Sermons

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

As a consequence of both having poor eyesight and being a rather clumsy person, I’ve never much enjoyed the dark. I dislike that feeling of waking up in the middle of the night and stumbling around to find my glasses, perhaps tripping over a cat or the shoes I left in the wrong place or whatever. I’m lucky to live in the developed world in the twenty-first century where electric lighting is ubiquitous.

In the ancient world, and for that matter in the modern world until about a century ago, the world would have literally been a much darker place.

Imagine, then, how surprising the imagery in this morning’s reading from Revelation would have been to people living in a literally much darker world:

And the city has no need of sun or moon to shine upon it, for the glory of God is its light, and its lamp is the Lamb. By its light shall the nations walk; and the kings of the earth shall bring their glory into it, and its gates shall never be shut by day–and there shall be no night there … And night shall be no more; they need no light of lamp or sun, for the Lord God will be their light, and they shall reign for ever and ever.

Light and dark imagery is seen throughout scripture, and I suspect it would have been more striking to these ancient people for whom the dark was a very dangerous reality. Bandits and predators struck in the dark. At nightfall you’d lock the gates to the city, and you’d probably stay in your house unless you were looking to get into some mischief.

And as dangerous as the literal darkness would have been, the metaphorical darkness in which the early church operated was a necessary evil. The church was being persecuted, and the best way to avoid death was to act like the bandits- move in secret, don’t get found out, worship God in locked rooms and catacombs.

How heartening, then, was this message of daylight! No longer would Christians need to scurry about in the dark, hiding from their torch-bearing persecutors. Finally, the true light which came to enlighten humanity could shine for all the world to see! The glory of God and of the Lamb would shine into every corner, bringing the righteous into a new and everlasting day and showing the designs of the wicked to be but vanity.

And now for the really interesting question, the question which makes the book of Revelation such a difficult text: Has this taken place? Are we, God’s faithful people, enjoying the light or is it an as-yet dim but growing hope.

I think it’s both. On the one hand, the majority of Christians can now be pretty open about their religion. Since Constantine, the Church has enjoyed a privileged place in Western society, even if it no longer has the authority it once had in the day-to-day lives of adherents and the larger culture. The Church continues to grow in foreign lands, many of which had until fairly recently seen the church persecuted just like in the bad old days of the Roman Empire. Things are by no means perfect, but they’ve getten better, at least in some parts of the world.

But we’ve not yet reached that perfect state of light. Sin and death are still with us. The vision of Revelation is not just about Christians escaping outright persecution (though that was the prevailing issue when the book was written). It’s also about all things being made subject to the reign of Christ. We’ve not yet seen “the kings of the earth bringing their glory into [the city of God].” It may have seemed like that for about a millennium, between Constantine and the Reformation, but the story was and remains a great deal more complex than that.

So, as much progress as has been made over the last two-thousand years, there is still darkness. There are still corners into which the saving light of God has not shone. The nations have not been fully healed. Not all have the name of the lamb inscribed on their foreheads and in their hearts.

So, the image of the City of God, the New Jerusalem, is still a hope. It is a hope for which we’ve been given a foretaste in the Church and Her Sacraments, but all is not yet accomplished.

And so we pray for the Kingdom, in the sure and certain hope that it is our birthright in Baptism. We don’t just wait around waiting for “pie in the sky when we die, by and by”, because the vision of the Holy City is a vision of the coming reality of this world, too. Rather, we light a candle here and there, causing the gloom to take flight, and one day, perhaps when we least expect it, the world will be so full of the light of Grace that the darkness will have no bastion remaining, and all things everywhere will be transformed into just what God intends for them.

+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.

What does it mean that we are made in the image and likeness of God? There have been multiple theories over the centuries. Some can, I think, be easily rejected. It doesn’t mean, for example, that God has ten fingers and ten toes and internal organs. Much less does he have a bushy, gray beard as much as our desire to anthropomorphize the Almighty has led us to depict him in particular ways in art over the centuries.

Other theories have their good points. Some have claimed that our being made in the image of God has primarily to do with our function as masters of creation. There is some merit to this idea, particularly considering the fact that God did give Adam dominion over all creatures. Even so, such a view leaves something to be desired. During the period which many of you know to be my personal bête noir–namely, that of the Nineteenth Century liberal protestant ascendancy, when anything and everything for the uplift of humanity seemed possible– the idea was in ascendancy, but that this is how humanity can be seen as the image of God goes back at least to the time of the Reformation. The failure of human progress, seen particularly in man’s inhumanity to man, seems a sufficient argument against this. So too, I would argue, does its logical implication for those who clearly have no control over themselves, much less the ability to be “masters of the universe.”

The view which I used to find most compelling is the Augustinian one, which holds that the human being’s capacity for memory, reason, and free will is what makes him like God. I’ve always liked it, of course, because I have a pretty good memory, I have a capacity for reason honed by the advanced study of philosophy, and I know I can be willful. But what of those who lack one or more of these? What of the merely forgetful or the properly demented? What of those whose natural abilities make them less able or even entirely incapable of rational inquiry? What of those who, because of being incapacitated in any of a number of ways cannot choose for themselves which path to take? Are they somehow less human? Are they a less elegant creation? Are they not quite made in the image of God?

The more I consider it, the more I believe that it is in nothing corporeal, nor authoritative, nor cognitive which defines our likeness to the Creator, but simply in our capacity to love as we have been loved. In John’s Gospel, Jesus goes round and round about what it means to abide in him, who himself abides in God, and thus for we ourselves to be identified with the Father. Sometimes he discusses it in terms of personal identification and sometimes, as in today’s Gospel, he discusses in terms of being his disciples, but invariably the point he makes is that the Father and the Son are one and we are also one with them so long as we allow him to imbue us with a single virtue. That virtue is love. Love for God and for our fellows. Thus, the death and resurrection of Jesus Christ and our Baptism into his body enables us to live into what it means to be human beings made in the image of God, to recapture the defining quality of humanity lost in the Fall–to be defined by the love we show as a reflection of God’s own love.

St. Gregory of Nyssa expresses this beautifully in likening the Creation of humanity to a canvas on which God at the first painted himself as love. He writes:

As then painters transfer human forms to their pictured by means of certain colors, laying on their copy the proper and corresponding tints so that the beauty of the original may be accurately transferred to the likeness, so I would have you understand that our Maker also, painting the portrait to resemble his own beauty, as it were with colors, shows in us his own sovereignty… God is love and the fount of love: for this the great John declares that “love is of God” and “God is love,” the Fasioner of our nature has made this to be our feature too. For “in this,” he says, “shall all know that you are my disciples, if you love one another.” And so, if love is absent, the whole stamp of the likeness is transformed.

As you’ve heard me say countless times, love in this sense (that is, in reflection of God’s love) is not primarily affective. It is not about warm, fuzzy feelings. It is, rather, the virtue which enables us to behave in certain ways toward each other: unselfishly, self-sacrificially, gently.

This capacity, this virtue, is the thing which the Fall took away. The fancy theological term for our condition, concupiscence, has unfortunately been equated by many with sexual immorality specifically, but it is in fact disordered affection understood more broadly–the lack of love or its misdirection, toward self-satisfaction, whatever form that takes.

The new morality, in contradiction of Christian morality, is a perfect example of this. We are increasingly told by the world that happiness and virtue are to be found in total self-determination, the pursuit of whatever we want so long as it doesn’t obviously harm others (and even that caveat sometimes seems more-and-more negotiable). A week or so ago, Annie and I went to see a film that’s been getting a lot of praise: Sinners, which is about blues music and vampires. It was a beautiful movie in every way except for its moral message, and it might be worth seeing (if you can handle the violence) if only to get an idea of what many believe, either implicitly or explicitly, makes for the good life. Long story short, the most important thing according to this view seems to be following one’s desires, getting what one wants, whatever scolds might tell us. I think most of us have known folks who have lived this way, but I wonder if any of us knows one who ended up happy or fulfilled at the end of the day.

Jesus gives us a better way, a way which has been proved over and over again to lead to a good life: love one another just as he loved us. Emulate, insofar as God has given us the power, the kind of love which is willing even to lay down one’s life for one’s brother or sister. This is the way to joy and peace, and it is a reflection, however dim, of the sort of love which we’ll enjoy in the life of the world to come.

+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.

At the intersection of humor and pop-psychology, much has been made of the phenomenon of “nominative determinism.” This is when a person’s name fits so perfectly with his or her profession or some other biographical detail that one wonders if that person must have been subconsciously led in a particular direction in life. There are some great, funny examples to be found online: the firefighter Les McBurney and the neuroscientist Lord Brain are some of my favorites. You’ll find famous examples, too, like the olympic sprinter Usain Bolt and (this one will only make sense to a few) Nintendo of America’s current CEO Doug Bowser. And those in my profession are well represented: there was a Fr. Chanter in Exeter,a Fr. Paternoster who served in Brechin and retired to a home on Priest Row in Wells, and–best of all–The Venerable Canon Bishop (who was neither a canon nor a bishop, but was an archdeacon in South Africa).

And then we come to Tabitha, whose Greek name was Dorcas, whom St. Peter raised from the dead as it was recorded in the Acts of the Apostles, and I would suggest it is neither coincidence nor subconscious self-determination which led to her being the subject of today’s first lesson, but rather Divine Providence. Here, we see a double nominative determinism. The first of is based entirely on my own speculation(though I’d love to see somebody else saying something similar, perhaps in a monograph which I’ll never write myself). The latter is generally accepted by the church fathers, so I’ll at least end on something not entirely idiosyncratic.

So, first, the words which Peter spoke when he resurrected Tabitha was either “Tabitha anastethi” or “Tabitha, cumi” (the former being Greek and the latter Aramaic). We can’t really know for certain. Joppa was both a center of Judaean civilization (whose everyday, domestic language was Aramaic) and a major port city on the Mediterranean (in which the language spoken in the marketplace and with strangers was Greek), and Luke (the author of Acts in addition to the Gospel which bears his name) invariably translated everything into Greek, even when the other Gospel writers maintained an Aramaic original, since he was writing to a broader, often Gentile audience. When Mark or Matthew or John have Jesus saying something in Aramaic, Luke puts it in Greek, but nobody else recorded this incident, so all we have is the Greek version, which may either be the original conversation or a translation of a conversation in Aramaic. Plus, it’s certain Peter spoke both languages fluently. Thus, we just can’t know for sure.

All that said, if the actual words were originally in Aramaic, as I suspect they may have been, the words Peter spoke would have been “Tabitha, cumi.” This is not just one letter, but one stroke of a letter away from something we know Jesus himself said when he raised the daughter of Jairus, the leader of a Galilean synagogue, from the dead in Matthew, Mark, and Luke. In Mark’s account of that story, Jesus’ words are recorded as “Talitha, cumi”–little girl, arise. The difference between the letters lamed and bet, between “Tabitha, cumi” and “Talitha, cumi” are literally one stroke, less than a line, not so much as to require one to lift one’s pen from the page even to add a “dot.” So, I strongly suspect, Peter’s point in performing this miracle is to connect it to Jesus’ own miracle in raising Jairus’ daughter, and to remind those around at the time and all of us that the church has been given the power to continue Christ’s own ministry, even as far as mediating God’s own miraculous power.

Moving from my suppositions to a point recognized by figures as important as St. John Chrysostom and the Venerable Bede, it is almost certain that Luke gives us the translation of Tabitha’s name–the Greek Dorcas–because he believed he was making a point about her character, which at least Chrysostom interprets as an instance not merely of nominative determinism in the pop psychology sense but as the outworking of Providence. The Hebrew/Aramaic Tabitha and the Greek Dorcas both mean “fallow deer” or “gaazelle,” creatures reckoned by the people of the ancient world to be noble for their fiercely energetic but deliberate activity. The preacher had this to say:

It was not without purpose that the writer informed us of the woman’s name, but to show that her character matched her name–she was active and wakeful as a gazelle. For many names are bestowed by providence, as we have often said to you. “She was full,” it says, “of good works.” Not only of alms but also of “good works,” both in general and of this good work in particular, “which Dorcas made while she was with them.” What humility! Unlike us, all of them were together, and she worked and made clothes.

So what does this have to teach us? Is Chrysostom saying (is Luke saying? is God saying?) that Tabitha’s particular profession, that of a seamstress, somehow had more inherent dignity than some other vocation. Well, I don’t think that’s precisely the point–though clothing the naked is a work of corporal mercy and working to that end (or to the producing of food or the construction of shelter or whatever) may be more useful than some other lines of work.

I think the point–and the fact that the widows were holding up what Tabitha had produced in life points to this–is that work done well and with care and love is a good in itself, not only because there is an inherent dignity in honest labor but also that doing a good job glorifies the God who gave us gifts to use in this life. And just as the widows remembered her good works, so, too, is every good thing we accomplish held in the mind of God, even unto eternity, not because they save us (works cannot do that, only Jesus can) but because they are a reflection of the loving creativity of the creator.

I have a dear friend who was and still twenty years later remains the Roman Catholic chaplain where I went to college. He remains my friend, I like to remind him, despite all of his unsuccessful attempts to convert me to his particular flavor of Christianity. Anyway, something he said all those years ago has stuck with me, and continues to affect how I approach life vocationally and avocationally.

We had been discussing Christian rock and pop music, which is sometimes theologically but more often simply aesthetically “not my cup of tea.” That’s a matter of my subjective taste, so I’m not bashing it as an entire genre. If it’s your thing, it’s all good.

That said, we were discussing some of the artistic shortcomings of some examples of the genre; my friend, by the way, had spent his undergraduate years studying Jazz performance at Berklee College of Music, so he was far more qualified than I to pass judgments on these things. His take was that the problem with a great deal of Christian art–whether it’s music or visual art or literature–was that it didn’t matter (at least as far as the market was concerned) if the piece in question had been of the highest quality so long as you, as he put it, “stamped a cross on it at the end.” That is to say, some people in the Christian community, will pay for bad art or literature or music so long as it’s explicitly Christian in nature.

His view, and subsequently mine, is that the primary obligation of the Christian artist, whatever his or her medium, is simply to make good art. It may or may not be explicitly Christian. The Cross of Christ, not feebly “stamped on” to get clout in a particular market may be embedded explicitly in the work or the work may engage more with secular themes. That doesn’t matter so much, so long as the intention is to do the very best one can with the gifts God has given one.

I think the same can be said about any honest occupation, any “honorable industry” as our prayer book puts it in its prayer for the nation, whether or not that work is creative in nature. And this includes not just gainful employment, but all virtuous endeavors on which one might spend one’s time and energy. Certainly this is the case with parenting, which I should highlight, it being Mother’s Day. So too might this apply to our social and leisure activities. Whatever we do, if done well and with love, can and should e done to the glory of God.

I went through a phase in Junior High and High School, based on something I’d read somewhere about Jesuit education, in which at least at a particular point in history students were made to write A.M.D.G. (ad majorem Dei gloriam – to the greater glory of God) at the top of every page of schoolwork, so I started doing that. I was not educated by Jesuits except much later, and then only for one course during seminary through cross-registration at a different institution, so I got all sorts of questions from teachers asking why I’d written A.M.D.G. at the top of my literature essay or history exam or whatever. I had mentioned this several years ago to Sue Ann Sandusky, by the way, and then noticed that when she later became clerk of the vestry, “A.M.D.G.” started showing up at the top of our meeting minutes. I think this gets to something we don’t consider as much as we should. Whether it’s a seventeen-year-old’s paper on social hypocrisy in Madame Bovary or minutes from a business meeting, if we do it with the intention of doing our best with the gifts God has given us and to his glory, that work will be done with more intention and care and sometimes even more love.

You see, not only has God given the church and her ministers the power and authority to continue his mission, as evinced by Peter raising Tabitha from the dead. He has also given each individual member of the body, each and every one of you, the power to glorify God. God is glorified in the simple things each and every one of us does do with his or her best efforts, whether that’s sewing a tunic like Tabitha or teaching a class or cooking a meal or coaching a team or playing on one or filling in a spreadsheet or having a conversation with somebody who just needs some encouragement. These are all opportunities for giving our best, if we would, and God will accept every effort. And what he gave Peter is not just for people like me. For the power of God is not chiefly shown by power, or authority, or even miracle, but by lowly service in his name. This is the heart of Christian service, which we might take on for ourselves, knowing that like the garments lovingly sewn by Tabitha, they will not wear out, but will prove themselves to be the robes of victory in the life of the world to come.

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