Sermons

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

You’ll frequently come across arguments, sometimes genuine and sometimes disingenuous, sometimes from secular people and occasionally even from Christians, that if the church really cared for the poor as much as we claimed then we’d just sell all our buildings and give the money away. Such arguments never account for how much good is done for the larger community within church-owned spaces–for example, we have recovery meetings in one space or another here at Trinity every night of the week, who’d be hard-pressed to find any other space that would work for them in terms of both cost and the need for maintaining anonymity. Nor does it account for the fact that frequently churches collaborate to establish institutions which “spin off” to become their own entities to better serve the needs of their communities–I believe this is the case for most if not all of the big, non-profit providers of direct services for the indigent in Findlay. Nor does it account for the data, which tell us that Christians are more than fifty percent more likely to volunteer in the larger community and more than twice as likely to give financially outside their churches for the relief of the poor; this should track (as much as the cultured despisers of religion may dislike it), since our modern concept of charity was invented by the church over and against the classical, pagan concept of philanthropy, which more or less held that doing nice things was good, so long as you got recognition for it.

Most important of all, while this would not move the heart of a secular proponent of ecclesial divestment, it should do for the purportedly Christian ones: while the moral implications of the Gospel should and I think usually do compel us to care first and foremost for the poor and otherwise marginalized in our midst, this is not the primary function of the Church. The primary function of the Church is to worship God and to bring others into deeper relationships with the Lord Jesus Christ, whatever their status, socioeconomically or otherwise. This doesn’t always happen in every congregation of every “flavor” of Christianity all the time. Those who were here for our bible study on Revelation a couple weeks ago will remember that this has been a problem from nearly the beginning; the church in Laodicea was denounced for being what we might today call a “country club parish” who were comfortable and friendly with each other but had lost their evangelistic fervor and their love of Christ. But, swings and roundabouts over the last two millennia aside, I think churches have generally, historically done this well when they put their minds and muscles to it.

All of this is by way of trying to get our heads and hearts around that difficult saying in today’s Gospel: “the poor always ye have with you, but me ye have not always.” Yes, in part Jesus knew that Judas was a robber, that his intentions were not really pure. Judas did not actually want to help the poor. No, Jesus is not saying here that we aren’t obliged to help the poor who are always with us; this particularly profligate use of a luxury good (300 pence, or denarii, being about a year’s worth of wages for a laboror) was, we might say, given “special dispensation,” both because of Jesus’ imminent execution and Mary of Bethany’s genuine devotion in offering of it. So, I’m not saying that a neat equivalent in today’s context would be appropriate for us; we’ll not be burning $50,000 worth of incense at the Easter Vigil.

There is a balance to be struck here, and both common sense and conscience have a role to play. We have the poor with us, and we must give of our time, talent, and treasure to support those in need. We also have Christ still with us. I could be wrong, but “me ye have not always”, I think, refers specifically to the three days between the Crucifixion and the Resurrection. The last words Christ says to his disciples and to us before the Ascension implies that we are in the opposite situation: “Lo, I am with you always, even unto the end of the world.” So we are dealing not with an either/or but with a both/and proposition. We are called to do unto the least of our sisters and brothers as we would to Christ himself, AND we are called to support the dignified worship of Christ and all those things which bring us and the world into closer relationships with him.

Next week, it will surprise nobody who knows me, is my favorite week of the year every year. The full battery of Holy Week liturgies accomplishes in a more intense way what every service of worship is aimed at doing–two things simultaneously. First, worship is for our edification. In today’s Epistle, Paul writes to the Philippians about his deepest desire: “That I may know him and the power of his resurrection, and the fellowship of his sufferings, being made conformable unto his death; if by any means I might attain to the resurrection of the dead.” His life’s work, his preaching and teaching and service and leadership of the churches he founded or supported were all aimed at this goal, but I also think that for Paul, and certainly for us, the worship of God presents an opportunity for the same in-and-of-itself. All our worship, and particularly our observance of Holy Week, serve to help conform us to Christ, to make us sharers in the fellowship of his suffering and death and help us experience a foretaste of the power and joy of his resurrection.

Secondly, and in my opinion even more importantly, all our worship, from our simple recitation of our daily prayers to the dramatic, sometimes heartbreaking, sometimes unimaginably joyous, moments of the most fulsome and complicated solemn liturgies of Holy Week, are undertaken simply because God is worthy of our worship, which is the most important thing we can give him–not because he “needs it” but because we owe it to him. Indeed, we owe God everything. We can’t repay him, but that doesn’t let us off the hook entirely. Our charitable gifts and efforts are due him. So is our obligation to commend the faith that is in us to those who do not know the Lord Jesus. And yes, so too is giving our best, through sharing our talents in art and music to praise God, in attending to the service of the altar as servers and lectors and altar guild members and all the rest, and most importantly in simply being present and attentive and sincerely offering our hearts in worship to the Lord who gave everything for us.

This may all sound like I’m just giving an advertisement-cum-harangue for showing up during Holy Week, and I’d be lying if I said that wasn’t a part of it, because I do think it’s important. But that’s not really the point. The point (and this is not universally held, it is Fr. John’s opinion, but I believe it is backed up by scripture and tradition) is that this celebration of the Eucharist–that every public service of the church we do in this space–is not first and foremost about getting one’s spiritual batteries recharged, or getting jazzed up to be more kind and loving and faithful the rest of the week, or learning something helpful or meaningful from the scripture readings or the sermon. Those are all good things, and I hope at least one of them is a “takeaway” for everyone every time we gather; like I said, worship is meant to edify us. But even more importantly in my opinion, is the fact that worship is an end in itself. It is the most important thing we do. I think it’s the thing that the church at its best does best, as important as everything else we do is. We give ourselves and each other and the whole world an opportunity in a life full of obligations and distractions to spend an hour or so at a time to be like Mary of Bethany, with the costly ointment which is our love and care, simply to be with Jesus and to worship him with no motive beyond the fact that he is worth it, he deserves it, and he wants nothing more than to be with us and to share his love and care with us at every moment.

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

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

Something occurred to me this week about today’s very familiar Gospel reading for the first time ever, which just goes to show how God can surprise us when we read his Word (and also, when we’re relying on others to help us, so I hasten to add that this thought is not original to me; it comes from Andy McGowan, Dean of Berkely Divinity School, our church’s seminary at Yale).

Now, this may strike some of you as shocking, but here goes–I wonder if the popular name we’ve given this story for centuries is a bit misleading. What do we call it? “The Parable of the Prodigal Son.” Indeed, the son is “prodigal”, meaning that he spends lavishly and wastefully. But the son’s prodigality is not the point of the story. His defining characteristic is not that he is a big spender, it’s that he’s lost.

You may have noticed that our assigned lesson skipped seven-and-a-half verses. In this case I think that’s understandable. The folks who gave us the lectionary wanted us to realize that this parable is told in the hearing of both publicans and sinners (“the wicked”) and the murmuring Scribes and Pharisees (“the righteous”), but Jesus tells this motley group two other parables in the elided verses–those of the lost sheep and the lost coin. Those parables deserve their own treatment, which they will get later this year, but the point is about how those valuable possessions are lost, how diligently the owners search for them, and how joyful they are upon finding them. Likewise, today’s parable might better be titled “the parable of the lost son,” because it is not primarily about the precise nature of his dissolution–his partying it up in the Ancient Near Eastern equivalent of Las Vegas or Amsterdam–but about the grief of loss and the joy of finding and being found by the one who loves us.

And let’s push it a step further. Maybe, like the other two parables, we are not meant to see the son as the protagonist, the “main character” here. Of course the son does stuff, and he is meant, I think, to symbolize us, all of whom are lost and found at various points in our pilgrimage through life. But are we the “main characters”? Our modern assumption is that we are the main characters in our own stories, and everyone else has a supporting role; or, for my role playing game nerds out there, everyone else is an NPC–a non-player character. No doubt this is a natural reaction to an opposite, equally bad extreme in which the person with power is always the main character and everyone else is a peon, but sometimes the pendulum does swing too far.

If we were to change the title yet again to highlight the person whom I think is supposed to be the protagonist here, maybe we should call this “the Parable of the Prodigal Father.” You see the father is just as prodigal as the son, albeit in a very different, positive way. He’s just as profligate, but he lavishes his wealth not on debauched living, but on celebrating the return of the one whom he loved, despite that one having essentially wished him dead in demanding an early inheritance. He had already cashed in half his retirement savings before turning 59-and-a-half (not a prudent move, at least according to the Church Pension Group), and now he’s throwing a party. Such is the beneficence of a God who would, who did give everything away for every lost child who came back home to him.

This was good news for the publicans and sinners who heard the story, and it was difficult, perhaps enraging news for the Pharisees and Scribes who like the older brother care more about what’s fair than what’s loving. But if those putatively righteous people had been paying attention with an understanding heart they would have noticed that the Father went out to seek and bring back inside the petulant older brother, too. He had thought, perhaps like the Pharisees and scribes, that he was the protagonist instead of the Father, instead of the all-merciful God.

Life is a lot easier and makes a lot more sense when we can just shift that focus to the Lord God as the center of the story. At the risk of embarrassing my wife (which I might do regularly anyway) I think about this a lot when it comes to weddings, and the varied experiences I have officiating them in comparison to my own and others. Sometimes you’ll get a “bridezilla”, but lest I be accused of misogyny, I’ve found it nearly as frequent to encounter a “groomzilla” or a “mom-and-dad-and-wedding-planner three headed King Ghidorah.”

I think our wedding was easy mostly because of Annie’s own view of marriage and mine were worked out before the wedding, and I’m pretty sure we still hold the same view, since I’ve heard heard her say out loud more than once. We’ve been asked more than once by families and friends why neither of us ever got cross with anybody or made unreasonable demands of anybody or ever seemed “stressed out” when we got married. The same was asked about the “layed back” nature of both her parents and mine. I’ll not deny, part of it was that we were both proper adults (both 29, though perhaps that’s now considered young), that my parents had already gone through a wedding with my little sister, and that Annie and I are both pretty naturally amenable people.

But, as much as I like to over-analyze, I think Annie always answers those sorts of questions the same way: well, it wasn’t about either of us. It wasn’t, which doesn’t mean the couple and their relationship doesn’t matter; it does. Nor was it even about the families around us or the friends and the fellow-parishioners who were likewise present. Their presence important, but it didn’t belong to them either. The main character was God himself, the one who owns that marriage, who took the love of two people and made it and continues to make it a a reflection of his Grace. He’s the center, and “it’s not really about us.”

I think that’s what the lost son and the prodigal father realize, it’s what the publicans and sinners must have realized, and it’s what the Pharisees and righteous older brothers among us (myself among their number sometimes) have trouble seeing–it’s not about us. It’s about our Heavenly Father, and Jesus our brother, and the Holy Ghost who gives us mercy in our hearts to offer back to the all-merciful God everything about ourselves, the good and the bad, knowing that he loves us all the same and has bought us, once bondservants to sin, and freed us to live as daughters and sons, and every blessing we enjoy is his and may be a small sign to the world of His infinite grace.

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

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

Those of you who have been subjected to my sermons over the years know that I have a particular bête noir, namely the myth of human progress that took hold of Protestant theology in the Nineteenth and early-Twentieth Centuries. The horror of the First World War forced a reassessment, and a rediscovery of more sober views of Original Sin and the sovereignty of God. Naturally, this wasn’t the first time such a dreadful disaster forced a reëvaluation along these lines. Perhaps less known to us, but which stood until the last century as the definitive disaster to befall the West, was not a war but a natural disaster–namely the Lisbon earthquake, which took place on All Saints’ Day 1755 and which killed tens of thousands in Portugal and Spain and what is today Morocco.

This disaster led to an increased concern with theodicy, the problem of evil, the question (to put it simply) of why bad things happen to good people. I am not accustomed to quoting Voltaire, since I think, his being a Deist, his “answer” to the question is not entirely satisfactory, even if his most famous meditation on the problem, in the novella Candide, is redolent of the answer to be found in Ecclesiastes: best to tend one’s garden, whatever Dr. Pangloss says. In any event, Voltaire’s statement of the problem is compelling, both in the novella and in his poem on the Lisbon disaster, which I’ll not read in full but whose opening lines should suffice to highlight the problem:

Unhappy mortals! Dark and mourning earth!
Affrighted gathering of human kind!
Eternal lingering of useless pain!
Come, ye philosophers, who cry, “All’s well,”
And contemplate this ruin of a world.
Behold these shreds and cinders of your race,
This child and mother heaped in common wreck,
These scattered limbs beneath the marble shafts–
A hundred thousand whom the earth devours,
Who, torn and bloody, palpitating yet,
Entombed beneath their hospitable roofs,
In racking torment end their stricken lives.
To those expiring murmurs of distress,
To that appalling spectacle of woe,
Will ye reply: “You do but illustrate
The iron laws that chain the will of God”?
Say ye, o’er that yet quivering mass of flesh:
“God is avenged: the wage of sin is death”?
What crime, what sin, had those young hearts conceived
That lie, bleeding and torn, on mother’s breast?
Did fallen Lisbon deeper drink of vice
Than London, Paris, or sunlit Madrid?
In these men dance; at Lisbon yawns the abyss.

The world is an evil place and full of suffering. Voltaire and Job pose the essentially same question, albeit arriving at polar opposite conclusions.

In today’s Gospel Jesus asks the question yet again, and his answer, though not of the warm, fuzzy variety does give us a path forward. Here we have Jesus responding to two tragedies which are otherwise not to be found in the historical record–which I contend is not evidence that they didn’t happen, but rather highlights the fact that in a world full of suffering, the victims of all but the most horrific examples of cruelty are sadly soon forgotten. The eighteen upon whom the Tower of Siloam fell were almost certainly simply bystanders, victims of slapdash construction and “being at the wrong place at the wrong time.” The Galileans slaughtered by Pilate’s men were not only blameless; they were righteous, having been in the midst of offering the appointed sacrifices to God. Jesus’ point is that bad things do happen to good people. There is no neat correlation between faith and prosperity.

Perhaps the Pharisees wanted Jesus to identify some clear reason these victims “should have been punished.” Maybe they were just trying to trip Jesus up. Or maybe they were genuinely struggling with the same question that Job and Voltaire were struggling with, and with which we, too, continue to struggle. We don’t know what the Pharisees’ intentions were. In any event, Jesus didn’t give them the kind of answer they wanted; if we’re honest, he doesn’t give us the answer we want, but he does give us what we need. He doesn’t say “everything happens for a reason”, as if the Gospels were Hallmark Channel movies and Jesus is the charming love interest character. What he says, rather, is “repent.”

Now that seems harsh, but it only is if we have a very narrow view of the nature of repentance, if we think all it is is saying “I’m a rubbish person.” You see, true repentance includes both a turning away and a turning toward. Yes, it includes the recognition of and sorrow for our sins. It also means finding in our God the assurance of forgiveness and a relationship which can lead to growth and abundance. I don’t mean abundance in an earthly sense–whether it be material prosperity or a shield against life’s difficulties. I mean abundance in bearing the fruits of the spirit–love, joy, peace, patience, kindness, goodness, faithfulness, gentleness, and self control.

I think this is why Jesus immediately follows his rejection of the Pharisees’ desire for an easy answer to the problem of evil with the parable of the fig tree.

You can sometimes tell that I choose the art for the bulletin long before writing my sermon. I think that image, which I chose because it’s interesting, shows Jesus as the vineyard owner and some nondescript guy as the gardener. Now, I think that’s all wrong. I don’t know who the vineyard owner is supposed to represent in the parable. Parables can be tricky that way. Maybe he’s supposed to be God the Father, whose love may take the form of wrath (that’s not the primary mode in which our God “whose property is always to have mercy” operates, but it’s not entirely off the table). Or maybe he’s supposed to be the devil, whose chief delight is in cutting down the child of God, severing that child from the roots of God’s beneficence, before he or she has the chance to bring forth good fruit. So, I don’t know who the vineyard owner is supposed to be. I do know that the gardener is Jesus Christ, whose own good spirit tends and fertilizes and waters our souls that we might flourish.

None of this means that we will be spared hardship. The curse of Original Sin, the fallen state of creation, means that even an old, sturdy tree might fall victim to blight or be torn out by a tornado. But the more firmly rooted we are, the more we allow Christ to tend our souls, the better able we will be to whether the storms of life without losing heart, and the more assured we’ll be that when this life is over there is for us an eternal garden in which every good fruit will be preserved by the spiritual gardener, and where we may commune with him unto the ages of ages.

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