossible standard for human behavior and emotions in the sermon on the Mount, when he said love your enemies.  But as he said elsewhere, with God nothing is impossible.  God gives us the grace to be able to pray sincerely for our enemies’ good.  For we must do this if we are to become “perfect,” or “whole,” i.e., what God wants us to be.   

The resurrection of Jesus helps us: as we live in Him and He in us, we no longer fall easy prey to tribal and parochial loyalties overwhelming the need for equanimity and compassion:  “For he is our peace; in his flesh he has made both groups into one and has broken down the dividing wall, that is, the hostility between us” (Ephesians 2:14). 

We are all God’s creatures and all bear God’s image, no matter how we may have distorted and twisted it. And so are all who are our enemies.  We are all in this together. And that is so regardless of what we think of each other, regardless of how right or wrong we may be in our judgments of each other.

God loves us, each and every one.  So we must learn to love each other.  Not pretend to love each other.  Not practice passive aggression on each other as we despise the other.  Not silently disengage and passively submit, detached, from the abuse others give us.  But love.  And love as God loves, which means sometimes being a pain in the neck and almost always means challenging the beloved.  We must forgive, knowing that reconciliation and restoration of trust comes later, as all live into their best selves. 

Grace and Peace. 

Fr. Tony+

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Called to Our Side (Easter 6C)

Called to Our Side (Easter 6C)

Homily delivered at Trinity Parish, Ashland (OR)

Sunday May 26, 2019 8:00 a.m. Said, 10:00 a.m. Sung Mass

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

Acts 16:9-15; Revelation 21:10, 22-22:5; John 14:23-29; Psalm 67

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

Today’s scriptures are all about, in one way or another, with us being in touch with God, and God being in touch with us.  The reading from Acts portrays a scene where the early apostles are led by the Holy Spirit to make major decisions on where to place their missionary efforts.  And they find surprises in the process: a wealthy non-Jewish woman who attends synagogue and is just right for hearing Paul’s message.  And they let her convince them, seemingly against their better judgment, to make her home their base of operations.   The Psalm, a favorite of mine that was sung when Elena and I celebrated 30 years of marriage by taking for the first time Christian vows of marriage, tells of gentiles, the “nations,” “all the ends of the earth,” also being welcomed to the hymn of thanks and praise sung to the one God by his covenant people.  The reading from the Revelation of John tells of the final state of God’s created world, a beautiful city without tears or darkness, where there is no need for temples or churches, because God dwells with its inhabitants personally.  

The Gospel reading is part of Jesus’ great farewell discourse in the Gospel of John.   Jesus says he will not leave his friends behind alone, bereft.  He will go away, but yet come back soon to them, by sending them “another, a paraclete.”  Parakletos means someone “called to stand beside” you.  It is from the verb kaleo, “to call”, and the preposition para, “along side.”  Translated verbally in Latin as Ad-vocatus, we sometimes hear it translated as “Advocate,” with the overtones of someone who stands beside us in court or a dispute to defend us.  But another way of understanding the word comes from a related abstract noun, paraklesis, which means “a standing with,” in the sense of consoling and empathizing.  This is where the King James Bible gets its translation, “Comforter.”  Eugene Peterson’s The Message translation understands it in a more comprehensive way, “The Friend, the Holy Spirit whom the Father will send at my request” (John 14:26). 

Paraklesis has a closely related word, epiclesis, that comes from the verb to call and the preposition epi, “upon.”   The epiclesis is the part of the Eucharistic prayer where we call upon God to pour out the spirit upon the congregation and the gifts of bread and wine, so that they may become the Body and Blood of Christ. 

In John, the evening of the Resurrection Jesus returns to his friends and says, “Peace,” and then breathes on them adding, “receive the Holy Spirit” (John 20:21-22).  In Luke/Acts, the coming of the Holy Spirit to the Church is placed on the day of Pentecost, after the Ascension of Jesus.  But though John wrote decades after Luke, his view seems to reflect the earlier understanding of the coming of the spirit:  Paul writing just a decade after Jesus’ death, says that “the Lord” (that is, the Risen Jesus) “is the Spirit” (2 Cor 3:17)

The basis of Christian spiritual life is having this Advocate, this Comforter, this “Friend” beside us, the Holy Spirit who makes Jesus present for us. 

It is a much abused concept.  People say the Spirit inspired them to do this or say that, to find a parking space here, or excommunicate that person, or go to war.  Simply because people think the spirit is talking to them does not make it so. 

We often hear at ordinations or at Pentecost hymns to the Holy Spirit that refer to the “seven-fold gifts” of the Spirit.  These seven gifts of the spirit in classical Christian theology are all taken from Isaiah 11:2-3: 1) wisdom, the capacity to rightly order our loves, 2) understanding, to comprehend how to put rightly-ordered love into practice, 3) counsel, actually to know the difference between right and wrong, and choose to do what is right, 4) courage, to overcome the fears that block our way in following God and taking risks for him, 5) knowledge, to perceive with certitude the meaning of God and the universe, 6) reverence, a deep respect for and humility before the Holy, and 7) fear of the Lord, a sense of wonder and awe at the beauty and majesty of our Maker. 

But Saint Paul gives a much more practical guide.  He says, “the fruit of the spirit is love, joy, peace, patience, kindness, generosity, faithfulness, gentleness, and self control” (Gal 5:22).   One of the reasons I can say with faithful hope that the Episcopal Church was guided by the Spirit to include women in ministry and gays and lesbians in our common, sacramental life, is that all these are present in the intuition behind this decision.  Jerry Falwell saying the Holy Spirit tells us in the Bible to reject such people, not so much. 

It is not legal or canonical guidance, as if the Spirit were a little appelate court judge sitting on one shoulder while the Devil tempts on the other.   It is more about life-affirming, loving, and joyful intuition and feeling.  Note that both in John’s account of the Last Supper and of the Risen Lord’s appearance on Easter evening, the spirit is promised or given along with the gift of peace, of a sense of wholeness, abundance, and calm. 

In today’s passage, the Holy Spirit has two functions: to “remind” us of what Jesus has already taught us and to “teach” us new things (v. 26).  This puts to rest the false dichotomy between standing with tried and true, canonical, and legal constraints, versus being bold in seeking new truth, with all the risk that entails.    

I have had moments in my life where I know I felt the Spirit: peace, clarity, loving kindness, and courage.  I felt it when I asked Elena to marry me.  I felt it when I sought confirmation in the Episcopal Church, and when I recognized God’s call to me to be a priest.  I have felt the gentle promptings from Jesus as I have counseled and consoled people, and as I have needed consolation and courage. 

We are well advised to reason and study things out, to seek counsel and advice to help us get our bearings and direction.  And it is wise to be cautious in making claims of “being guided by the Spirit,” if only to relieve God of the burden of having silly or wrong things chalked up to his account.   But we need to listen.  An active and regular prayer life as part of a rule of life, reading scripture as well as thoughtful, uplifting and even challenging books, a regular practice of contemplating beauty and serving others, and listening—all these are ways to help hear the Holy Spirit. 

I invite us all this week to look at how we’re doing in pursuing such regular practice. 

Jesus is here now, present for us.  The spirit of love and holiness is here now.  It is up to us to do what we can so that we better hear his voice. 

In the name of Christ, Amen

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St. Vincent of Lerins

St. Vincent of Lerins

Homily delivered at Trinity Parish, Ashland (OR)

Thursday May 22, 2019 12 noon said Mass with healing

The Very Rev. Anthony Hutchinson, SCP, Ph.D.

Isa 49:8-13; Psa 23; 1 Pet 5:1-4; John 15:12-17

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

Vincent was a monk and writer who died c. 445. Born to a noble family of Gaul (modern France), he initially served as a soldier but gave it up to become a monk on the island of Lerins off the southern French coast near Cannes. He was ordained there and in about 434 authored his famous work the Commonitorium (“On What is Held in Common”).  A measure of how risky it was to publish in theology in this period of great controversy is that Vincent published under the pseudonym Peregrinus (the pilgrim). 

In the book, Vincent took on the theological giants of his age.  He argued against the Bishop of Constantinople, Nestorius, and affirmed the rightness of referring to the Blessed Virgin Mary as Theotokos, “Mother of God.”  He also took on the bishop of Hippo, Augustine, and condemned what he saw as the extremism of St. Augustine’s doctrine of grace and predestination.  In both cases, Vincent argued caution about “new-fangled” teaching.  He includes his famous maxim, the Vincentian Canon, by which he hoped to be able to differentiate between true and false tradition: quod ubique, quod semper, quod ab omnibus credituni est (“what has been believed everywhere, always, and by all”). He believed that the ultimate source of Christian truth was Holy Scripture as interpreted and understood by the authority of the larger Church. 

Monastics in Southern France during this age tended to share British monk Pelagius’ objections to Augustine’s teaching on grace because they saw Augustine’s teachings as undermining the basic monastic ideal of spiritual practice helping make one closer to God, though they shied away from outright support once church councils began to condemn Pelagius’ obsession with human free will.  Centuries after Vincent’s death, these so-called semi-Pelagian views were condemned as heretical just as Pelagius had been condemned.  But it is not clear that Vincent actually held any of the specific tenets at issue.  It is clear that he opposed views later labeled as Calvinist; committed Calvinists to this day condemn what they still call “Semi-Pelagianism” in the traditions that honor Vincent as a saint:  Roman Catholicism, Orthodoxy, and Anglicanism.   

What is the value of the Vincentian canon?  Some argue that it is meaningless, given the great diversity of Christian faith over the ages and in different locales.  Or they say that it reduces the deposit of faith to a lowest common denominator of what doesn’t offend most Christians over time.  But I think there still is great value to what Vincent was getting at.  Congregational determinations on the content of faith are notoriously cranky and eccentric.  Even in the Episcopal Church, we hear on occasion that the true core of faith is constituted by Scripture, Tradition, and Reason, and, most importantly, what the previous Rector taught.  Using the general standard of what has passed the laugh test over the ages and in many different locales as at least a hint of what the heart of our Catholic and Orthodox faith is, well, that is to my mind a wise practice.

Thanks be to God. 

Crazy About You (Midweek Message)

Crazy About You

Fr. Tony’s Midweek Message May 22, 2019

As we continue our path through the great Fifty Days of Easter, we are reading many passages in the Eucharistic Lectionary as well as the Daily Office Lectionary about our new identities in Christ. 

You may have noticed that instead of “Glory to God in the Highest” as our opening liturgical Song of Praise, each Sunday in Easter we have been singing the Canticle Pascha Nostrum, a stringing together of several of Paul’s poetic descriptions of the resurrection (1 Corinthians 5:7-8; Romans 6:9-11; and 1 Corinthians 15:20-22): 

Alleluia.

Christ our Passover has been sacrificed for us;
therefore let us keep the feast,

Not with the old leaven, the leaven of malice and evil,
but with the unleavened bread of sincerity and truth.

 Alleluia.

Christ being raised from the dead will never die again;
death no longer has dominion over him.

The death that he died, he died to sin, once for all;
but the life he lives, he lives to God.

So also consider yourselves dead to sin,
and alive to God in Jesus Christ our Lord.

Alleluia.

Christ has been raised from the dead,
the first fruits of those who have fallen asleep.

For since by a man came death,
by a man has come also the resurrection of the dead.

For as in Adam all die,
so also in Christ shall all be made alive.

Alleluia.

The idea is that we have died to our old selves and now are alive, and have new identities in the Resurrected Lord. 

When it comes to identities, whether old or new, it is important to ask ourselves who exactly we think we are and what we think others think of us.  Note in this regard the comments by Psychologist David Benner in his book Surrender to Love about what God thinks of us: 

“Imagine God thinking about you. What do you assume God feels when you come to mind? When I ask people to do this, a surprising number of people say that the first thing they assume God feels is disappointment. Others assume that God feels anger. In both cases, these people are convinced that it is their sin that first catches God's attention. I think they are wrong- and I think the consequences of such a view of God are enormous.  … 

“Regardless of what you have come to believe about God based on your life experience, the truth is that when God thinks of you, love swells in his heart and a smile comes to his face. God bursts with love for humans. He is far from being emotionally uninvolved with his creation. God’s bias toward us is strong, persistent and positive. The Christian God chooses to be known as Love, and that love pervades every aspect of God’s relationship with us.  … 

“If you assume God looks at you with disgust, disappointment, frustration or anger, the central feature of any spiritual response to such a God will be an effort to earn his approval. … How could anyone expect to feel safe enough to relax in the presence of a God who is preoccupied with their shortcomings and failures?  …

“Genuinely encountering Love is not the same as inviting Jesus into your heart, joining or attending a church, or doing what Jesus commands. It is the experience of love that is transformational. You simply cannot bask in divine love and not be affected.” 

Jesus' victory over evil and death on Easter changes the game for all of us.  That is why Paul says “even so in Christ shall all be made alive.” 

Do you believe in a God that loves you, that is crazy about you?  Is the God you imagine in your heart as overwhelmingly bursting with kind feelings, loving concern, and affection for you as the one suggested by Jesus in the parable of the Loving Father (the one with the two problem children—the Prodigal and the Prig)?  If this idea is difficult for you to feel and accept in your heart, whether because of some theological habit or personal burden, that means something is amiss.  I stand ready to talk with you in private about it, share experience and listen to yours, and pray with you. 

With the spring now here, and warmer weather approaching, many of us are taking time to bask, to rest in the sunshine.  As part of your spiritual discipline this week, take time to simply bask in God’s love for a few minutes as well. 

Grace and Peace.

--Fr. Tony+ 

[Edited and reposted from May 2, 2012.  Thanks to the Rev. Jemma Allen and the Rev. Andrew Coyle for bringing this passage from Benner to my attention.]

All Things New (Easter 5C)

“All Things New”
Easter 5C
19 May 2019 8:00 a.m. Said and 10 a.m. Sung Mass

Parish Church of Trinity, Ashland (Oregon)

Acts 11:1-18; Psalm 148; Revelation 21:1-6; John 13:31-35

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

I am so sad about the current strife going on in the United Methodist Church, strife that threatens to disunite it.  I am troubled by the illiberality of the times:  on the right, trying to roll back women’s rights and minority protections, on the left, trying to shut down free thought and discussion of difficult things.  But, as one of my seminary professors put it, “Human beings often mistake our petty programs for the arrival of the Reign of God.”  

Such turmoil is part of a larger problem of being human, of becoming distracted, of mistaking last things for first and insignificant peripherals for the core.  We often let the urgent things in our life push aside the important things. We mistake someone’s plea for attention and empathy for a request to step in and fix things, make suggestions, or worse, give direction.  We play down the importance of mutual relationships and of just being with another and exaggerate our own power to judge things rightly and actually help others.   And we think that we need the right answers, or worse, HAVE the right answers, when in fact what we need are the right questions.  

Today’s story from Acts tells about Peter turning from tried and true answers to more important questions.  Just how broad is God’s love?  How have we tried to make our own boundaries and tribal divisions into God’s will?  What does it means when a stranger and a foreigner experiences things that we call blessings from God?    In this story, Peter stops worrying about maintaining and defending the boundaries he thought God had erected.  He breaks down barriers, overcomes human divisions, and embraces the sacrificial, transforming love that comes from a living God. The inclusion of the Gentiles—that great unexpected and, at the time, anti-scriptural overturning of past prejudice—is a great theme of the Book of Acts, which sees it as the direct consequence of Jesus’ resurrection.   

 

Everything Peter knows about clean and unclean, proper and improper, moral and immoral, holy and profane is upended by this. He is going against the Holy Scriptures as taught and understood in his day.  This causes people in the Church to question him.  He intentionally goes to them, takes time and explains, “step by step.”  He simply says what has happened to him to help him change his mind from where he once was and where those criticizing him still are.  He is careful to include the details of his dream vision: “Lord, I can’t eat that stuff because it’s against your commandments and I’ve tried since I was little to keep them.  I can’t eat it because it’s disgusting.”   “But then the voice of God said, ‘call nothing unclean that I have made clean and nothing profane that I have made holy.’”  And Peter then actually gets to know some of these believing Gentiles and sees in their lives the signs that God has been active in their lives, just as much as in the lives of Jewish believers.  This for him is the sign that God has indeed made these Gentiles holy, without benefit of following Torah, the Scriptural Law that Peter knows. 

The Resurrection of Jesus changed the world for his followers.  All things were made new.  Jesus in his life had proclaimed the arrival of God’s Reign; God raising Jesus from the dead showed that the Reign had indeed come.  As so we have to live as if the Reign of God is already here.  This includes God’s great banquet for all peoples at the end of time, as described in today’s reading from Revelation.  This includes all people being priests and prophets.   (It’s why Eucharistic Prayer C, which we here at Trinity use during the Great 50 days of Easter, is a dialogue between the celebrant and the people, all serving as priests whose prayer consecrates the elements.)   Jesus’ disciples re-evaluated everything in light of the Resurrection. Their contemplation of the Beauty that raises the dead to life made them quickly see the universality of God’s grace, and the impermanence of human barriers. 

“Call nothing profane that I have made holy!”  “Call nothing unclean that I have made clean!”

The resurrection of Jesus should change all things for us.  All things made new! If we are to follow God’s call, we must stand ready to witness to the truth of God’s action in our lives and the lives of others, especially those different from us.  With Peter, we must reach out and get to know the unfamiliar.  We must “go” with them and learn to see the hand of God in their lives.  Then we must go to those who criticize, and explain gently, “step by step,” what has led us to see God’s hand at work in our fellow human beings.

This issue is still very much with us today.  The full inclusion of first women as priests and bishops and then gays and lesbians fully in the common and sacramental life of the Episcopal Church has caused a lot of controversy in the Church and the Anglican Communion in the last 30 years.  Like the devout Jewish Christians in today’s story, some have criticized inclusion, pointing to Scripture as they understand it, and asked how we can do such a thing. 

All things made new! The Gospel calls us to break these barriers too.  In Christ, there is no white or black, slave or free, male or female, Jew or Gentile, gay or straight.  Our reading of Holy Scripture, our reflection on tradition, and our reason tells us that we are seeing clear evidence of God intending women to be church leaders, and redeeming, transforming grace at work in the lives of gay, lesbian, and transgender people of faith.  This has led us to discern, to be led by the Spirit if you will, that we must open these ministries and sacraments to all, including people previously marginalized and condemned due to impediment of gender or what had been seen as the moral failing and disorder of same sex attraction and love.  Call nothing profane that God has declared holy! 

The resurrection of Jesus from the dead is what calls us, just as it did Peter.

Many members of this congregation over the years have been great examples of working for the ordination and episcopal consecration of women, and full inclusion in the sacraments and life of the Church of gays, lesbians, and transgender persons.  These Trinitarians are models for us all. 

All the blessings of full inclusion have been obvious, not just for those now newly included, but for us all, who have been graced by the gifts and contributions they make in our common life.   

I know that we often operate by the rule: to get along, don’t talk religion or politics with people, especially if they disagree with you.  But far from avoiding the difficult conversations with those who question or disagree with us here, we need to learn to commend the faith that is in us.  Like Peter, we need to go to them, and explain these things step-by-step.  And we need to do this because we see in them also the children of God.

Frederick Buechner writes:   

“On her deathbed, Gertrude Stein … asked, ‘What is the answer?’ Then, after a long silence, ‘What is the question?’ Don't start looking in the Bible for the answers it gives. Start by listening for the questions it asks. We are much involved, all of us, with questions about things that matter a good deal today but will be forgotten by this time tomorrow—the immediate wheres and whens and hows that face us daily at home and at work—but at the same time we tend to lose track of the questions about things that matter always, life-and-death questions about meaning, purpose, and value. To lose track of such deep questions as these is to risk losing track of who we really are in our own depths and where we are really going. There is perhaps no stronger reason for reading the Bible than that somewhere among all those India-paper pages there awaits each one of us, whoever we are, the one question that (though for years we may have been pretending not to hear it) is the central question of our individual lives. Here are a few of them:

“For what will it profit anyone if they gain the whole world but [lose their soul]? (Matthew 16:26)
Am I my brother’s keeper? (Genesis 4:9)
If God is for us, who can be against us? (Romans 8:31)
What is truth? (John 18:38)
How can anyone be born after having grown old? (John 3:4)
What do people gain from all the toil at which they toil under the sun? (Ecclesiastes 1:3)
Where shall I run to escape your Spirit? (Psalm 139:7)
Who is my neighbor? (Luke 10:29)
What shall I do to inherit eternal life? (Luke 10:25).”

“When you hear the question that is your question, then you have already begun to hear much. Whether you can accept the Bible's answer or not, you have reached the point where at least you can begin to hear it too.” (from Wishful Thinking and later Beyond Words).  

Beloved, focusing on answers rather than questions, trying to systematize and tame God, getting first things last and last things first—all this is actually reflects a kind of idolatry, setting in stone our image of God at a particular time and thinking that it must never change.  Under the lens of faith, it is a kind of pride, one of the sins that will kill your life in God.  We must always remember that we are not called to play God.  Rather, we are called to follow Jesus. 

Amen.  

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Telling Good News

 Trinity Church, c. 1910 

(the North-South intercontinental railway came in 1887; 

Trinity was built in 1894)
Photo Courtesy of The Terry Skibby Collection

Telling Good News

Fr. Tony’s Midweek Message

May 16, 2019

An old joke  runs this way:  When pioneers came West, soon there came missionaries and clergy from the churches—the Baptists came first with the earliest intrepid souls, walking or riding a horse.  Next came the Methodists, in wagon trains along with the first wave of farmers and settlers, followed by Presbyterians and Lutherans once the wagon trains were more established.  Then, last of all, came the Episcopalians, once the intercontinental railroad was established with dining cars, proper table settings, and fully stocked bars. 

We Episcopalians can indeed at times be overly insistent on our creature comforts and doing things “just right” and shy away from things that might make us the butt of jokes or turned up noses.  The truth be told, we tend to shy away from the big E—

Evangelism, or sharing the Good News of the Gospel with others.    The main reason is that we look at what some Evangelicals have done with Evangelism and feel our stomachs turn:  hard sales pitch pushing brand loyalty, engaging strangers with calls to authority and submission, browbeating and Bible-thumping, and a variety of cheesy stories telling people to turn off their brains and fall in line. 

But the fact is, we are natural evangelists, if we mean by that sharing good news:  social creatures that we are, we love telling others about weddings, births, and all the joyful things in life.  And even when it comes to sharing faith stories, we are powerful.  When the right moment comes, usually with someone we know (though random strangers sometimes are in the mix) we tend to share honestly what has given us faith and joy.  We don’t push a brand and beat up on others.  Rather, we simply tell why we believe that God is love, what in faith has brought us joy, and why we have hope that in the end, all things will be well.   Because our sharing is honest, not aimed at advancing a particular agenda or dogma, it is authentic.  And faith, authentically shared, is powerful. It attracts others.   Jesus says to us, “Come, follow me.”  When we share honestly with others, it says, “You too are beloved.  If you want what we have, know that you are always welcome to join us, and that in the degree that is suited to you where you are now.” 

Grace and Peace.     

My Sheep Hear My Voice (Easter 4C)

My Sheep Hear My Voice (Easter 4C)

Homily delivered at Trinity Parish, Ashland (OR)

Sunday May 12, 2019 8:00 a.m. said, 10:00 a.m. sung Mass

The Very Rev. Anthony Hutchinson, SCP, Ph.D.

Acts 9:36-43; Revelation 7:9-17; John 10:22-30; Psalm 23

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

I remember very vividly the moment when I decided to leave the denomination of my youth and become an Episcopalian.   Both Elena and I were raised Mormon, and came from families that had been LDS for 5-6 generations. When I was about 14, I was about ready to leave faith altogether, but an inspired local leader asked me to teach Sunday School to 7-year-olds: a course on Old Testament stories.  The next year, I taught stories about Jesus from the Gospels.  These stories spoke deeply to me, and I had a spiritual experience at the age of 16 that led me to go on a Mormon mission to France and marry in the Mormon Temple.  The truth be told, though, my true passion was always these Bible stories.  That’s why I received a B.A. and M.A. in Classics and Hebrew at BYU and then went to Catholic University in Washington DC for a second M.A. and a Ph.D. in Biblical Studies. 

As I learned more, I saw more and more problems in LDS truth claims, especially about the Bible and early Church history.  I saw the continuity between the apostles and the Catholicism of the episcopate, and early on came to accept the Apostles’ and Nicene Creeds.  As my knowledge and intellectual rigor developed under the tutelage of Jesuits, Dominicans, Sulpicians, and Franciscans, my spirituality focused.  Eventually, the tensions were just too great: legalism, anti-intellectualism, wooden authority, and injustice for women, racial, and sexual minorities.  But I also saw that Roman Catholicism, as it began to draw back from the openness of Vatican II, suffered from many of these same problems. 

So I turned to the Episcopal Church.   As for many of you, when I first came into an Episcopal Church, I felt that I had come home, found “worship in spirit and in truth.”  Here was a part of Christ’s one, holy, catholic, and apostolic Church that tried to follow both to the spirit of Christ’s words, was honest and reasonable, and sought to be open to the spirit.   For me, Anglicanism had the strengths of both Mormonism and Roman Catholicism without what I saw as the weirdness of Utah or what the early Prayer Book calls the “enormities of the bishop of Rome.” 

It took several years.  As one of my Franciscan teachers said, “you do not change religions like you are changing a shirt.”   Sometimes when I was ready to leave, Elena was not; and then when she was ready to leave, I was not.  Years passed.  Life went on, with its challenges, joys, and pains, and the need for spiritual support and grounding.  I tried different spiritual paths to help me even as I remained LDS. But the tensions grew, and less and less held us to the church of our families and our youth. 

One day, I read in Thomas Merton’s book Zen and the Birds of Appetite a passage: “Any God that needs to be kept alive through constant effort of mind and acts of will is an idol.” The next day, I read in Merton's Meditation and Spiritual Direction, “God does not expect us to be a robot army of victim souls.”  With my heart in turmoil, I attended a Wednesday noon Mass at St. Mary’s Episcopal in Foggy Bottom near the State Department.  There, I heard the voice of Jesus in the cadences and reverence of the Book of Common Prayer. 

When I returned to the office, I talked to a colleague. Damaris had spent much of her career in Southeast Asia, and was best described as a Buddhist.  She always had a listening ear, and gave support and comfort.  So I expressed my frustration and turmoil.

Damaris rarely gave advice. But here, she broke from her regular pattern.  She stared at me incredulously and said, “Tony, are you crazy?  It’s obvious you are a very unhappy Mormon.  Life is short.  Why do you waste your time beating your head against the wall?  Accept the facts.  You can’t go on like this just to please family or friends!  You find joy in the Episcopal Church. If your Mormon family and friends love you, they’ll see that and come to accept it.  If not, don’t worry about them.”  

Within a couple of weeks, Elena and I had joined the choir at our Episcopal Parish, and quit the choir at the Mormon Ward.  We have never looked back.    And we were able to retain our deepest relationships.  Later, the priest who brought us into the Episcopal Church officiated when we took Christian vows of marriage for our 30^th anniversary.  Our Mormon friends and family came.  

In today’s Gospel, Jesus says, “My sheep hear my voice.”    The phrase echoes lines from earlier in the chapter:   “The sheep hear [the Shepherd’s] voice. He calls his own sheep by name and leads them out.  … He goes ahead of them, and the sheep follow him because they recognize his voice. …  I am the Good Shepherd.” (John 10: 2, 4, 11).

How do we recognize the voice of Jesus?  

Modern theologians like David Tracy, Karl Rahner, or Hans Urs von Balthasar say we come to faith and recognize the voice of God by intuition.  It is not an external process of hearing and merely submitting or accepting.  It is a process that involves our memory, our desires, and hopes.  It happens in community.    This is based on a central idea in the theology of St. Thomas Aquinas:  that true knowledge of things or people involves sharing in their nature.  Connaturality is the technical term for this, the word behind the French word for intimate or experiential knowledge, connaître. 

It’s like recognizing a taste, a flavor, or a scent.  It cannot be put into words:  a flavor might be described as bitter, salty, or sweet, like chocolate, apples, or chicken.  It helps a little, but does not sum up recognition.  A scent might have floral overtones, spiciness, or musk.  But hearing these words does not give you the ability to recognize the smell. 

“My sheep hear my voice.  They truly know it.  They recognize it.” 

Saying that you can tell Jesus’ voice by whether it is in accordance with scripture misses the point.  The fact is, there are many voices in scripture; some of them are not good.  They are included, I think, by way of example, to help us recognize what is not the voice of Jesus. 

But Scripture, in the context of a loving community and its sacraments, and of a personal spirituality of having an open heart and mind in listening and service, matters.  In my own faith journey, those Bible stories that I taught as a teenager gave me the start of a faith that was my own.   The Bible was so clearly strange.  It beckoned from afar, in foreign images and cadences. The parables of Jesus, and the ways the different stories about Jesus were told in the different Gospels—these helped me develop a sense of who Jesus was, what his voice might sound like.  Over the years, it grew to the point where I can say “that’s not Jesus speaking” when something put onto his lips by another does not ring true. Despite all the differences between the four Gospels, these stories brings us a coherent, recognizable voice.  Today when I hear something, even something very hard and challenging for me, that rings true to what I have heard of Jesus’ voice up till now I can say, “that’s him.” 

And in this there is joy.  When we hear Jesus’ voice, he challenges us and we are changed, at least in our perceptions and desires.  And that leads to gradual change in how we act, in who we are.  And this helps us understand who we truly are.  It all starts with reading the Gospels, prayer, and coming to Church to partake of the sacraments.   

Rachel Held Evans, who died last week at the age of 37, wrote the following about her leaving conservative evangelical Christianity and becoming an Episcopalian.  Note how she contrasts learning to hear the voice of Jesus and how many Christians get this process wrong: 
 

“When I left church at age 29, full of doubt and disillusionment, I wasn’t looking for a better-produced Christianity. I was looking for a truer Christianity, a more authentic Christianity: I didn’t like how gay, lesbian, bisexual and transgender people were being treated by my evangelical faith community. I had questions about science and faith, biblical interpretation and theology. I felt lonely in my doubts.

“What finally brought me back, after years of running away, wasn’t lattes or skinny jeans; it was the sacraments. Baptism, confession, Communion, preaching the Word, anointing the sick — you know, those strange rituals and traditions Christians have been practicing for the past 2,000 years. The sacraments are what make the church relevant, no matter the culture or era. They don’t need to be repackaged or rebranded; they just need to be practiced, offered and explained in the context of a loving, authentic and inclusive community.

“My search has led me to the Episcopal Church, where every week I find myself, at age 33, kneeling next to a gray-haired lady to my left and a gay couple to my right as I confess my sins and recite the Lord’s Prayer. No one’s trying to sell me anything. No one’s desperately trying to make the Gospel hip or relevant or cool. They’re just joining me in proclaiming the great mystery of the faith — that Christ has died, Christ has risen, and Christ will come again — which, in spite of my persistent doubts and knee-jerk cynicism, I still believe most days."

In the name of God, Amen