Sermons

+In the name of the Father and of the Son and of the Holy Spirit. Amen.

In light of just having heard St. Luke’s account of the beatitudes from Jesus’ Sermon on the Plain (the Lukan parallel of the Sermon on the Mount from St. Matthew’s Gospel), I want to speak briefly this morning about a somewhat controversial theological claim articulated during the latter half of the twentieth century- namely, the preferential option for the poor.

This concept, the preferential option, was first championed by the Peruvian theologian and Roman Catholic, Dominican priest Gustavo Gutiérez in his 1968 outline “Toward a Theology of Liberation.” The claim, in its simplest form, is that when Jesus said “Blessed are the poor” he was, in some sense, summarizing the moral and socio-political dimension of the entire biblical account, that there is a special place in God’s heart for the poor and marginalized, and that one of our chief moral duties as Christians is to help model the Kingdom of God insofar as its promise is to restore “the least of these” to wholeness, both spiritually and materially.

Now, this seems uncontroversial enough, doesn’t it? Over and over, scripture demands that those of us with means are obliged to serve those without. But consider when Gutiérez’s outline was released–1968–and the year his seminal monograph, A Theology of Liberation: History, Politics, and Salvation, was published–1971–and you might realize how this would have gone over. It was the height of the Cold War, and “enemy number one” was the “growing threat” of international Communism. The intellectual movement which Gutiérez’s work sparked, and which came to be known as liberation theology was, thus, labeled Marxist.

In fairness to the critics of liberation theology writ large (and I’d actually count myself among these critics) the movement strayed into what I, for one, would consider serious theological error. Many of the proponents leaned into Marxist analysis, reckoning class struggle the animating force of history rather than the death and resurrection of Christ Jesus and the sanctifying presence of the Holy Spirit. Too often praxis preceded theoria, the experience of well meaning but sometimes misguided activism took precedence over reflection on the truths given in Scripture and the Church’s tradition, that the movement produced what we might call a “false soteriology”- that is, a mistaken view of what constitutes salvation.

What do I mean? When the establishment of a particular socio-political reality by our own efforts becomes the chief end, when we call that our salvation, then our hope is founded in something at best merely adjacent to and at worst at odds with, the true salvation which is only in Christ Jesus. The same, naturally, can be said of liberation theology’s political polar opposite, the prosperity gospel, which has become popular in North American mega churches. This view seems to place salvation in the realm of the personal accumulation of wealth. Not to put too fine a point on it, but anything that places itself rather than Christ as the source and summit of salvation is, by definition, antichrist. Now, there’s a qualitative moral difference between a system whose intended end is social equality and one whose end is the sanctification of personal greed. I don’t mean to make a false equivalency here. But neither can in itself be the Gospel, and if either claims to be, then we are in real trouble. Either soteriological perspective falls victim to “trust[ing] in man” as the Lord spoke to Jeremiah in this morning’s old testament lesson, and the result, we are told, is curse rather than salvation.

But let’s take a step back and consider two questions: first, what does scripture teach with regard to the status of the poor in the heart of God and what is our concommitant obligation? And second, how does this relate to a true soteriology?

Answering the first question is easier. James tells us God has chosen the poor to be rich in faith. Our Lady, in the Magnificat, celebrates God’s choice of the lowly to be vessels of his Grace, herself chief among them. The Psalmist continually reminds us of God’s special desire for the poor. The Law of Moses, over and over again, makes special note of Israel’s responsibility for the indigent who dwell among them. Matthew 25 identifies the moral center of the Gospel as being based on how faithful we are in loving those with less. I’ll hold back from peppering prooftexts all over you, but suffice to say, the biblical account is clear.

I think most of us acknowledge this. Christians, indeed all people of goodwill, have genuine differences of opinion on what the most effective way of aiding the poor is, and a lot of our political disagreements about things like tax structure and social programs come from people with different views about what the best approach is to lifting the poor from their poverty, but that they nonetheless desire a more equitable situation. Perhaps I’m a Pollyanna on this point, but I feel I have to hold on to that so as not to despair. Of course, there are some who simply “despise the poor in their poverty.” But, I think most of us care enough about the moral demands of the Gospel to recognize our obligation to help those in need.

So, that was the easy question, believe it or not. Now to the difficult question, the one pertaining to salvation. It is worth noting that Luke’s version of the beatitudes has several differences with Matthew’s more popular version, but the difference you might have noticed this morning is the inclusion of “woes” after the “blesseds.” The blessedness of the poor and the hungry and the mournful and the persecuted is contrasted with the coming doom of the rich and the full and the joyous and those who are praised in this world. This should remind us of earlier passages in Luke’s Gospel. It should remind us of the Magnificat, which I’ve already mentioned. It should remind us of Jesus’ first sermon in the synagogue in Nazareth, in which he proclaimed the year of Jubilee and was nearly killed for it. It may also, and this is where it gets awfully uncomfortable, remind you of Jesus’ conversation with the rich young man in Luke 18, in which the young man’s wealth made him despair of his ability to follow the Christ who said “it is easier for a camel to go through the eye of a needle than for a rich man to enter the Kingdom of God.”

So, here is the really difficult question, not necessarily difficult because the answer is unclear but difficult because the clear answer makes us so uncomfortable. Is it easier for a poor person to get into heaven than a rich person? Yes. The answer is yes. Now, to be fair, in Luke 18, after the rich man’s desolation, Jesus himself reminds us that “what is impossible with men is possible with God,” but possible does not mean easy.

But, why? It is not because the wealthy are inherently more sinful nor that the poor are more inherently ethical. I believe that we should neither fetishize the poor nor engage in class struggle. This, too, is idolatry. It is, rather, that the more comfortable one is, the more advantages one has, the closer such idols, such false sources of hope for salvation, lie at hand.

I say all this as a sinner in need of saving from the selfsame tendency toward idolatry. I know for a fact that I have–at least on occasion–sought to find my own salvation in money or security or my education or my professional attainments or my innate cleverness instead of in the Lord Jesus Christ, who is the only thing that can actually save me.

The one benefit, then, the most poor and distressed have in this life is an ease in recognition that the hope for salvation must be built on something greater and more eternal. God does not will penury, no more than God would will any other difficulty that has befallen our world due to sin. Nevertheless, it is in these extremities that men and women can catch a glimpse of the saving power of God in ways that our own comfort and self-reliance can obscure.

It is, then, our obligation as those with more-than-enough to get by, not only to aid the poor (and feed the hungry and welcome the stranger and visit the sick and the prisoner and do all the other things our Lord requires of us) but also to tear down the altars we have erected to false gods in our own hearts (to the gods of wealth and comfort and security and all the rest) until we can be assured that our hope is built on nothing less, nor anything more, than Jesus’ blood and righteousness. In other words, we ask God to purify our hearts to be a temple made even for himself.

+In the name of the Father and of the Son and of the Holy Spirit. Amen.

+In the name of the Father and of the Son and of the Holy Spirit. Amen.

Last week we heard that wonderful account from the Book of Nehemiah in which Ezra the Scribe reintroduced the Law to the Jewish people outside the Water Gate of Jerusalem. As a reminder, the Jews had been permitted to return to their homeland after the Persians under Cyrus the Great defeated the Babylonian Empire, under whose rule the Jews had lived in exile for around seventy years. With the help of the Persians, they rebuilt the Temple and the city walls and resumed their common cultural and religious life, with the major exception that they had been muddling through without the benefit of knowing or having easy access to the Law of Moses for over eighty years. So Ezra read the Torah, the Five Books of Moses, to them and interpreted it for them and then sent them on their way telling that instead of immediately mourning their generations-long disobedience they should first rejoice and celebrate that the Law had come back to them.

What I failed to mention was that there was yet one more critically important element of the Jewish religious heritage which Ezra was incapable of bringing back to the people. The temple had been rebuilt and its system of sacrificial worship restored. The edicts of God had been rediscovered and renewed. But(!), the Ark of the Covenant and the stone tablets of the commandments which it contained remained lost. Indeed it remains lost to this day.

The mystery of its whereabouts came up in our adult Sunday school a month or two ago when we were considering the Books of the Maccabees. In the second chapter of Second Maccabees we learn that the Prophet Jeremiah hid the Ark somewhere on the mountain where Moses had first received the Law. Some of his followers attempted to mark a path (a sort of treasure map) so they could find it again when the exile was over, but the prophet rebuked them, explaining that its hiding place should remain a secret to future generations, but that it would be found again when “God gathers his people together again and shows his mercy.” One would think that he had meant by this the year 538 B.C., when the Babylonian Exile had ended, but this was apparently not the case.

So where is it? I explained to the class that it was not actually recovered by Indiana Jones, rescuing it from the Nazis who wanted to use it as a weapon of mass destruction, before placing it in a warehouse under the vigilant eyes of “top men.” The likeliest candidate for its actual location (though it’s hard to say, because so many of the theories have an element of strangeness and conspiracism) is Axum, where the Ethiopian Orthodox Church claims to have it under lock-and-key, but they won’t let anybody but monks and senior prelates see it, so who knows?!

Now, what if I told you the Ark had been found? You’d think I was crazy, that I had delusions of being the real-life Indiana Jones! Well, I can’t make a claim for the literal, historical artifact, but when we read scripture typologically, understanding that the Old and New Testaments make once hidden meaning clear, that prophecy is fulfilled in unexpected ways, then in a real sense we can say that the Ark has been found, and this is what we are celebrating on this great feast day.

Now, before I explain what I mean, a disclaimer is in order. It used to be that one of the worst things you could be called in certain circles of progressive Christianity was a “supercessionist”, which in those circles is a theologically loaded way of accusing somebody of being an anti-semite. I’m not sure that this is still the case, since so many on the extreme end of those circles have moved from expressing absolutely legitimate concerns about human rights in Gaza and elsewhere into honest-to-God anti-semitism themselves, under the euphemism “Christian Anit-Zionism.” This is all complicated and sensitive, but suffice it to say that you can lament and even denounce violations of proportionality under just war principles without saying nonsense like “Hamas are good guys, actually.” It seems to me a lot of presumably well-meaning people on all sides have lost the plot, as they say.

Anyway, the charge of “supercessionism” by those who use the term, is that it is inherently anti-semitic to claim that the New Covenant has fulfilled the Old. Well, the problem with saying supercessionism is bad, then, seems to mean that we’re not actually supposed believe what the New Testament says. There’s a lot of rhetorical mumbo-jumbo to try to claim that it means something else, a lot of hermeneutic hand-waving, but in my opinion that’s essentially the crux of the matter. So, I could be perhaps legitimately accused of supercessionism, and like I said, at least at one point in very recent history that would mean there are plenty of cocktail parties I’d not get an invitation to at the American Academy of Religion annual conference, if I ever went to it, but I can live with that.

Lastly on this matter, before finally returning to the point, I’d say that you’ve got to hold this truth together with the fact that God doesn’t go back on his promises, and so he’s absolutely not sending faithful, observant Jews to hell or anything like that! They are God’s people AND God has extended that definition to include Christ’s Church in which, through Jesus, we have all been made citizens with the saints. If you want fancy theological terms to explain this, punitive supercessionism is illegitimate but economic supercessionism seems inescapable in a genuinely Christian systematic theology, at least in my opinion.

And here’s the point I’ve been creeping up on with the preceding disclaimer–the location of the physical, historical Ark of the Covenant is ultimately irrelevant, because this day, the Ark of the New Covenant and even more importantly, the New Covenant itself made manifest, return to the temple. The ark is Our Lady, who bore the Word in her spotless womb. The Covenant itself is manifest not in tablets of stone, but in flesh and blood in the person of Jesus Christ.

There were two rites being fulfilled in the Jerusalem temple that day more than two millennia ago. One of them used to be the title of this feast day–the Purification of the Blessed Virgin Mary. The belief, understandably de-emphasized by the holiday’s name change because it seems so backwards by contemporary standards, that a woman was ritually unclean after giving birth was actually, probably the primary reason for the Holy Family’s visit to the temple. You hear me complain enough about certain updates to our liturgical practices in the latter half of the last century, but one change for which I’m extremely grateful is that the old service of “The Churching of Women” which seemed to assume something like this belief (and, lets face it, the inability of a lot of men to see women’s bodies as either objects to be possessed or mysterious, icky things to be covered up either ritually or literally) has happily been replaced by a service of thanksgiving for the birth or adoption of a child. In all events, if there were ever a woman who didn’t need a ritual purification after giving birth, it was Our Lady, and yet faithful to the law under which she was still living, she dutifully presented herself at the temple.

The second rite, which we focus more on these days, is the presentation of the Christ Child. This is actually another requirement of the Law, but there’s a twist here. The redemption of the firstborn was a sign of the deaths of the first-born sons of Egypt and the redemption of the first-born of the Israelites at the Passover. To redeem the Israelites that were spared an offering to the Temple was expected, either a lamb and a pigeon or turtledove or, for the poor (as was the case for the Holy Family), no lamb and two birds. There are apparently conflicting traditions here, as in Exodus and even elsewhere in Leviticus (from which the reference in the Gospel comes) the price of redemption was not sacrificial animals but money, specifically five shekels. In any event, some offering was to be made. What is not expected in the Law, though, is that the first-born son himself be presented, just the offering. It would have been more likely, were he an ordinary first-born son, that Jesus would have been left with his Aunt Elizabeth or some other relative while Mary and Joseph went to the temple to fulfill their obligations. So the child’s presence in the temple is significant. Six hundred years after Jeremiah hid the Ark and the tablets, they have both returned in an unexpected and glorious manner.

So is the fact that it was not the priests but an elderly man and an elderly woman known for their devotion who understand who the child is. The temple elite, no doubt, would have preferred the armies of Israel to rise up and return with the Ark of the Covenant to presage the successful Jewish revolt against the Romans that was in fact never to come. The wisdom of Simeon and of Anna was to see that the Ark was before them, the Law had become flesh, the whole world had changed because God had chosen to save his people by means the powerful had not anticipated, but which had been anticipated by the prophets of old.

And the Fathers also bear witness to the return of the Ark and of the Word of God in the reopening of the temple to the nations, albeit not the temple made with hands, a copy of the true one. St. Jerome remarks in a rather earthy section in his tract against the Pelagians, which considering the hour and the company I’ll put delicately rather than quoting directly, that the east door of the temple through which only the high priest may pass on his way to the Ark and which had been closed for century upon century was indeed opened in the moment of Christ’s birth in Bethlehem.

An image which I love most of all pertaining to this day, and with which I’ll conclude is given by St. Ephrem the Syrian, who explains the Prophetess Anna’s prediction that a sword should pierce the Blessed Virgin’s soul. Yes, it is the sword of grief which she felt standing at the foot of the cross. But it is also the flaming sword with which the cherubim guard the tree of life in Eden. Whereas Eve’s trespass closed the door to Paradise, the new Eve, Mary the Mother of God, has disarmed the sentries and opened the way once more. As Adam fled with his spouse, the New Adam, Christ Jesus, has first stormed the gates of Hell and then opened the way back to Paradise, where with his Mother he awaits his Spouse, the Holy Church of God, to welcome her, to welcome us, back to the Temple not made with hands, heaven itself, where he will reign over us for all eternity. To him be the glory to the ages of ages. Amen.

+In the name of the Father and of the Son and of the Holy Spirit. Amen.

Our yearly Christmas gift exchange in the family typically takes a long time for various reasons, even after we imposed a two-gift limit on each household. One reason is that my mother-in-law is famous for coming up with obscure things to write on the gift labels which we have to figure out before we can open the ones she gave. This year, each of the gifts had a quote on the label whose speaker we had to identify. Some were said by family members, some by family friends, some by deadpan comedian Steven Wright, and still others by Friedrich Nietzsche. Anyway, everyone knew who said the following immediately: “cats do not need to be baptized, because contrary to popular belief, they are born without the stain of original sin.” Those were my words, in a text message reply to a cartoon about the dangers of trying to baptize a cat my mother-in-law had sent me.

While true, the connection between baptism and original sin makes the event we commemorate every year on this Sunday, the Baptism of our Lord, a bit tricky. If Baptism is for the remission of sins, and Christ was like us in every way but sin, why in heavens name did he need to be baptized?!

It’s a natural question, but I think it stems from a misunderstanding of the nature of Holy Baptism. It is certainly the case that we believe Baptism to be for the forgiveness of sins. The Nicene Creed says as much, and the Church Fathers explain that even those who are not guilty of particular sins, primarily infants, are nonetheless subject to the stain of original sin, that sad state of affairs enacted by the fall whereby no man can escape sin’s reality. Thus, we are all in need of Baptism for the remission of sins, but to view Baptism as only effecting our state in this regard is to take a rather narrow view of a complex Sacrament which effects us in more ways than that, and it confuses the nature of Christ’s own baptism.

Let’s take another look at the Gospel Reading:

When Jesus also had been baptized and was praying, the heaven was opened, and the Holy Spirit descended upon him in bodily form, as a dove, and a voice came from heaven, “Thou art my beloved Son; with thee I am well pleased.”

Now, Jesus’ baptism seemed to effect something quite different than the remission of sins, of which, remember, he was not in need. Instead, we learn from his Baptism something about his relationship to the Godhead. We learn about his intimate connection to the Father and the Holy Spirit. For Christ, this was a relationship which was already a reality. The Creation Story in Genesis makes this much clear, when we see the Father creating the world by means of the Word (or Logos) of which Jesus became the embodiment, and we learn of His Spirit moving over the deep.

This relationship preceded Creation, it has been for eternity in fact, but in the Waters of Baptism, it is made tangible. The Holy Spirit does not arise as a feeling, but descends as a dove. The Father is not presented as a concept, but as a person with a voice which can be heard.

This is very important, because it is what is so unique about the Christian faith. If there is one thing I am reminded of by Jesus’ baptism it is this. It’s not all about some mental or spiritual transcendence whereby we leave the world and live on some different plane of existence. Rather, God is made known in ordinary, tangible stuff.

The mystery of the Trinity is made real when Jesus, a flesh-and-blood human being, stepped into regular old water. Our relationship with the Trinity is effected with regular old water which, by the Grace of God, becomes something extraordinary. The Mystery of Salvation, of Christ’s death and resurrection, is made known to us not through mental gymnastics, but through ordinary water and ordinary bread and ordinary wine which by the Grace of God becomes something extraordinary. We learn from Acts that the presence of the Holy Spirit is effected not by some sort of transcendental meditation, but through the laying on of physical apostolic hands onto a flesh and blood person, just as today, the Grace of the Holy Spirit is made real when the successors of those first apostles lay their hands, ordinary old hands, onto an ordinary head to confirm or ordain someone.

So, Baptism is about more than just the remission of sins, though for us sinners that’s part of the story. Baptism is also about the ability of God to create a relationship with flesh-and-blood people in the material world. It’s about Christ being known not primarily by spiritual athletes who stay in their studies or their cells and just think a lot (as edifying and gratifying as that practice can be from time to time). Nor is it about having some grand “spiritual” experience (again, not a bad thing, but not the point). Rather, the power and glory of God is made present in the midst of remarkably ordinary things: water, bread, wine, flesh, blood. The Grace of God is made present in the gathering of flesh-and-blood people, who’ve been regenerated by the Holy Spirit and maintain holy relationships with God and each other.

We as Christians, and particularly as Anglicans, have an Incarnational faith, which is to say that the reality of God becoming man in Christ Jesus makes all the difference for how we view the world. The world is no longer just a place for “stumbling blocks”, but has become the setting of God’s saving work. Christ’s Incarnation, His Baptism at the Jordan, His whole life of woe, and his physical, bodily Resurrection all point to the fact that the way to holiness is not by some kind of world-denying levitation, but by being Christians in the material world, among ordinary stuff, acknowledging reality, and watching God make his presence known around us in the midst of that which is commonplace, whether it be ordinary water, ordinary bread and wine, or ordinary people. It is the ordinary things that serve as the vessels God uses to make His Grace known and felt. In just a few moments, we’ll see that Grace made powerfully present again. May it be a reminder for us of just how extraordinary it is when God comes rushing into our midst and changes us and makes his love known and felt. He does it for us all the time, but how much more wonderful it is when we recognize it: in plain old water, in pretty tasteless bread, in not fantastic wine, in that person sitting next to you, in the midst of ordinary stuff. It takes a great God to forgo thunderbolts and a booming voice and the like to make Himself known in quotidian things; it takes a God who values us, who values our experience, who wants to be in a relationship with us all the time. Thank God that’s our God!

+In the name of the Father and of the Son and of the Holy Spirit. Amen.