Sermons

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

Despite loving reading, I often avoid reading collections of writers’ correspondence, and sometimes I avoid looking too much into their biographies, lest I be prejudiced when it comes to their novels and stories. That said, occasionally I do come upon a letter which illuminates a literary figure, and I have an all-time favorite. It was written by W.H. Auden to his priest, the Rector of St. Mark’s in the Bowery in New York. The letter opens thusly:

Dear Father Allen,

Have you gone stark raving mad?

Having been a Rector for over a decade-and-a-half I have received some correspondence which might be deemed confrontational, but never anything quite that forceful.

Auden was writing sometime in the early 1970s, a time of liturgical experimentation, prompted in large part by both the desire to conform the worship of the church more closely to ancient texts which had been rediscovered within the preceding century and the desire to translate the words and ideas of church services into a more contemporary English. The Roman Catholics were first to the party, as they had the furthest to go since in the West the Mass had been said exclusively in Latin up until the 1960s, but our own “flavor” of Christianity was close behind.

Auden was reacting to what are known as “trial use” liturgies, meant to test forms and language during the process of Prayer Book revision–in this case, the process which eventually replaced the 1928 Book of Common Prayer with our current, 1979 edition. Needless to say, Auden was against this, admittedly for aesthetic rather than theological reasons. The best line in the letter reads as follows: “I implore you by the bowels of Christ to stick to Cranmer and King James!” (Cranmer was the primary author of the first two editions of the Book of Common Prayer, those of 1549 and 1552, and, of course by “King James” he means the Authorized Version of the Bible.) Even old Auden eventually moderated on this point; he was instrumental in the translation of the Psalms which we still use, and–in my humble opinion–helped them maintain a degree of sonority despite being in a more “accessible” idiom.

It will not surprise those who know me, that my feeling hew rather closer to Auden’s than to the proponents (or perpetrators) of “liturgical renewal.” In my private daily prayers I do personally “stick to Cranmer and King James”, using either the 1928 or 1662 prayer book and invariably reading from the Authorized Version. You may be grateful, perhaps, that I at least recognize that while the rubrics of our current book allow for this in public prayer, I should not impose my idiosyncratic liturgical preferences on you for most of the year. Trinity being the only Episcopal parish covering several counties, I think it’s most important to keep to the middle of the road.

There is one element of our worship that I remain forever grateful that the more radical of the Twentieth Century liturgiologists didn’t get their way on. You may have noticed this before. Open up your prayerbooks to page 364. Notice that we have competing versions of the Lord’s Prayer. I suspect that some of the more “advanced” of the reformers would have preferred to only have the one on the right (the one we never use), just as they are known to have attempted to exclude the traditional idiom (what we now call “Rite I”) entirely from our current book.

Show of hands of anybody here who has actually experienced the version of the Lord’s Prayer on the right side of the page actually used. We would trot it out at seminary, because our liturgics professor was a bit of an iconoclast, and I occasionally see it used at diocesan or national church functions, probably because whoever put the service together is trying to make a point (what that point is I couldn’t tell you).

At one of the recent monthly meetings we have of our deanery clergy up in Toledo, I asked if anybody had experienced this version used “in the wild” (by which I mean, on a Sunday morning in a parish church) and only one of the roughly dozen of us raised his hand. I know of a committed layman (and lest you think this is an “old person problem”, he is younger than I) who moved, and the interim Rector of the parish he began attending instituted the use of the “contemporary” version of the Lord’s Prayer at all of that church’s services, and so difficult was it to get his head and heart around this that he ended up attending a different Episcopal Church (he was fortunate enough to be in a place with more options than we have here). I can’t say I entirely blame him.

There may be only one prayer which all Christians everywhere know by heart. In the West, it is one of the three things, along with the Apostles’ Creed and the Ten Commandments, that we teach all children first (I do this with kids when they prepare to make their First Communion). Yes, we all say it in our own languages. Yes, even among Anglophones there are slight variations. Roman Catholics tend to omit the prayer’s doxology when recited in the Mass. Presbyterians say “debts” instead of “trespasses”. Some, like us put a conjunction before “the power” and say “forever and ever” instead of just “forever.” Yes, the version we use is a blend of the different versions found in the Gospels. Yes, it may not even actually be the most accurate translation. If we were to be extra-scrupulous about that, I’d argue, we’d have to meet halfway between the Anglican and the Presbyterian version: forgive us our trespasses as we forgive our debtors. All that said, we’re saying more or less the same thing, and it binds us together across the gulfs created by the unhappy divisions within the church militant here on earth.

I’ve had frequent occasions in my pastoral ministry to visit folks suffering the later stages of dementia–men and women who have lost all ability to participate in a conversation or recall even the most basic facts about the world and even about themselves. Those who’ve gone through this with loved ones know how great a sadness this can be. But over and over again, even near furthest extreme of that horrible disease’s progression I can say “Our Father” and that man or woman will invariably join in with all the right words, praying from the heart. If that’s not enough to leave well enough alone with at least that one prayer, then I don’t know what is.

And, you know what? This prayer which Jesus gave us is all we need to pray aright. We acknowledge God’s holiness, his righteousness, his perfection. We recognize that our world is not as it should be, and that God will eventually put it to rights. We remember that we don’t need fancy cars, and big investment portfolios, and caviar and champagne for dinner–just some sustenance (physical and spiritual) to get us through today. We know we need forgiveness and that we’ve got to extend grace to those who have wronged us. And we beg God to protect us from that evil which may trip us up on the pilgrim road of life. We may want more than those things, but that’s all we need. And, as Jesus reminds us in the parable of the neighbor at midnight, if we just ask for those things, God will give us his Spirit to accomplish even more in our souls.

So, lest you were worried when I pointed it out a few minutes ago, we’re not going to get cute and switch up the version of the Lord’s Prayer this week. But we will be joining with them, too, and with those praying in thousands of different languages, even with those who say “debts” instead of trespasses. We’ll be joining with over two billion sisters and brothers, in praying for the few things which are needful in this life as we prepare for the next. And that, my friends, is a miracle in itself.

+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.

My in-laws came to visit last week, and they were excited to give us a recommendation for a television show they’d been watching. Annie and I have neither the time nor the inclination to watch television (which they know, though it’s always sweet when they think they can convince us otherwise), and one of the benefits of this is that they can tell us what they liked about it without fear of “spoiling us” on the plot twists. Anyway, the program they had been watching is called “The Bear” and, as I understand it, it’s about an accomplished chef who inherits his family’s Chicago “Italian Beef” sandwich shop and attempts to transform in into a fine dining restaurant. One of the episodes they were telling us about was a “flashback” in which the protagonist’s mother, played by Jamie Lee Curtis, is depicted trying to put together a family holiday meal. The kitchen is chaotic, family drama interrupts the delicate cooking procedure, everything must be perfect, and the mother remains on the edge of “losing it” throughout the entirety of the episode. At the end she pulls it off. The meal is executed perfectly and the table is set. At thus point, the mother calmly walks outside and a moment later, she drives her car through the front of the house.

I worry my in-laws might have been sharing the plot because it reminded them of observing me cook Christmas dinner every year. I don’t think I’ve ever visibly lost my cool, and I’ve certainly not threatened life and limb or intentionally damaged property. That said, all concerned have mostly learned that I do not require assistance in cooking any meal–that as nice as the offer is, it is in fact the opposite of helpful in practice–and least of all do I need additional bodies in our small kitchen while cooking a complicated meal where everything simply must happen at a particular moment for the whole thing to come together. Anyway, like Martha of Bethany, my attempts at hospitality have probably, ironically made me less hospitable in practice.

I think the tricky part of this story is that we can take it to an extreme and fail to see that Martha had the right intentions, just the wrong way of going about it. And note well, Jesus does not berate her for trying to provide hospitality in her way, but rather for her criticism of her sister, who was being hospitable in a different way. The point of the story, I think, is not that we should all be slugabeds. Rather, I think it is meant to remind us that service and companionship are two sides of the same coin, and neither should be taken to an extreme.

So Martha isn’t entirely wrong to be working hard to make her Lord and Master and houseguest comfortable and well-fed. That was not only her social obligation (hospitality in ancient cultures being far more codified and demanding than today), but for at least part of her, before she got carried away, it would have also been her joy. She just went overboard and, worse, started resenting Mary. You need to feed your guest, but maybe Jesus didn’t need or want a Michelin-starred seven course dining experience.

And then we have Mary. Just as with Martha, there is more to Mary than the caricature. She wasn’t just shirking obligations in an attempt to be relaxed. Jesus is not elevating the slothful over the conscientious. Quite to the contrary, Mary is being conscientious in entertaining her host rather than fretting obsessively about the outward show of hospitality. She is acing as the truly hospitable hostess by being with Jesus. She recognizes that her own obligation, and in fact, the sine-qua-non of her relationship with Jesus, is found not entirely in doing stuff for him but must include simply being with him.

When it comes to our relationship with God, it is entirely possible to lose one’s soul in a program of highly useful activity. As a priest, I can attest to this. I can spend all day accomplishing tasks which I believe benefit Christ’s Church. If I don’t take some time to simply converse with God, though, and render my thanks and express my deepest joys and fears, then all that stuff I do for the Church doesn’t get me a step closer to God. The same can be said for any of us. In our culture, which elevates action over contemplation much more than the culture of Jesus’ day, it can be more difficult, but no less critical, to stop and pray, to be still before the Lord our God, who made us and loves us and wants a relationship with us.

The result of taking such intentional pauses in our work for the Kingdom to be present before God, is that the work we do ultimately benefits. I mentioned earlier that Martha had likely gone overboard in her attempt to be hospitable, ironically making her less hospitable. When we take Mary’s approach, the result is not that we remain in inactivity forever, but that we are given new directions in our mission. When we stop working for a bit and pray, God will help us know how to do His work better. Perhaps God has some task for us which we’ll never know unless we stop frantically doing something else that we think we’re supposed to be doing but aren’t.

Taking an hour out on Sunday morning to be present before God in worship is a great help in this regard, but it is not enough. Only through daily, intentional, quality time with God (in prayer and in meditating on Holy Scripture) can our relationship with Him grow to its full potential. Only when we take time every day to sit with Mary at the feet of our Lord can we learn how to serve Him in our work for the Kingdom, how to be a bit more circumspect in our activity than was Martha. So, settle down, breathe, pray, and He’ll tell you how you can serve Him more effectively.

+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.

The typical sermon one might hear on the Parable of the Good Samaritan usually starts with the reminder that Jews and Samaritans didn’t get along particularly well. They had cultural and religious differences which separated them and created enmity despite all being Israelites. They weren’t neighborly, but they weren’t perfect strangers either. Samaritans were to Jews what Anthony Keddie called “proximate others” and we might think of this being a case of familiarity breeding contempt. So the divide isn’t like people from different planets. It’s more like Hindu vs. Buddhist or Christian vs. Mormon–they started from the same place but diverged enough to mean that you’re dealing with distinct though related religions. Anyway, this standard sermon ends with some lesson about how we might see God’s Grace expressed in the actions of those we least expect, and even if we have serious theological differences. I’ve preached that sermon before, and it’s true enough, but there’s actually something more interesting and challenging going on here, too.

Note the setting and the characters. The traveler is going down from Jerusalem. Why would he have gone up to Jerusalem in the first place? Almost certainly to sacrifice at the Temple as every able-bodied male Jew was required to do three times a year. We sometimes don’t realize how peripatetic both ancient and medieval people could be, but even so people tended not to “get away” to the city or the country on a frequent basis like some of us may do today. This isn’t like going down to Columbus or up to Ann Arbor several times a year for the “big game”–though sometimes those seem a bit too close for comfort to pilgrimages to ancient temples for the sacrifice.

Anyway, my suspicion is almost certainly confirmed by the fact that the first two who come upon the man are a priest and a Levite. These classes of men had particular roles in the sacrificial system of the Jews, and we needn’t get into all the particularities. Think of priests like the priests we still have, like me, who do the actual business of the sacrifice (albeit a “bloodless sacrifice” in the New Covenant), and of the Levites as a bit like the servers and Lay Eucharistic Ministers who assist at the altar and in the distribution of the Sacrament.

So why do they shirk their responsibility to help this man? We usually assume that they are simply heartless, and that perhaps their pride in their positions of religious authority have blinded them to the needs of lesser mortals, even those in extreme distress. No doubt there is an element of that, but there’s more. Notice that Jesus says the bandits left their victim “half dead.” The Greek here is ἡμιθανής. I’ll spare you the details of the lexical rabbit-hole I went down with this peculiar term, which is a hapax legomenon (a word that only appears once in the Bible) unless you count the Fourth Book of the Maccabees, which only appears in an appendix to the Greek Bible. If you really want me to regale you with details of Strabo, Diodorus, and Dionysius Halicarnassus, you can pigeon-hole me at coffee hour.

The upshot is that the victim by the roadside would not have immediately been clearly dead or alive. You’d have to get up close and personal to make a determination, feeling for a pulse or for breath. And if he turned out to be dead, the priest and the Levite would have been in a pickle. He would have been ritually unclean and thus unable to do his job until purifying himself. This is what Leviticus says, in the 21^st chapter, verses 1 through 3:

And the LORD said to Moses, “Speak to the priests, the sons of Aaron, and say to them that none of them shall defile himself for the dead among his people, except for his nearest of kin, his mother, his father, his son, his daughter, his brother, or his virgin sister (who is near to him because she has had no husband; for her he may defile himself).”

These exceptions for touching close family members did not apply to the high priest, who couldn’t even do that. Lest you think this ritual concern died with the destruction of the Jerusalem Temple, I found an article this week published by Chabad, which is probably the largest Ultra-Orthodox group, and the one organization on that end of the Jewish spectrum that reaches outside the shtetl to engage with more reformed and secular Jews and even those of other religions. The article was about caring for the dead, and the upshot was that doing so was a mitzvah–a good work–but the kohanim (those descended from Moses’ brother Aaron who once served as the temple priests) must still avoid hospitals and nursing homes, and cemeteries lest they get too close to a corpse. They haven’t made sacrifices in nearly two thousand years; my understanding is that the only role they really still play is being given the first Torah reading at synagogue and blessing the congregation at the end of the service. (You’re not supposed to look at them when they do this, by the way, but famously when he was a child, Leonard Nimoy peaked one Sabbath morning, and thus, Mr. Spock got the inspiration for the Vulcan salute).

So, why couldn’t the priest and the Levite just take a chance knowing that they could purify yourself afterward. It’s inconvenient, but you might save a life. Well, the Book of Numbers outlines the purification ritual, which requires the ashes of a spotless red heifer. More than an inconvenience, procuring said ashes from the Temple where a small supply would have been kept was somewhere between highly improbable and virtually impossible. Tradition holds that between the time of Moses in the 13^th Century B.C. And the destruction of the Second Temple by the Romans in A.D. 70 only nine spotless red heifers had been identified and sacrificed, so supplies were limited, to say the least.

As an aside, if you’re looking for a fun, summer read, I commend to you Michael Chabon’s funny, exhilarating novel The Yiddish Policemen’s Union. It’s an alternative history, hard-boiled detective story whose premise is that after the Second World War the Jewish State was founded not in the Middle East but in Alaska. The book plunges the reader into the investigation of a murder which uncovers a group which believe it has found the long-anticipated Messiah and a spotless red heifer, promising the possibility of building a third Jerusalem Temple and reestablishing the sacrificial system. I say the book is funny, because it is, but it’s also a bit scary since there are both Ultra-Orthodox Jewish and fundamentalist Christian sects that have been pursuing just this sort of thing for the last several decades. (Note well, here, that I am not making a statement about the modern state of Israel one way or another. I’m just saying that strange, end-times theories are generally bad for both politics and–more importantly–mainstream religion, both Jewish and Christian). Anyway, read the book; you’ll love it!

Back to the Parable of the Good Samaritan… The point in all this is that the priest and the Levite didn’t ignore the wounded traveler just because they were heartless, though they may well have been. They ignored him because they put ritual purity and the outward exercise of religion above love of neighbor. The Samaritan had no such cause for scrupulosity. Despite being children of Abraham, Samaritans were not allowed inside the temple, much less could they participate in the sacrifices. The best they could do would be to hang out in the so-called “Court of the Gentiles” with the Greeks and Romans and money-changers. Most of them would have probably resented the Jewish temple elite enough not to even do that. We learn from the Book of Ezra that five centuries earlier, when the Jews returned from their exile in Babylon, the Samaritans had offered to help them rebuild the Temple. The answer? Thanks, but no thanks. In all events, it was the Samaritan’s lack of interest in and need to maintain purity that allowed him to love his neighbor, not just in word but in deed.

But how does this relate to us, you might justifiably ask? Unlike most if not all other religions, Christianity does not have a purity code. If some behavior is verboten it’s because it’s immoral, not because it makes approaching God impossible. The one pure sacrifice was already made by Christ on the Cross, and even if your priest is a great sinner (which he is) he can still administer a valid Sacrament to you, because sin, while serious and while we shouldn’t abide grave sin in the clergy, does not pollute in a ritual sense. This assurance, established by Ecumenical Council in the Fourth Century and termed Anti-Donatism, is your most important church insurance policy, and you don’t even have to pay for it.

Since food is often the first thing that comes to mind, because we remember that there are som many dietary restriction in the Old Testament, it’s nice to know that Christians get to eat and drink whatever they like in moderation. If the Church encourages (though not requires) avoiding something or another it’s either as a spiritual discipline to conform us to Christ’s own abstention–like when we are encouraged to abstain from meat and other delicacies on Fridays–or to avoid scandal–like not eating food sacrificed to an idol in from of a neophyte. It’s never because we thus become ritually impure and have to hose ourselves off before we can pray!

All that said, avoiding contamination is a very human tendency, and any anthropologist will tell you that our concern with it is preternatural. Maybe it’s not “unclean” food or dead bodies or a misogynistic monthly spousal separation for us. Maybe it’s the homeless person who hasn’t bathed in a while because she’s living on the streets. Maybe it’s the oleaginous business bro whose angle you haven’t ferreted out, but you know he’s got one. Maybe it’s the mentally disturbed or cognitively disabled person, because you’ve irrationally convinced yourself you’re gonna catch it. Maybe it’s the person whose sexual preferences you disagree with or that just give you “the ick.” Again, I assure you, whatever you think about those issues (and I know there’s a diversity of opinions here about that, which is fine), whatever “gay” is, it’s not an air-born infection.

And, sometimes, there is something in the environment which is literally infectious, but that doesn’t mean it has the capacity to make us ritually impure. Hear me when I say that I am not encouraging anybody in particular to put themselves in danger, here, but I am so grateful that among the handful of Episcopalian saints on our general calendar are the “Martyrs of Memphis.” When the Rt. Rev’d Charles Quintard, Bishop of Tennessee, invited the Sisterhood of Saint Mary to Memphis in 1873 it was to establish a girl’s school at the Cathedral. That school remains to this day, and stands as one of the best of its type in the country. Little did Bishop Quintard and the sister know that a terrible outbreak of yellow fever would strike Memphis five years later, in 1878. Most who could leave the city did. The sisters could have done, but they did not. They remained and ministered tirelessly, valiantly to the sick and dying. In the end four of them died in this humble service. So I thank God for Sr. Constance, Sr. Thecla, Sr. Ruth, and Sr. Francis for reminding me that Jesus is not just the Good Shepherd. He is also the Good Samaritan, and I pray to the Father and beg the intercessions of the Martyrs of Memphis that I might be prepared to do the same should the day of decision come.

The point here is that both the Good Samaritan and the Good Shepherd weren’t afraid of getting down in the dirt. They teach us that love of neighbor calls us to go where Christ has gone–among sinners, in the slums, sometimes in the sewers. Jesus didn’t just stop there. He went all the way into Hell. The one truly pure priest and victim did not thus become unclean. Rather, he cleansed the filthiest corners of every hovel and every heart simply with his presence. And when he abides in us, we are no longer separated, we are no longer soiled, we are, rather, saved from every spot of sin, having been washed clean with his most precious blood.

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