Sermons

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


For quite a while, now, I’ve to spend some time every day in silent prayer and meditation, and if you know me very well you’ll realize how difficult this can be for me. We seem these days to populate our lives with noise, and I am as bad an offender as any in this regard. I listen to podcasts when I’m cooking dinner and doing laundry. My phone is constantly alerting me to emails and text messages which are often important and time sensitive and require quick response, but which do tend to invade the silence that all of us need from time to time. I do not believe I am alone in being captive (to a certain extent) to the noisy world in which we live. Turning the noise off, even for a few minutes sometimes seems beyond our ability.
In this morning’s Old Testament lesson, Elijah has retreated to Mount Horeb, which other biblical authors named Mount Sinai (the same place God had given the Law to Moses). He was seeking refuge from King Ahab and especially from Ahab’s wife Jezebel who desired the death of the prophet for challenging and defeating the followers of the pagan god Baal in a sort of tournament of miracles.
We can assume, though, that Elijah was looking for more than just a hiding place. He had already found a safe haven in the wilderness, and despite his own melancholy (which led him to desire death from starvation), God’s angels had ministered to him and kept him from falling prey to his depression. That Elijah made the long trek to Horeb—which we are told took him forty days and forty nights—suggests that he was looking for something more than a “hidey-hole”. Rather, I believe he was seeking some kind of message from God, and what better place to find such a message than at that very place in which God’s greatest moment of self-disclosure up to that point (namely, the revelation of the Law to Moses) had occurred.
No doubt Elijah was hoping for a grand display of power. Moses had seen a burning bush on this mountain, and God had enclosed Horeb with clouds and fire while he communed with Moses at the summit. Elijah got what he was expecting in part: a wind strong enough to split rocks, a tremendous earthquake, and a firestorm. But in all these powerful signs, Elijah did not hear the message he desired from God. It was only after these apparently cataclysmic events that Elijah heard the still small voice of God, breaking through sheer silence.
And what does Elijah hear in that silence? It is not just a sense of calm or of affirmation. Elijah hears words of instruction. He gets his marching orders, as it were. He is told very specifically to anoint Hazael as king of Aram (in what today is Syria) and to anoint Jehu son of Nimshi as king of Israel and to anoint Elisha as his successor as God’s prophet.
This is why quiet time with God is terribly important. We’re not just out to feel God’s calming presence in some abstract sense. That is certainly a secondary benefit we can gain from prayer, but it’s not the only reason we should listen in prayer as much as we talk. We need silence so that God can tell us what to do. He may tell us by giving us a sense of affirmation about some plans we mean to make or by implanting in our hearts feelings of unease about a course of action we ought not to take. God may even speak to us in discernible language as in Elijah’s case. I don’t know how often this happens. God has never spoken to me in the Queen’s English, but it’s possible.
However God chooses to speak to us, though, we have to give God an opportunity. We have to carve out of our busy schedules moments for silence. I find that simply being quiet and present before God can do wonders, as hard as it is for me to do that. Five or ten minutes of silent prayer and meditation can do wonders as we seek to become closer to God.
This can be done in the course of one’s regular, rather wordy daily prayers (that’s what I do) or as a completely separate exercise. However you manage to work silent, prayerful contemplation into your routine, if you try it I think you’ll find that God will speak to you in a manner more clear and compelling than if we wait for an earthquake or a burning bush before we pay attention. Whether God speaks to you with an honest-to-God voice or (more likely) with a small but discernible murmur in your heart, God will speak and will give you that which is needful to accomplish His perfect Will.

+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.

All this talk of bread in the Gospel readings lately has got me rethinking my low-carb diet, that I’ve had for a year or two. Bread is the staff of life, after all, though I did read that earlier this year the food pyramid got inverted, so I don’t know anymore. Anyway, coinciding with our grain-heavy Gospel readings, yesterday was the now sadly obscure English Christian first-fruits festival of Lammas Day, or “loaf mass” day, which in many places would have been transferred to the following Sunday (today). So we should be having a procession to the nearest bakery to bless the bread; in some places in England they would use part of that newly blessed, substantial bread for Holy Communion. I am not personally a fan of that practice, albeit for practical rather than strictly theological reasons. I’ve never doubted that leavened bread could be used instead of unleavened wafers in the Eucharist (Eastern churches have used loaves since the earliest days of the church), but it can get very messy.
In one of those moments of synchronicity or Providence, as I was getting ready to write this sermon about Jesus feeding the five thousand “in a lonely place”, I read a piece from this week’s edition of the New Yorker from the critic Kelefa Sanneh titled “The Myth of the Food Desert.” My initial response to the provocative title was to think “well, make that case to all the people who, until a few weeks ago, could walk to the Great Scot on Main Cross!” But, of course, the essay itself was much more careful than the headline. There may indeed be food deserts, and there are certainly “food swamps”—places where you can get enough bare calories from fast food or dollar stores, but without what you or I might consider “wholesome.”
There is, however, an assumption that the primary problem everywhere is “access” which, according to Sanneh’s piece, may not be the case (as it was for the five thousand). Apparently it has been shown that just because well-meaning middle class people like me have long assumed that opening a store with whole, minimally-processed foods (maybe with some organic, vegan, free range and sustainable options thrown in), and subsidizing it through either government or charitable funds, should fix the problem, this will not immediately lead people to choosing those options over potato chips and microwave burritos. As somebody who loves to cook and who cares about eating relatively healthy food I may not relate, but if you really want to eat mostly junk food, you’re probably going to eat mostly junk food.
None of this is meant to minimize the difficulty of those who genuinely face what has come to be called “food insecurity.” That is a real problem. I’m grateful to live in a community with so many resources—like the City Mission, Chopin Hall, and Christian Clearing House—that help meet those needs, and I’m proud to be part of a church that supports those vitally important ministries. We also live in a society with an opposite sort of problem, borne of the relative luxury and convenience of being the wealthiest people to ever exist: a form of decadence which allows us to choose that which is not only less good for us, but which is positively unhealthy, and mostly get away with it for a while (the eventual poor health outcomes are not initially apparent to the person subsisting entirely on chicken nuggets and Kraft Dinner).
Let’s turn from talking about literal nutrition, though, and toward the matter of spiritual sustenance—the water and wine and milk and bread and good, fat things of which I believe the Lord was speaking through the prophet Isaiah. These the five thousand consumed upon that Syrian shore just as surely as the had their fill of literal bread and fish, acquired without money and without price. Good, nutritious spiritual food is abundant and ubiquitous under the New Covenant of Christ Jesus, found both in the Sacraments of the Church and in the divine teaching of Scripture. It can be acquired freely, without money and without price.
But do we avail ourselves of it? Or are we rather subsisting on the spiritual equivalent of junk food?
I hope that it’s the former, and I believe that at least insofar as we are considering what we do on Sundays week in and week out it mostly is. Even if my sermon on any given Sunday may sometimes be wholesome or may at other times be like a bit of candy to give you a spiritual sugar rush (I hope I don’t do that too often, but I probably do sometimes), at least we are receiving a healthy diet of scripture readings, prayers which have been proved over the years, hymns with actual theological content, and—most importantly of all—food and drink which we are promised sustains us on the way to everlasting life. This is not to say that the sweet treat or savory crunch of affect and religious enthusiasm is always amiss. It can be a great amuse bouche or desert course, but it can’t be the whole meal. So, I think we do a relatively good job in our little corner of Christendom as far as that goes on any given Sunday.
But what about Monday through Saturday? It is both my hope and my strong suspicion, having gotten to know most of you over the last decade, that the great majority of you are not taking a complete fast from spiritual sustenance six days a week. I have no doubt that most of you are praying and that you are reading something at least putatively edifying during the course of the week. But I think it is useful for each of us, myself included, to ask himself or herself “am I getting a healthy diet of these things?”
With regard to the soul’s health, I can only speak with any confidence about my own—and as far as that goes, the great physician is not always as forthcoming with his diagnosis as I’d like, so there’s some guess work there, too. Not only am I incapable of taking a stethoscope to anybody else’s soul, I’m not a spiritual director, I’m just a simple parish priest, so what advice I can give is limited to what I know has helped me and what the saints of the church have said helped them. That said, despite being a “religious professional”, I’m not a monk, and I think those practices I’ve found helpful could be applicable to most ordinary Christians, regardless of domestic and professional commitments.
So, what I do is very simple, but I think it’s kept me in mostly good spiritual condition. I pray every day at fixed times and I read the bible every day at fixed times. The backbone of this for me is the daily office of morning and evening prayer, which comes with its cycle of prayers for most needs and occasions, opportunity for silent contemplation and extemporaneous prayer (if you pay attention to the rubrics), and what I like to think of as the “minimum daily allowance” of bible reading. I tend to read more scripture than is appointed over the course of the day (most frequently, bits that the lectionary skips over or references in the assigned readings that take me through more of the depth and breadth of scripture), but the daily lectionary is the minimum for me. Our current prayerbook makes it a bit harder than older ones (harder than it should be, in my opinion) to figure out what to read on any given day. I did a class on this several months ago, and I’m willing to do it again, but for simplicity’s sake, you can go to prayer.forwardmovement.org and this site will simply give you the day’s readings and even place them into Morning or Evening Prayer if you don’t mind praying with a device (I don’t like praying with my phone in front of me, but your mileage may vary).
And I find, as somebody who likes to eat his meals at fixed times, that praying and reading scripture at fixed times helps insure that I get the sustenance I need when I need it. So morning prayer, on days when I’m in the office happens at 8 o’clock, and on other days it’s right after I feed the cats and start the coffee maker, usually around 5 or 5:30 a.m. Evening Prayer is 4:30 p.m. If I have some obligation at that time, Evening Prayer is right after that is finished, before I cook or finish cooking dinner. Each of these takes between twenty and thirty minutes, and that’s with me reading slowly and observing silence, so I think it’s doable for most people. And if it’s not, and I say the following with humility and realizing both that I have no children and that I have a relatively flexible schedule, we could all ask ourselves (particularly in our productivity-obsessed and highly programmed age) “am I too busy?” For me, if I am too busy to pray, I am too busy.
And there are other spiritual dietary supplements I try to take. Whether I’m saying Morning Prayer in the wee hours at home or later in the church, I always make an examination of conscience and of consciousness early in the morning, presenting to God those things for which I need forgiveness and those things for which I am grateful from the previous day, and praying for his guidance in the day to come. When the church bell rings the Angelus I drop what I’m doing and pray the Angelus. (If I hear it; you may have noticed that our bell is ringing, but it’s muffled and quiet right now. We are scheduled to be scheduled to have that fixed.) I try to include books with some spiritual or theological depth into what I read for pleasure, between the depressing literary novels and medieval history.
Anyway, I share all this not to brag about my piety. I’m sure I could be doing more, and perhaps there are among you some that are doing more than I on a daily basis. I share all of it to give you one example of what a healthy diet of wholesome spiritual food might look like. Just as in nutrition there can be a lot of diversity in what a healthy meal looks like (I like Indian food and you might prefer Chinese, but both can work) so too does this principle work with regard to our daily spiritual bread. I like using the lectionary, and you might prefer one of those “read the bible in a year” plans. The point is that we’d all benefit from some daily diet of prayer and scripture reading, and “consuming” those things with intentionality and regularity. Try it, and just as good diet and exercise lead to bodily health, I think you’ll find the same when it comes to the health of your soul.
+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 time I read that passage from Matthew’s Gospel I wonder if the disciples’ response—“Yes, we understood all that!”—was actually true or not. My hunch is that they were lying, because they were lost but too proud to admit it, though maybe that’s just my projection. They must have eventually come to understand, though, because they did even more than “sell all they had” for the pearl of great price; all but John literally died for the Gospel, and he was exiled for it.
But they can be forgiven if they were incapable of understanding, if not for lying about it, because there is an awful lot going on in these quickfire parables. Unlike the Gospel lessons from last week and the week before, Jesus does not explain them to the disciples later. A lot of modern biblical scholars will suggest that here Matthew is acting as a redactor, following the more fully fleshed out parables with other sayings of Jesus which he didn’t know where to place as a sort of addendum. I have a suspicion, though, that Jesus was intentionally using rhetorical parallelism to bring his first period of teaching to a close, to punctuate it. The time is growing short, and he takes the opportunity to slip in some critical instruction the point of which the disciples would only later come to grasp. We do get more parables later in Matthew’s Gospel, but there is a shift in the narrative here at the end of chapter 13. The story moves to Herod killing John the Baptist and Jesus performing miracles, a decisive shift in his ministry which brings him ever closer to Calvary.
So, enough about rhetoric and narrative structure. What is the point he’s making? Well, I think it’s actually at least two points.
First: the Kingdom is a valuable treasure. Notice what the real estate speculator and the pearl merchant do. They don’t take out a bank loan at a favorable interest rate. They don’t leverage some of their investments. They sell everything that they have. What if it’s a fake pearl or fools’ gold? This is not a wise investment! But they have faith, and they will have the Kingdom. The apostles were tortured and killed, and for what? To the world it looked like folly. They were killed all the day long, regarded as sheep to be slaughtered. But Paul assures us in today’s Epistle, that they were more than conquerors, because nothing could separate them (nothing can separate us) from God’s love.
The second point, which I think the parables of the mustard seed and the leaven highlight, is that a small and unassuming faith not only leads to big things, but to life sustaining gifts, not just for the one with that little bit of faith, but for all whom we share this pilgrim journey. The birds of the air find their home in the great shrub grown from the tiny seed. And whether or not you like mustard (I love it!) it was important and valuable in the ancient world. It’s wasn’t limited to a little French’s yellow on your hot dog or some Grey Poupon in your vinaigrette. Mustard shows up in twelve-thousand year old seed cakes in Syria and in Egyptian tombs. It was easier to get than salt or pepper, and it masked the taste of meat that had gone a little off (which was most meat in the ancient world).
Most striking to me, though, was something I found in one of my research rabbit holes this week. The Talmud, the collection of Jewish Oral History finalized in the Late Classical and Early Medieval periods contains material stretching back to before Jesus’ time. In that tradition’s version of Abraham’s hospitality (depicted in that icon), guess what he and Sarah served the three angels… tongue in mustard sauce. It’s uncertain whether this particular story predates Jesus, that he would have heard it, but it’s possible, and perhaps part of the point is that the blessing of the Kingdom are so abundant that we should be ready at all times to share that bounty with others.
As for the bread-maker, don’t imagine a packet of Fleischmann’s yeast. She would have used a little lump of old, nasty fermented bread (like an ancient sourdough starter, but not as high-flown as the stuff used by hipster artisan bakers). And she’s mixing it into three measures of flour. That’s about 40 liters in volume or fifty pounds in weight. Once the leaven has done its work, the amount of bread would fill your bathtub three quarters of the way full. Too much bread for the woman. Might as well share.
So, the Kingdom is worth everything and it has the capacity to grow exponentially. Are we treating it that way. Are we refusing to invest all that we have (physically, spiritually, materially) and seeing what great things God can do? Well, we all are, myself included. I know I need to step out in faith more, put my trust in God more, place those things I hold most dear (my reputation, my comfort, my time, my treasure) on the line more readily than I do.
The good news is that every time I take a little step (in prayer, in action, in giving) the results are gratuitously generous in blessing. I promise this is not a prosperity Gospel, Joel Osteen style sermon. Those who fleece the sheep should go to prison for a while, and frequently they do. What I’m trying to say is that anything we dedicate to God in terms of time, talent, and treasure, through whatever means (via the church or on one’s own) is an act of faith. Only a mustard seed is required, but the more we dedicate our lives to Christ, the richer are the blessings of happiness and contentment in this life as we await the final reward which we’ll all share when the Kingdom comes in its fullness.
It is in that Kingdom where the hidden treasure will truly be found, where the pearl will be obtained, where we may dwell with the birds upon the branches of divine teaching, where we may eat the bread which will always satisfy. But even now, we may at times enjoy that life in spirit and in truth so long as our hope is set where it belongs. Having been instructed in the way of faith we are as scribes trained for the kingdom of heaven, being made wiser in householding than even Solomon himself. And we have been given even greater treasures. For, as Origen of Alexandria wrote:
One who is truly such a householder is both free and rich. He is rich because from the office of the scribe he has been made a disciple to the kingdom of heaven, in every word of the Old Testament and in all knowledge concerning the new teaching of Christ Jesus. He has these riches laid up in his own treasure house—in heaven, in which he stores his treasure as one who has been made a disciple to the kingdom of heaven. There neither moth consumes nor thieves break through and steal. For the one who has such treasures laid up in heaven, not one moth of inordinate passions can touch his spiritual and heavenly possessions.

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