Glory in Creation (Epiphany 5C)

 

Marc Chagall, The Calling of Isaiah

Glory in Creation

Homily delivered for the Fifth Sunday after Epiphany (Year C)

The Rev. Fr. Tony Hutchinson, SCP, Ph.D.
9 February 2035

11:00 a.m. Holy Eucharist
Mission Church of the Holy Spirit, Sutherlin (Oregon)

Isaiah 6:1-8; 1 Corinthians 15:1-11; Luke 5:1-11; Psalm 138

 

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

 

We all know the song of the seraphs around God’s throne recounted in today’s Hebrew Scriptures lesson, because it echoes in the Sanctus, part of the canon of the Mass we celebrate each week: “Holy, Holy, Holy, Lord God of Hosts.  Heaven and earth are full of your glory.”  The Hebrew’s stately rhythms resonate with the scene of the Holy of Holies of the Temple with its shaken pillars and clouds of incense smoke: Qadosh, qadosh, qadosh, Adonai tsebaoth.  Melo’ kol ha’arets kevodo.  Robert Alter, in his magisterial translation of the whole Hebrew Scripture, renders the verse, accurately, as follows:  “Holy, holy, holy is the Lord God of Armies, the fullness of all the earth is His glory.” 

 

Qadosh:  separate, special, holy.  Kavod: weightiness, gravitas, honor, or brilliant light.   The idea is that God is separate, unique, and apart, holy, and that thrice over. What makes God noticeable, resplendent, and brilliant, however, is God’s creation itself.  The idea is not that God’s glory is apart from all creation, invading it somehow and filling it.   The idea is that the whole of creation, the handiwork of God, itself is God’s glory.  

 

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.”  Irenaeus means that God’s brilliance is not ultimately found out there, in the angel choirs or seraphic dance, but here, in that part of creation made in God’s image, a living breathing human being. 

 

Seeing the glory of God in our human lives should not be an alien idea for us, since we affirm the incarnation of God, God taking on flesh and becoming truly human in Jesus, as part of our creeds. Seeing the glory of God as all of creation itself is also not foreign:  most of us have experienced awe and wonder at the beauty, complexity, and balance of the natural world around us.    This is the idea behind the great canticle from the Greek Additions to Daniel, Benedicite Omnia Opera Domini, which is chanted every Saturday in Morning Prayer, whose verses on the winter cold are particularly apt this morning:  "Glorify the Lord, O chill and cold, drops of dew and flakes of snow.  Frost and cold, ice and sleet, glorify the Lord, praise him, and highly exalt him forever."  

 

What becomes tricky is this:  when we look to see the glory of God in our cranky, bothersome, and worried selves, in us when we are not our best, not our loveliest.  It is harder still, I think, when we seek to see the image of God in us and in those about us when what we see before us is clearly broken, twisted, and lame.  

 

That is where all the other passages in today’s lectionary come in:  Isaiah sees the splendor of God, and immediately bewails his failings, his shortcomings, where he does not measure up.  Paul recounts the wonder preached by those who went before him—Christ died for our sins, was raised, and appeared, first to Cephas and the Twelve, then to James and the apostles, then to more than 500 at a single event.  When he comes to the risen Lord’s appearance to Paul himself, all he can talk about is how monstrous it was, how untimely, given his own failings, “the least of the apostles,” indeed!   In today’s Gospel, after the miraculous draft of fish, Peter recoils, “Get away from me, Jesus!  I am a sinful man!”    It is hard to see God in us when we note how far we are from the splendor of God.  

 

But that is where the Psalm teaches us: it is gratitude and thankfulness for God’s gracious acts to us that give us eyes to see we indeed are in God’s image, we are indeed God’s glory:  

 

“I will give thanks to You, Yahweh, with all my heart;

It is Your praise that I will sing even before other gods.

Toward Your Holy Temple I will bow down;

Your name I will praise.  

All because of Your love and steadfastness.

For You live up to Your name, Being Itself,

and You do what you say no matter what.  

I called You, and You answered me;

You strengthened me from within…

Though Yahweh is over all, God looks after the lowly.

And from afar God sees the haughty for what they are.  

Though I walk through troubles all about, You keep me safe;

You stretch forth Your hand against my raging enemies.  

Your right hand shall save me.

Yahweh will come through for me;

Yahweh, your love lasts forever.  

You do not abandon us, the works of your hands.” (The Ashland Bible)

 

Accepting our limitations, confessing our brokenness, is key in seeing the image of God in us, in perceiving glory here where we did not think it was.  Not that the brokenness is the image of God, but that such honesty, coupled with grateful hearts, helps us distinguish between flaws and pain and the underlying goodness.  We thus perceive the glorious brightness of the Creator in us and all about us.  

 

At the end of the Priestly story of creation in Genesis 1, we read: “God saw everything God had made: how very good it was!”  We are part of that.  Scripture here teaches clearly: we are God’s beautiful and good creatures.  We are in the image and likeness of God.  The Psalter teaches we are but a little lower than the gods.  Original Blessing—the basic goodness at the heart of humanity—is scriptural teaching. God’s image is woven throughout our nature, no matter how we may have broken or twisted it.  If it were somehow pulled out of the warp and woof of our beings, we would, simply, unravel.  The whole of creation is the Glory of God.  A Human Being, alive, is the Glory of God.  Original blessing is scriptural.  

 

But then so is the seeming universal tendency we all have toward brokenness.   Genesis chapter 2 is often called “the Fall of Adam and Eve” but it is most definitely NOT history.  Modern biblical scholarship and theology are unanimous that when we read scripture paying due attention to the literary forms it uses, it is clear that Genesis 1-11 contains origin myths and legends.  Genesis 2 is about ha’adam, Hebrew for “the Human Being,” or Every Man and Every Woman, on occasion translated as "Adam."  It is about each and every one of us, and the predicament we find ourselves in regarding evil, sin, and knowing the difference between good and bad.  The sin of Adam and Eve is not a historical event, but an image for how things are for each one of us.  To see evidence for it, don't look into fossils or old books.  Look into a mirror.  

 

We often lose sight of this because of the historicized way these stories are commonly read, a process helped along by the rhetorical flourishes you can see in such places as Romans 5. But even here, note that Paul says Adam passed sin to his descendants “because all have sinned,” not “so that they all sin,” or “be punished for a sin not theirs.”   Augustine and Calvin’s doctrine of Original Sin, a permanent condition of being in rebellion against God that is sexually transmitted from one generation to another, is just wrong.  It makes the error of denying the underlying goodness and glory in creation, in the human person.  They compound the error when they couple their doctrine of universal human depravity with a twisted idea of an angry God thirsty for blood and the Cross as God’s intentional infliction of pain on Jesus as a transferred punishment.  This is not scriptural at all.  But the idea of gratitude opening our eyes to God’s glory in us is scriptural.  And it is all the more powerful when our gratitude is for the love of God shown in God becoming truly human, human enough to suffer along with us unjust death on the cross at the hands of Empire.  

 

Other scriptures try to account for a glorious and good creation, including us, that still harbors brokenness.  The story of the flood in Genesis 9 says that every human heart mysteriously seems to have an urge to be bad, a yetser hara‘, despite our being in God’s image.    In Genesis 1, not all the commands of God in creation are perfectly reflected in the nature that results, especially if you read this in the original Hebrew.  “‘Let light be,’ commands God; ‘Light there was,” comes back the report.  This is not ham-fisted editing: whoever put this story together knew exactly what they were doing.  ‘Let the grass be grass,’ God tells the earth.  But the earth does not.  It ‘puts forth’ grass.  The created order is slightly disobedient from the start.”  Of the eight “let there be” orders in creation, only “Let there be light” is implemented exactly (Charles Foster, The Selfless Gene: Living with God and Darwin [Hodder & Stoughton, 2009] pp. 132-33). 

 

Seeing the glory of God in ourselves as we get older is a special challenge: we often let regret for lost abilities and health make us deaf to that call of God in our hearts. But here too gratitude is the key.  Thanks for the good we have been and seen, and thanks for what we are still able to enjoy. 

 

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

 

When the signs of age begin to mark my body

(and still more when they touch my mind);

 

when the ill that is to diminish me or carry me off

strikes from without or is born within me;

 

when the painful moment comes

in which I suddenly awaken

to the fact that I am ill or growing old;

 

and above all at that last moment

when I feel I am losing hold of myself

and am absolutely passive within the hands

of the great unknown forces that have formed me;

 

in all those dark moments, O God,

grant that I may understand that it is you

(provided only my faith is strong enough)

who are painfully parting the fibres of my being

in order to penetrate to the very marrow

of my substance and bear me away within yourself.

 

 Siblings in Christ, the whole of creation, including us, is the Glory of God.  When we call upon God, when we recognize out brokenness, God hears us and calls back.  And when God calls us, we hear God.  We see the glory.  We perceive the beauty and the love.  Gratitude and thanks are what opens our ears and eyes.  

 

Thanks be to God.

 

Love's Near Enemy (Epiphany 4C)

 

Love’s Near Enemy
Homily delivered for the Fourth Sunday after Epiphany (Year C)

The Feast of the Presentation

The Rev. Fr. Tony Hutchinson, SCP, Ph.D.
2 February 2025

9:00 a.m. Sung Eucharist 
Parish Church of St Luke, Grants Pass (Oregon)

Jeremiah 1:4-10; Psalm 71:1-6; 1 Corinthians 13:1-13; Luke 4:21-30

 

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

 

“Love is not jealous.”

 

This line at the beginning of the Hymn to Love, today’s epistle, is part of a joke, a pun, by St. Paul.  Paul introduces the hymn by using the very same word "jealous," when he says “Earnestly desire (literally, “be jealous for”) the higher gifts” (1 Cor 12:31). He repeats the verb in resuming his letter after the hymn with the words, “Make love your aim, earnestly desire (or: be jealous for) the spiritual gifts” (1 Cor 14:1).    

 

So which is it Paul, should we be jealous or not? 

 

The problem of course, is that the word zelo’o means both zealous and jealous.  Its root meaning is deep attachment, connection, or engagement.  It means a sharp desire.  If this is a desire to take on something or someone that is not yet ours, it often is translated as “strive for,” or “earnestly seek.”  This can slide into “envy” if the thing desired already belongs to someone else.  If this desire is to keep something or someone that is already ours, it often is translated as “jealous.” 

 

The Hebrew word we often translate as “jealous” has a similar semantic range.  Thus “The Lord your God is a jealous God” does not mean so much “is overly touchy about his privileges and status, and domineering in the extreme” but rather, “is passionately engaged and committed.” 

 

Paul with this little pun is saying strong desire is a good thing, except when it isn’t.  His hymn to love tries to give us an idea of where the lines are drawn.  I translate the core of this passage as follows:

 

“What is love?  When you love someone, you are patient and kind with that person.  You are not jealous of those you love, and you don’t try to show them up.  You don’t talk down to them, or act rudely toward them.  You don’t try to have your own way at their expense, nor do you get annoyed or resentful at them.  … When you love someone, you put up with whatever they do, you trust whatever they say, you hold every hope for them, and you are willing to endure anything for them.  When you love, you never stop loving.” 

 

Buddhist teaching is very clear about the issues raised here.  It sees each virtue as having a polar opposite, as well as a closely related opposite that mimics but falsifies the virtue.  The polar opposite is called a “Far Enemy” of the virtue, while the distortion that mimics the virtue is called its “Near Enemy.” 

 

In standard Dharma teaching, the divine emotions all have polar opposites as well as false imitations. 

 

Loving-kindness is selfless good will and love for others.  Its polar opposite, obviously, is hatred or ill-will.  Its near enemy looks like love, but is distorted and sick:  it is selfish attachment or the so-called “love” that seeks to control exclusively and establish dependence. 

 

Compassion is empathy and sympathy for others.  Its far enemy is cruelty.  Its near enemy is pity.  Where compassion looks on a suffering person as an equal, pity looks down on the sufferers, sees them as inferiors. 

 

Joy in others is opposed by resentment or envy, while its near enemy is mere exuberance in social settings. 

 

Equanimity is the ability to see and feel about yourself as you see and feel about others, and is what I would call humility.  Its polar opposite is envy or jealousy while its near enemy is simple indifference, not caring about yourself or others. 

Paul argues here that true love is not possessive and centered on one’s own desires, but rather the desires of the beloved. 

For Paul, it is a grievous error to say that Othello killed Desdemona because he loved her too much.  What drove Othello was not love, but a desire to possess, a desire further twisted into murderous jealousy by Iago.  Iago himself is driven by envy and thwarted desire: at the opening of the play he swears revenge on Othello for promoting an Army colleague to a position for which he had hoped.  He poisons Othello with his own venom of envy and jealousy.
 
Paul is saying we must keep a clear distinction in our minds between love and its near enemies: envy or jealousy, and conditional, demanding, and self-centered sexual and emotional attachment. 
 
The boundary between love and its near enemies is implicit in today’s Gospel reading.  Jesus preaches at Nazareth, his home town.  One would expect him to be welcomed warmly, due to the affection, a minor type of love, we tend to have for one “of our own.” 

The villagers start out with affection, “Isn’t this Joseph’s son?”  But they expect Jesus to bring honor to the group, fame (and perhaps commerce) to the community.  So when he is unwilling to perform in his own home, they turn against him.  They know, perhaps, of his irregular conception and quickly turn the reference to Joseph into an accusation of illegitimacy.

Jesus’ teaching of mission—of going out to strange places and people to do God’s acts of love—is coupled with his view that the great prophets worked some of their greatest miracles with strangers and foreigners.  He notes that Elijah gave miraculous food not to good Israelites, but a woman in a pagan village.  It was not good Jews that Elisha cured, but the Syrian leper Na’aman. 

The Nazareth villagers’ familiarity with this native son does not grow into attachment and loyalty, but breeds contempt. Affection for a home-boy turns to murderous rage when it doesn’t deliver the goods they earnestly desire.   Like Othello for Desdemona or Frankie for Johnnie, their emotion is not love, but its near enemy:  a will to possess and dominate based in desire-fulfilment. 

Philosopher Rene Girard identified most of our socially generated evils with what he called mimetic desire: the urge to acquire what others have, or be what others are.  Our tendency to scapegoat is one expression of this:  we try to bond and become one with those we envy by defining others out, laying on them the fault of our not having what we envy, often blaming them with our own faults, especially those we can’t admit to ourselves, driving them outside of our “community” thus created, and then assaulting them with the very things we fear, the reasons for our wanting to imitate others. 

In Aesop’s fables, there is the story of a wild donkey who envied the pasture and care given a tame donkey until, one day, she happened to come upon the tame donkey pulling a heavily loaded cart and being whipped. The wild donkey, on second thought, preferred freedom.  There are two morals that usually go with the story.  The first is wildly known:  The grass is always greener on the other side of the fence, that is, something that is not ours makes us want it, regardless of whether it is actually preferable.  The second, less common is this:  Between envy and ingratitude, we make ourselves doubly miserable:  we think either that our neighbor has too much, or that we ourselves have too little.  The Chinese proverb describing the human rat race says it clearly 患得患失 huàndéhuànshī “You worry about getting stuff, then you worry about losing it.” 

Note here the hallmark of corrupt mimetic desire:  it’s a zero sum game where someone else’s gain is our loss, and our gain their loss.  It’s all about comparison for competition, not for growing together.

Even Girard admits that there is one kind of mimetic desire that is good and healthy:  when we emulate those whom we admire.  Such a desire does not seek to deprive them of that good, but simply enjoy along with them.  In “How it Works,” the introduction to the Twelve Steps of Recovery taught by AA, NA, and Alanon, we read:  “If you have decided you want what we have and are willing to go to any length to get it – then you are ready to take certain steps: (Alcoholics Anonymous, p. 58).  This is what is at heart of 12 step programs’ policy of “attraction, not promotion.”  Madeleine L’Engle described Christian evangelism in similar terms: “We draw people to Christ not by loudly discrediting what they believe, by telling them how wrong they are and how right we are, but by showing them a light that is so lovely that they want with all their hearts to know the source of it.”   This is the basic reason for the Church, I think:  to provide us with community in which we can see close up and personal not perfect people or unattainable good, but rather real good lived out in real lives, the blessing of opening our hearts and lives to Christ and his teaching.

 

Again, as Paul teaches, strong desire is a good thing except when it is not.  Love of our own family, tribe, nation, and community is good, except when it is at the expense of others, of outsiders.  In a world where we are all in this together, there is little room for exclusion and stingy hoarding of resources.  There is absolutely no room for demonizing and dehumanizing others.  The solidarity Jesus calls us to fosters the common good, equal opportunity, welcoming of diversity and equity among people and nations, and peace in the world.  It is at the heart of what it means to be human, since we humans are essentially social beings, not isolated monads.  It is more than a vague feeling of compassion, common cause, or shallow sympathy.   It is in fact a commitment to our common life, a sign that we accept responsibility for each other. 

 

We should earnestly desire, strive for, the spiritual gifts of faith, hope, and love even while we confess that love is not jealous or envious.  We should desire and strive for the authentic good, the real thing.  “And the greatest of these is love.”  

In the name of God, Amen. 

 

Ain't that Good News (Epiphany 3C)

 

Ain’t that Good News?
Homily delivered for the Third Sunday after Epiphany (Year C)

The Rev. Fr. Tony Hutchinson, SCP, Ph.D.
26 January 2025

9:00 a.m. Sung Mass
St. Luke’s Episcopal Church

Grants Pass, Oregon

Nehemiah 8:1-3, 5-6, 8-10; Ps 19; 1 Corinthians 12:12-31a; Luke 4:14-21

 

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

 

Today’s scriptures all in one way or another talk about how we think about God, whether in fear or joy. 

 

In the Hebrew scripture reading, the scribe Ezra reads the book of the Law before the people who react by bursting into weeping, totally dismayed at its severity. Ezra’s liturgy police  react:  no weeping or mourning allowed, only feasting shared with the poor, because “LAW IS GOOD” no matter what!  Put on a happy face, even if this stuff is killing you!

 

The Psalm says that we can learn much about God in looking at the wondrous stars and planets in the skies above us, as well as by reading the Law, a “perfect” and “sure” teacher that “revives” and “makes wise” the heart by stirring it up to “fear” and prayers that our words and thoughts be acceptable to the God thus revealed. 

 

The Gospel reading is Luke’s portrayal of Jesus’ first public sermon. He reads from Isaiah 61, beginning

 

“The Spirit of the Lord is upon me, because

he has anointed me

to bring good news to the poor.

He has sent me

to proclaim release to the captives

and recovery of sight to the blind,” 

 

But then, instead of the next line, “to proclaim the year of the Lord’s favor and the day of vengeance of our God,” Jesus ends the reading by throwing in a line from another part of Isaiah (58:6) and saying: 

 

“to send out into freedom those once downtrodden,

to proclaim the year of the Lord's favor.”

 

He deliberately deletes Second Isaiah’s reference to “the Day of Vengeance of our God” and replaces it with a line from Second Isaiah’s great song about what true worship is:

 

“Is not this the fast that I choose:
    to loose the bonds of injustice,
    to undo the thongs of the yoke,
to send out into freedom those once downtrodden,
    and to break every yoke?
Is it not to share your bread with the hungry,
    and bring the homeless poor into your house;
when you see the naked, to cover them,
    and not to hide yourself from your own kin?”

 (Isaiah 56:5-7)

 

Jesus applies this all to himself, and thus announces his mission.    Like Gabriel Fauré in his Requiem as originally written, Jesus deliberately leaves out the Dies Irae.  By deleting the reference to the Day of Vengeance, Jesus focuses his message on Good News, hope and forgiveness, rather than fear.  Jesus is to break the bonds, and then send out those who were once downtrodden into freedom, as sent ones, or apostles, with his message of liberation to others. 

 

We will read of the congregation’s bitter reaction to Jesus’ sermon next week.  And as you shall see later in this homily, a sermon that announces good news can trigger a bitter response.  But the story we read today is clear: Jesus’ mission is to bring joy not fear, hope not despair. Forgiveness, not punishment: a Happy Announcement, or Good News. 

 

Mahatma Gandhi said “I love your Christ. It is you Christians that frighten me.”  The Church’s occasional obsessive and fear-inducing focus on pure and legal has driven many, especially the young, from what they call “organized religion.”  For many, it is not “Good News,” that Christian Churches proclaim, but rather, “bad news”: you don’t measure up, you need to shape up or ship out, and even if Jesus wants to love you, you are simply not worthy, not up to snuff.  God with a capital G really is annoyed with you, and especially with the fact that you don’t feel properly convicted of your evil ways.  The things that give you pleasure and joy are all forbidden, you yourself are deficient and hopeless, and only by throwing yourself at the mercy of the Church, with its abusive hierarchs, hypocritical congregations, pointing fingers, demands for mindless submission and faith, and constant demands for money and time, you might be able, just possibly, to gain a bit of favor from the overarching, homophobic, woman-hating, sex-hating, drink-loathing, KILLJOY IN THE SKY.  

 

But we need to understand that Jesus’ message is a message of GOOD NEWS, no matter where you are. 

 

I used to sing my children to sleep by singing lullabies and African-American Spirituals.  One of their favorites was this: 

 

I got shoes in that kingdom, ain’t that good news?  (repeat)

I’m gonna lay down my troubles, and shoulder up my cross,

Good God, I’m gonna bear it home

to my Jesus,

Now ain’t that good news? 

 

The other verses followed suit: “I got a robe in that kingdom,” “I got a house in that kingdom.”  “I got a crown in that kingdom.”

 

The point is that in Jesus, we have a promise for what we need, even things like shoes, shelter, and food.  We have a blessing in him to receive the true desire of our hearts.  It doesn’t mean that all we think we may want is right, or that he has promised bad things for us because we in our brokenness want the wrong things. But it does mean Jesus is good news, not bad.  

 

This is not good news for the afterlife only.    It is about our lives here and now, about who we are, not just about how we should be.  It is about liberation from what binds us, what keeps us back, what holds us down, both individually and communally.   Liberation from addictions, obsessions, fears, and vicious habits.  Healing from illness.  Jesus went out from that sermon and healed people, and called them to help each other.    This is the heart of Christian mission:  Jesus sends out free those who were once held captive, once down-trodden, and asks them to free others. 

 

Importantly, Jesus here says his mission is to make the Happy Announcement to the poor, the downtrodden, to those who have the most to fear from the broken way the world is.  The very people that we have pledged to defend and support in our baptismal covenant. 

 

This brings us to a matter that has been on the hearts of many of us this week.  You made have hear about the Episcopal Bishop of Washington DC, the Right Rev. Maryann Budde’s short homily at the National Prayer Service held at National Cathedral the day after the Inauguration.  Addressing President Trump sitting there front and center in the first row of pews, she said this:

 

Let me make one final plea, Mr. President. Millions have put their trust in you and, as you told the nation yesterday, you have felt the providential hand of a loving God. In the name of our God, I ask you to have mercy upon the people in our country who are scared now. There are gay, lesbian and transgender children in Democratic, Republican, and Independent families, some who fear for their lives.”  [She then gives a lengthy description of people who are at risk of deportation, stressing the fact that most are good contributing members of our communities and concludes:] “Our God teaches us that we are to be merciful to the stranger, for we were all once strangers in this land. May God grant us the strength and courage to honor the dignity of every human being, to speak the truth to one another in love and walk humbly with each other and our God for the good of all people. Good of all people in this nation and the world.”

 

For this, Bishop Budde was accused of “ambushing” the President, “acting inappropriately,” or, in his own words, being a “nasty” “left-wing radical.”   One member of congress called for her to be deported, though she is a native-born U.S. citizen. But then birth-right citizenship, guaranteed in our Constitution, has come under direct attack. 

 

One dear priest friend of mine, an old-style conservative republican wrote this about the matter:  The image that has come to mind is the rich young ruler and Jesus. Christ sees him and loves him.  He then tells him that to truly follow him would mean leaving behind what defined him, expressing a hard truth with love. The Bishop asked the President to set aside what defines him — a reflexive cruelty that is his brand now, and for some of his followers, one of his chief attractions.  No wonder it triggered such bile and anger.  It was perhaps not good political discourse meant to gently bring someone over to another way of thinking--but I suspect the Bishop held little hope that the President would actually relent based on her call for mercy:  just look at the response!  But when all is said and done, she was doing exactly what a priest or a bishop is called by Jesus to do, proclaiming by word and deed the “Good News” of Jesus. 

 

The Christian doctrine of Salvation is a far broader concept than “transferred Karmic payback for my sins.”  It is being rescued from anything and everything that is the matter.  And different things are “the matter” for different people.  So “Good News” can mean different things to different people.  And yet Jesus is proclaimer of Good News to all, of healing to all, of liberation to all, of deliverance to all.  And that includes both sides of our deeply divided and broken national community.    

 

That is the gist of today’s epistle reading.  Paul likens us to a body with all sorts of different body parts.   The very diversity of the body’s different parts is a good thing, and makes the body strong.   One size does not fit all.  And if it pretends to, it fits no one.    Paul calls on us to get along, and to value and respect—even honor—diversity. 

 

One of the great glories of the Anglican tradition is that we value diversity.  Historically, we are a broad tent, and include both very evangelically-minded protestants as well as sacramentally-minded catholics.  We include liberals as well as conservatives, and have a wide range of worship styles. 

 

As St. Paul notes, the key here in healthy community life in the Church is grounding ourselves in Christ.  It demands not just toleration—holding our noses and putting up with others’ habits and ideas that are not so attractive to us—but rather truly honoring and welcoming difference. 

 

Let us focus on being heralds of Good News—of liberation, healing, reconciliation, and love.   Let us work to set the captives free and break every chain that ties us down and holds us back.  Let us honor and respect all our fellow human beings, and embrace the glorious diversity that God created us for. 

 

In the Name of God, Amen.

 

 

The Good Stuff (Epiphany 2C)

 

The Good Stuff
Homily delivered for the Second Sunday after Epiphany (Year C)
19 January 2025

11:00 a.m. Sung Mass
Mission Church of the Holy Spirit

Sutherlin, Oregon

Isaiah 62:1-5 ; Psalm 36:5-10 ; 1 Corinthians 12:1-11 ; John 2:1-11

 

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

When I was a boy, we would travel to my Grandparents’ house in Idaho about once every year. There, we would eat wonderful homemade meals that were not common in my mother’s home.  My mother worked outside the home, and had learned to simplify her cooking in the 1950s and early 60s by using processed foods like Bisquick, Campbell’s Condensed Soups, and even Cheez Whiz or Velveeta in her day-to-day cooking, often using recipes that included brand-name items.   Not so in my Grandmother’s House.  There, they raised most what they ate in their large garden, and “put up,” as they said, much of their garden produce for use in the winter.   I remember the first time I ever tasted real ketchup.  It came out of one of the white glass bottles that my Grandma used to preserve homemade ketchup, steak sauce, and chutney.  I was shocked.  It tasted nothing like the Heinz 57 Ketchup I was used to.  This was too tart and tomatoey, with a lot of fresh vegetable overtones.  I wondered to myself how my Grandparents could stand such stuff, a weak imitation of the real thing, all because they were too poor to buy real ketchup in a grocery store!  It was only years later that I realized that my Grandma’s ketchup was far better than any commercially produced stuff, and in fact, was the real thing.  Heinz and Del Monte were the cheap imitations.  

C.S. Lewis tells a story from his own youth about this kind of contrast:  stealing cigarettes from his father’s stash.  Occasionally when the cigarettes were so few that even one might be missed, he dipped into his father’s plentiful cigar stash, which he kept only for honored guests.  He says that when this occurred, he and a friend thought “poor us, today we’ll have to put up with cigars when we might have had cigarettes!”    Again, if the only thing we know is a weak imitation, or a distorted shadow, when we actually run into the real thing we may think it strange, and perhaps mark it as the poor substitute. 

Today’s Gospel reading from John tells the story of the first sign of Jesus’ glory:  at a wedding at Cana, Jesus simply says the word and turns water stored in jars for purification rites into wine.   I have visited the site of this miracle, in Cana.  There, in the undercroft of the church over the traditional site, is a museum display of first century stone jars for holding water for purification:  they are immense, each holding about 30 gallons!   There were six:  we are talking about 180 gallons of the finest vintage here: a scripture that definitely speaks to wine snobs though the ages!

 

At the end of the story, the steward tastes the wine, calls the bridegroom, and says, “Everyone serves the good wine first, and then the cheap stuff after everyone has become drunk and can no longer tell the difference.  But you kept the good stuff until now.”  The point is that the wine miraculously made by Jesus is better than any other wine, wine produced by the more pedestrian miracle of sunshine, water, grapevines, skill, and time.   The wine Jesus offers is “the good stuff;” all other wine, the cheap imitation.

John reveals Jesus to the reader through a series of marvelous acts: turning water to wine (2:1-12), healings (4:46-5:18), multiplying the loaves and fishes (6:1-16), walking on the sea (6:16-21), giving sight to a man born blind (9:1-40), and raising Lazarus from the dead (11:1-44).  John does not call these things miracles. He calls them signs, or pointers to the true meaning of Jesus.   He makes his meaning clear by interspersing between his stories of the signs speeches:  after multiplying loaves, Jesus says, “I am the bread that gives life.” Meeting the Samaritan woman at the well of Jacob Jesus says “whoever drinks the water I shall give will never thirst; the water I shall give will become in them a spring of water welling up.”   

 

In chapter 7, on the last day of the feast of Tabernacles, when priests and Levites formed a chain to bring up bucket after bucket of water from the Siloam pool up to the Temple to cleanse the altar, he says, “Let anyone who is thirsty come to me, and let the one who believes in me drink.”

In chapter 8, at the Feast of Hannukah when the candles of the Feast of Lights are being lit (cf. 10:22), and again in chapter 9 just before he cures the man born blind, Jesus says, “I am the light of the world.”

In the final sign of Gospel before the passion, just before Jesus raises Lazarus from the dead, he tells Martha, “I am the resurrection and the life.”

Here in chapter 2, Jesus as his first sign makes wine from water at a wedding. Later, in his last discourse before the passion, he says, “I am the true vine.”

The signs, symbols, and images are rich and varied, but all point to one reality, one truth: Jesus is God Incarnate, the ultimate measure by which all good things must be seen.   Bread, Wine, Vine, Water, Light, even Life—all these are good, very good indeed.  But they are mere hints of the real thing, the really good stuff.

 

In this world, where we are so used to cheap imitations, we often think that we are trying to do the right thing when in fact, in our brokenness, we are doing its opposite.  And that applies whether you want “to make America great again,” or you want to build social justice in the land.  That is why we must look to Jesus and what he taught and modeled as our standard.  As our former Presiding Bishop Michael Curry says, “if it’s not about love, it’s not about God.” 

John, in all these stories of signs and discourses on Jesus being true light, wine, water, bread is saying:  as good as the good things in our mixed lives can be, Jesus is the truly “good stuff.”   No matter how sweet, beautiful, and wonderful something in our lives may be, it is a mere hint, a dim reflection of what God truly has in store for us, of who Jesus is.  And he is the corrective for our brokenness and our mistaking imitation for genuine. 

Think of the things in your life that truly make you happy.  Think of the things that give you joy, and that take your breath away or make you weep in awe. 

Today’s Gospel, through this sly remark “you left the good stuff till last,” is telling us that these good things, these points of joy like copious wine at a wedding, these, as wonderful as they are, are just shadows, cheap imitations to be followed by the really good stuff.

In Jesus, we find all that we need. Now that is not to belittle other real needs. To say Jesus is the bread of life is not to say that we have no need to work to earn our daily bread, or to help feed the hungry with real bread.   It is simply saying something like Jesus says in Matthew, quoting the Book of Deuteronomy, “A human being does not live by bread alone, but by the word of God.”   

This week, I want you to take some thought about the truly good and wonderful things you enjoy.  Make a gratitude list. And then reflect on what the real thing in which they participate is, what the good stuff for each might be.    Where in our life are we accepting cheap imitations or pale reflections of and rejecting the real thing?  Where in our lives can we be signs to God’s greater love and care? 

Jesus says, I am true wine, the bread of life, the true light, the living water.  I am the vine that gives true wine; you are that vine’s branches.  Trust me. Have faith in me. Be fruitful and make wine for others.

May we so live, and that each day.

In the Name of God, Amen.