Sermons

+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.

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

Every year on this Sunday our Gospel lesson is taken from the prologue of the Gospel according to John, and we hear the Christmas story from a different perspective–that of cosmic history rather than the particular history recorded in the nativity stories found in Matthew and especially Luke. I loved what our new Presiding Bishop, the Rt. Rev’d Sean Rowe wrote in his Christmas message this year–namely that for him the moment Christmas truly arrives is when he hears those words, “and the Word was made flesh and dwelt among us,” again, as indeed we did in the traditional “Last Gospel” Christmas Eve, again the next morning in church on Christmas Day, and yet a third time today for those who attended all three services. It occurs to me that I have preached on this text fifteen years in a row on this Sunday, and though it is among my favorites, I’m going to do something shocking this morning and preach on the Epistle instead. I think you’ll find that it does connect, though, because it explicates what Christ, the Word of God, coming into the world means for us in very practical terms. Namely, so as not to bury the lede, it means that we have obtained freedom in the Gospel, the purpose of the Law of the Old Testament being to prepare us to accept the same.

“The law was our custodian,” Paul wrote to the Galatians, “until Christ came.” The word translated custodian here, or disciplinarian in some other translations, is a bit different and more specific in the Greek. Paul actually says “The law was our paidagogos until Christ came.” A paidagogos was a person with a very important job in the Hellenistic world. He was usually one of the highest ranked and most trusted slaves of the household and he had but one job: convey the children of the household to the gymnasium, the local school, and get them back home again safely at the end of the day. I don’t suspect you see this so much around here (and I know we didn’t when I lived in rural Arkansas), but back when I lived in New York City, there was an equivalent profession- the nanny. Like an uptown Manhattan nanny, the paidagogos had to be trusted a great deal for those parents to turn their kids into his hands. He had to care for the children as if they were his own to execute his job rightly.

So, Paul is saying something like- the Law of the Old Testament was our nanny. The Law got us to school safely and got us back home. The Law kept us from stepping into the oncoming traffic of worldly concerns; it kept us out of the hands of those who would kidnap our hearts and minds, not to get a ransom from wealthy Upper East Side parents, but to pervert our faith and morals, to convince us that the God of Israel is not even our Father after all.

Now, if we were a Jewish synagogue rather than a Christian church, that would be the end of it. But for Paul, and for us, the metaphor must go one step further. We are no longer children. We are expected to approach God as adults, to have a mature relationship with him. Like adult children, we no longer have the threat or the comfort of getting straightened out when our parents get home. “We are no longer under a disciplinarian”, a paidagogos, a nanny. We are expected to live faithfully by our own choice.

Paul was addressing some very specific issues when he made this point. The Church in Galatia was in an uproar as it struggled to determine the requirements of Christianity. There were those who maintained that a gentile, should she or he wish to become a Christian, must first become a Jew. Specifically, for men this meant undergoing the rite of circumcision- less of an issue for an eight-day-old child as for an adult convert as you can imagine. On the other hand, there were those who claimed that Christianity was for all, not only for Jews and those who would become Jews. Believe it or not, this was probably the most controversial issue the church has ever faced. Forget about all of the fights we’ve had about new prayerbooks, and women priests, and human sexuality. Whether or not a gentile could become a Christian without becoming a Jew was far more controversial, and, at least in some sense an even more important question, because it was about the availability of salvation itself to the 99% of the world’s population that wasn’t fortunate enough to be born Jewish.

Paul, as you may be aware, sides with the so-called “uncircumcision party”. He says that you don’t have to become a Jew to become a Christian:

For as many of you as were baptized into Christ have put on Christ [he writes]. There is neither Jew nor Greek, there is neither slave nor free, there is neither male nor female; for you are all one in Christ Jesus.

For Paul, and for the Church, the Law was certainly God-given, it was certainly good, but it was like one of those nannies, and it took us to school and back home while we were young, but now we’re older and it’s up to us to get on without a nanny. Our parent, God himself, who is the perfect embodiment of fatherhood and motherhood, trusts us to do that. It’s a lot harder than having our hand held by a nanny; it’s a lot harder than knowing all the time exactly what the rules are, exactly what the boundaries are, exactly where all the dangers lie on the road. Even so, God trusts us to take on the challenge.

But, oh how we love rules! Maybe not all of you are preternatural rule-followers, but I know I am. I’m not sure sometimes if I’m a very good Christian, but I believe I’d make an excellent Orthodox Jew. Knowing what is permitted to eat and what not, when and how precisely to pray, being given a specific moral guide in the form of “shalls” and “shall nots”: it would be very comforting to me, and in some sense easier than having my relationship with God predicated on something so vague as faith. This is not to say that following the laws of the Torah was an easy way of life for those who followed it and still do; but for folks so disposed, like I am, to appreciate clear direction, it is at least more straight-forward.

I wonder sometimes whether or not the majority of Christians are still, in a sense, living under the law. While the Old Testament injunctions against pork and the requirement of ritual circumcision and the rest are no longer deemed requirements, many have set up alternative sets of rules. What precisely the rules are is beside the point. The point is that the natural view of religion is that it must have at its heart certain rules which serve as the center of the religion. Whether or not we preach it, it is only natural to see our faith as an exercise in rule-following, to boil Christianity down to the “shalls” and “shall nots” and see them as the central message.

What Paul tells us is that, to the contrary, Christianity is not about rules but about a relationship: a relationship of faith with a God who has literally come down to earth to establish the preconditions that make such a relationship possible. While it is easier to follow rules than to truly trust God, the latter is what it’s all about. What’s more, rules by themselves can breed elitism and contempt. Rules can divide. But a trusting, loving relationship with God is open to all, Jew and Greek, slave and free, male and female.

Don’t get me wrong–there are certainly moral and spiritual expectations that could and maybe should be seen as rules. The ten commandments are still important, and Jesus gives us some rules himself: “love the Lord your God with all your heart, mind, and soul and your neighbor as yourself” is a pretty good one. But the rules aren’t the center. They all proceed from the relationship of faith and love which we have with God. That relationship is the core. So, for those of us who are rule-followers this might be difficult, but the Good News is that we are now free to build that relationship on terms other than laws. We can build that relationship through our own prayer and discernment, through our own loving relationship with God with the guidance of the Church and the strength given by her Sacraments. Without the nanny holding our hand, we’re now able to enter into our own personal relationship with God (and for that matter, to allow that primary relationship to direct how we relate to each other)- an adult relationship, just as fraught but just as rewarding as an adult child has with a mother or father. There is still trust and support and love. Indeed, these qualities are even richer because they are love and trust and support based on mutuality and respect. So it is when we nurture an adult relationship with our heavenly father. True, the way is beset by dangers, but the kind of relationship we can have is all the better because of this freedom we have in Christ Jesus who came as at this time to dwell among us and promises to enjoy eternity with us in a relationship of perfect love.

+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.

Do you ever wake up grumpy and then nurse that snit for hours afterward? It is a rare occurrence for me; I am one of those obnoxious people who loves the early morning hours, and I generally bound out of bed and feed the cats and make my coffee and all is right with the world as far as I’m concerned, even if my chipperness can irritate those around me of different dispositions. Even so, sometimes it does happen, and such was the case last Friday. I’ll spare you all the details, but there were so many Christmas-related tasks done and left undone, we’d been managing the introduction of a new cat into the Rectory which can be a stressful time, and to top it off, we had a flat tire. I was particularly provoked because we had ordered a replacement tire on Sunday which was supposed to have arrived Wednesday and which had not by Friday (nor has it yet!) and the particular big box store with whom this purchase had been placed could neither track the package nor would they allow me to cancel the order.

So, I finally found a tire the right size in stock at a different store that did not have availability to put it on, I set an appointment with a different place to do the work, and set out on a slushy, dreary morning to get it all taken care of. I was already hot under the collar (which with my collars presents an added wrinkle, quite literally!) when something came on the radio. “Many of our listeners are preparing to celebrate Christmas, but did you know there are millions of pagans preparing for their observance of the Winter Solstice. Tune in at nine o’clock to hear their story.” In ideal circumstances, I would have just rolled my eyes at this. In the moment, I continued to seethe.

But for some reason, I didn’t just turn the radio off as I normally would do, and believe it or not I now believe it was the Holy Spirit himself who stayed my hand. After picking up the new tire and staring on my way to the mechanic, a different story came on the radio. A man in Southern Ohio, in the Appalachian part of our state, was being interviewed. He had enjoyed spelunking all his life and in his early thirties he had bought an abandoned mine on a lark. Some years later, this man had had a religious conversion; he said something like “well, in these parts we call it being born again.” He decided to take this abandoned mine and turn it into a Nativity display which would take the visitor through tableau of each element of the Christmas story, until at last at the heart of the cave one reached a scene of the manger. I particularly loved that this evangelical Appalachian said “in Bethlehem they didn’t have barns, after all; they kept their livestock in caves.” Indeed, this is the traditional understanding of where Christ was born among Eastern Orthodox Christians, who are not thick on the ground in Appalachia, so I don’t know where the man picked this up, but I was delighted to hear him say it!

I mentioned in a sermon a few weeks ago that in my middle age I’ve become not only less rigid but more sentimental. In my younger years, I’m ashamed to say, I might have heard this story and thought something like “well good for him, but I bet it’s tacky” or “couldn’t the money he spent on all that have been given to the poor instead.” (I am now fully aware of which biblical figure I’d have been evoking in saying the latter, by the way!) But in the moment, my heart was warmed and I was made to refocus on what matters despite everything else that was distracting me.

This doesn’t mean that everything in the world immediately became magically easy, of course. Those of you who’ve been around Trinity for a while will know what I’m talking about when I say that it wouldn’t be the Fourth Sunday of Advent in Findlay if I didn’t need to go see somebody unexpectedly admitted to the hospital, and indeed that held true this year.

There is a phenomenon that many of my closest clergy friends and I discuss every year–namely that something always goes wrong. Whether it’s the photocopier or the boiler going out right before Christmas or illness spreading through the congregation or even more tragic events, something is going on. And we tend to agree on what it is. I shared this with some of you recently, and I always prefaced it with the disclaimer “I don’t mean to sound spooky”, but I’m not going to use that disclaimer anymore. Around Christmas (and Easter, for that matter) the Adversary redoubles his efforts to distract us from what really matters, in this case simply celebrating the Newborn King and worshiping him with joyful hearts. The devil hates Christmas. It’s no wonder; he knows it spells his defeat. He knows he’s now powerless to do much beyond simply distracting us, but that he will attempt. Our weapon in that fight, though, is joy. Not mere cheerfulness–which, as I’ve said before, may or may not come, particularly for those who find this time of year difficult for various reasons. But honest-to-God joy–the fruit of the virtues of faith, hope, and love–is a gift we all have access to. And the powers of hell quake at this.

We have a choice regarding whether or not to accept that gift, and (as I’m thinking again about my annual Christmas desert/fire hazard) the proof of the pudding is in the eating. I saw that displayed again this past weekend in what was probably not intended to be but certainly struck me as dueling pieces in the New York Times. One was on Saturday in an interview with the historian of religion Elaine Pagels, whose work I’ve mostly managed to ignore over the last couple of decades. Her point was all about metaphor (though metaphor for what I remain ignorant), and she proceeded to basically dismiss all the supernatural elements of the Christmas story. This sort of rhetoric is almost always deadly dull, but there was also (and maybe I’m just projecting here, but I don’t think so) a sort of deep sadness in it.

And then, just a day later there was a lengthy piece by David Brooks recounting his own coming to faith, the process by which he became convinced not only of the existence of God but came to follow Christ, not so much through rational analysis but through numinous experience–feeling and knowing the presence of God in all sorts of ways, both on his own in scripture and the natural world and in community with others. And that piece was clearly shot through with profound joy and gratitude.

Again, I’m not talk about cheerfulness here. Sometimes it’s okay to be a bit sad, particularly when the whole world around us demands that we pretend to be glad. But underneath whatever one’s current mood, there can be a great wellspring of genuine joy to see us through the dry seasons of life. It is found, I truly believe, in holding fast to the conviction that God is for us and he has accomplished in Christ Jesus all that we need for the present in expectation of eternity. We just need to not be distracted.

The glory of this day is not just that a baby has been born, always a minor miracle in itself. It is that the true God and true man has come into the world to change everything–to teach us how to love aright, to release us from whatever binds us, to take on willingly the penalty we had owed, to descend to hell and thus defeat it, to rise in glory as the first-fruits of the triumph he won for us, to come again and establish a peace which will last for all eternity. You may go off rejoicing in grand style like the shepherds or you may simply ponder these mysteries in your heart as Our Lady did. Both are valid options. But whatever you do, don’t diminish the enormity of the miracle, because it has the power to change your life and lives of those around you.

And don’t get distracted. This is good news for all of us. And let us go even unto Bethlehem, even unto Nazareth, even unto the Cross and the empty tomb, even unto our heavenly home secure in the knowledge that the child is now the man who reigns in glory and the God who will take us to himself. Happy Christmas. Keep the faith. Give thanks. And, above all, rejoice.

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