Sermons

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

Several years I saw a little low-budget movie called Napoleon Dynamite. It’s a very silly, comedic film, so if you’ve seen it the following claim might seem outrageous. Napoleon Dynamite is a very theological film. The movie is all about fitting in, or rather the inability of several young men and women to do so, and ultimately in finding meaning in loving, supportive relationships—be they romance or friendship or family ties—in spite of the awkwardness and unhealthiness with which we each go through life, whether we realize it or not.

One of the several threads that runs through the story is about a boy named Pedro, a Mexican immigrant who is trying to fit in despite being shy and having a middle-school mustache. He decides to run for student council president against the most popular girl in school, and his equally awkward friend Napoleon tells him that to win he simply needs to get up during his speech and say, “vote for me, and all your wildest dreams will come true.” In fact, he makes that very promise, and with a little help from his friend Napoleon, Pedro wins the election.

The film, I think, had a great insight into humanity as a political creature. We tend to elect people who promise to make all our wildest dreams come true. Conversely, if someone is doing a great deal of good and meeting people’s needs and garnering favor with a broad audience, we sometimes tend to assume that he is planning on running for some kind of powerful, political position. It’s a cynical assumption, but we nonetheless often think in those terms, and are pretty regularly correct.

This is precisely the pattern into which the crowd in today’s Gospel fell. Jesus made all their dreams come true. He fed a huge group of hungry people, and that’s precisely what the Israelites of the first century wanted in a political ruler. They had grown used to Roman rule with a Jewish figurehead, Herod, receiving plenty from the largess of the empire in exchange for keeping the peace. Rarely did this largess devolve much lower than the top tier of the Temple and Rabbinical elite. The vast majority of Jews were expecting a Messiah who would be a new king, who would overthrow the Roman Empire, dispel political and religious corruption, and reëstablish Israel as an independent, wealthy nation where everyone could be safe and well-fed and brought out of the depths of poverty.

So, when Jesus fed the five thousand, this is immediately where the collective mind of the assembled crowd went. “Jesus realized that they were about to come and take him by force to make him king.” Israel, you might recall, had had a rough go with it as far as kings were concerned. At the establishment of the monarchy they pressured the prophet Samuel into permitting them to have a king despite God’s wish that they not have such a government. This commenced centuries of mostly bad kings who fell into moral laxity and religious heresy, up to the puppet kings of the Roman period. Slow to learn from this inglorious history, the Israelites were going to try again to make all things well by putting another politician in charge. Here was another person whom they thought would make all their wildest dreams come true.

Now, presumably Jesus could have permitted the crowd to have their way. He could have given into the kind of pride which had led others in his own day to mount attempts at gaining political control, and if he had done so he might have even been more successful than those others, all of whom were savagely executed by the Romans. That Christ did not sin does not mean that he did not face temptation. Quite to the contrary, because he was fully human as well as fully God, he had the capacity to choose his course and, theoretically, to choose to go against the Will of the Father.

Thank God that he did not. Thanks be to God that instead Christ chose the path of suffering and of death which won for us the victory over sin. What Jesus realized, and what his crowd did not, was that his Kingdom was not of this world.

Something that’s really neat about the Gospel of John, is that every time Jesus does something it is a sign of his identity and mission. There are a number of words in the New Testament that get translated as miracle, the most common of which id dynamis which simply means “a deed of power”. But in John’s Gospel, every time Jesus performs what we would call a “miracle” the word John uses is seimon which means “sign”. So, every time Jesus performs an act like he did in today’s Gospel, it’s meant to be a “sign” of who Jesus is and what he’s about.

Unfortunately, sometimes people misread the sign, or rather they can see the sign but not get the message. It is as if someone who couldn’t read saw a stop sign and thought that it simply meant “red octagons ahead”. This is what happened that day on the Sea of Galilee. The people recognized that Jesus was divulging something about himself in feeding them, they knew it was a sign, but they got the absolute wrong message. Jesus wasn’t showing them that he could continue to give them regular old bread if he were made king. He wasn’t trying to communicate that he would make all their political and physical dreams come true. Rather, he was communicating something about the tremendous power he had and has to give spiritual sustenance.

There is a danger here of getting ahead of ourselves, because next week’s Gospel reading deals with the real meaning of the sign; the enduring sustenance of which it foretells, the eating of which keeps us in eternal life, is nothing less than the Eucharist. But that is for next week’s sermon.

For now, let me leave you with a little food for thought, pun intended. The crowd believed that physical food, the bread which Jesus gave them, was a sign of generous governance in an earthly kingdom. They did not have the ability to see beyond their very tangible problems, penury and hunger being chief among them, and we can hardly blame them for that. How often, though, do we fail to see beyond the exigencies of our earthly strife to that which endures. How often do we not pray the prayer of today’s collect, that “we may so pass through things temporal, that we not lose the things eternal”? How often do we place our ultimate hope on that raise or that promotion or whatever instead of placing our hope on the Risen Lord? I don’t mean to suggest that the “cares and occupations of this life” are not often real problems we need to deal with and pray about, but all too often we see our salvation as being in the resolution of these issues and not in the abiding love and grace of God. The question is, what does any of us really want? Do we principally want an earthly king to fix all our immediate problems or the King of Heaven to lead the whole of creation to its consummation in Himself? Does any of us really want for nothing but earthly bread, or do we crave also the bread of heaven? If the answer is the latter, how do we fix our minds on things heavenly? How do we see beyond our immediate problems to ultimate concerns? The answer is next week’s Gospel, so stay tuned.

+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.

When I was in high school, there was a fad of sorts among certain of my classmates to wear rubber wristbands with the letters W, W, J, and D. Most of you will probably know that these letters stood for the question “What would Jesus do?”

Now, as a teenager I was a bit less charitable than I am now, and I thought that I was pretty theologically adept, which I may or may not have been, and when a fellow of mine approached me and asked if I wanted to wear such a wristband, as he had an extra, I responded that I had no intention of dying on the cross for humankind, in fact that there was no need for me to do so, and thus the question was a less reliable means of determining moral action than, say, Immanuel Kant’s categorical imperative. Actually, when I mentioned earlier that I was less charitable in my younger years, I should have said that I had a tendency to be a little snot.

Anyway, upon obtaining some maturity and doing some reflection, I discovered that I was not quite right to dismiss the pious practice of wearing “WWJD” wristbands, nor was I entirely wrong. In addition to being our saviour, Jesus is our principal moral example, and while not all of his actions are expected of us, the virtues of which he is the exemplar, sacrifice being chief among them, are the virtues by which we are called to live as children of God.

Even so, there is not a neat one-to-one correlation between the actions of Jesus and what makes for a healthy moral and spiritual life for us, because Jesus was the Son of God and he had a specific mission which is not ours in quite the same way. We are called to sacrifice (and even some heroic Christian saints are called to die for the faith), but we cannot make the ultimate sacrifice upon the cross. That was Christ’s alone to do. Likewise, we are called to make Christ known, but we can go about that in a way which Jesus couldn’t have done, because he only had three years to do it.

I say all of this to try to make some sense of a tension which is present in today’s Gospel. We learnt that Jesus and the disciples didn’t even have time to eat because they were so busy with sick, hungry, needy people. So, they try to get away and have a time of respite by crossing the Sea of Galilee and getting away from the crowds. But when they get to the other side, the people there recognized who Jesus and his disciples were and rushed up with their own needs just as they had on the other side of the lake. The Gospel doesn’t say that Jesus and his disciples took tea and a nap before getting on with it, and we can only assume that they continued their ministry as before. Tired and hungry, they tended to others who were tired and hungry without tending to their own needs. “What would Jesus do?” He’d sacrifice his time of respite whenever the needy approached him.

Jesus could do this, and some heroic saints like the apostles did it as well, but for most of us such a schedule would lead to ineffectiveness. I would not be able to do the needful tasks set before me in my ministry if I didn’t eat at relatively normal times, and sleep relatively regular hours, and take time simply to be alone in the presence of God. If I didn’t take time to do these things, I’d eventually get cranky and the work that I do for the church would be slapdash and inconsistent.

The same would be true for any of you, unless there is a real certifiable saint in the congregation this morning (which their may well be). Most of us would be sorely remiss if we didn’t take time to recharge our batteries, as it were, and God not only understands but insists on this.

We heard it in the psalm, which many of us know better in the King James translation:

He maketh me to lie down in green pastures:
He leadeth me beside the still waters.
He restoreth my soul.

Rest and restoration is something God intends for us, and which He gives us. We usually hear this psalm at funerals, and indeed death is the final means by which we attain rest and rejuvenation, albeit in exciting expectation of the Resurrection. But this is not primarily a psalm about death. It is, rather, a psalm about life, the Christian life wherein we find periods of rest in God between the periods in which we furiously wage the glorious battle for the Kingdom.

Thus, the Christian life is one of balance. We are certainly not permitted to live a life of sloth and complete comfort. But neither does the Christian life entail that we labour for the Kingdom to the point of exhaustion and, to use a hopelessly modern term, “burnout”.

Yet our whole culture militates against this balance. Or, rather, I should say cultures, because there are, it seems to me, two diametrically opposed views of human activity to which significant portions of our society adhere, both of which miss the mark.

On the one hand, we have the “Protestant Work Ethic” a heresy which defined the American psyche for generations. In a nutshell, this worldview holds that we’ll stay out of trouble if we keep extraordinarily busy. We’re less prone to sins of the flesh if we work eighteen hours a day and sleep lightly the other six.

On the other hand, we have the hedonist approach, which has taken hold of much of society in the last fifty years or so. By hedonist I don’t necessarily mean sexual hedonism, though that fits under the umbrella. The technical meaning of hedonism is the glorification of any lifestyle predicated principally on self-gratification, whether vulgar or apparently lofty. So, sitting in a bathtub all day eating donuts and drinking cognac is one form of hedonism, and doing nothing with one’s life besides personally enriching leisure activities like reading dusty books and exercising is another form of hedonism.

Anyway, the “Protestant Work Ethic” and hedonism are two sides of the same heretical coin. Like most heresies, the Christian view is found in the via media, the middle way. Just as the old Christological heresies, which held that Christ was either only God or only man, were resolved by a middle way of affirming both truths, so too do these modern heresies find their orthodoxy somewhere in the middle. We must come to balance work and play to be healthy people, and we must balance the good works enjoined by our Christian commitment with prayer and rest to be healthy Christians. Christian monasticism has struck this balance perfectly in its rather rigid, programmatic scheduling of time for work, prayer, and study; but we who live in the world can find this balance too if we make a prayerful assessment of our own lives, and develop what is called a rule of life: a plan for how to balance work and play and prayer and study and so forth. How to go about developing such a rule is beyond the scope of this sermon, but if any of you is interested in becoming more intentional about finding the proper kind of balance please don’t hesitate to call and set up an appointment and we can talk about how to get started.

In the end, we may be sure that the Christian life is one in which activity and contemplation both play a role. The Christian life requires rest if the work we are to do is to be done. Ultimately this rest is found in God and our times of recreation (or re-creation) are sanctified by God and held in His hands. Indeed, to rest at all is to rest in God in a profound and wonderful way. And so, let us ever pray the prayer of St. Augustine, who said, “our hearts are restless, O Lord, until they find their rest in thee.” Amen.

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

After our worship this morning Fr. John is going to have a presentation of all of the most important resolutions that were passed this year’s General Convention, but at the risk of stealing his thunder, I want to speak to one issue in particular which was discussed in Austin this week: the possible full revision of the Book of Common Prayer. The General Convention had set up a “media hub” online, where anyone could watch the deliberations of the church while they were happening. This was my first time watching General Convention events unfold, and as I expected, there was a lot of energy around Prayer book revision, from people on all sides of the issue. The House of Deputies spent over a half hour debating whether or not they wanted to add 60 minutes to the discussion time for prayer book revision. The people were ready for a debate and argument, and we heard impassioned arguments on all sides.
There are no doubt many aspects of the 1979 Prayer book which could be improved or shored up, but the energy behind Prayer book revision at the convention was primarily around how to address God. The revisionists have two primary concerns, and the first is this: God is immaterial, and therefore God is without gender. That being the case, the liturgy of the church should reflect this teaching in its language for God. So instead of saying “God and His people,” we would say “God, and God’s people.” The Lord’s Prayer could be rewritten to begin, “Our Parent, who art in heaven…” Words that would need to be swapped out or deemphasized include “Father, Son, King, Lord, etc.” The second reason for the necessity of these revisions is that all people are made in the image of God. So it stands to reason that God is like all of us people, so we should not use words that make God “seem male.

The revisionists do have a point, and it may be possible to expand our selection of Biblical images for God in liturgical worship. However, gender neutrality (or gender expansiveness) is not the sole or only criterion which should be considered. Dr. Kara Slade and Father J. Wesley Evans, along with the help of many other contributors, submitted to the House of Bishops entitled, “A Memorial to the 79th General Convention.” I would commend each of you to read the Memorial in its entirety, for the point of this sermon let me simply read the second paragraph:

And I quote, “The Episcopal Church affirms the Baptismal promise to “continue in the apostles’ teaching” (BCP 304) as part of the one, holy, catholic, and apostolic church. Therefore this teaching ought to be reflected in our liturgy. We affirm that the Christological titles found in the New Testament are integral to the Gospel. While some of these are experienced negatively in the world because of human sin, we affirm that Jesus redeems that which is abused. The dominion of Jesus Christ is not analogous to these concepts as they operate according to the logic of the world. Instead, it subverts them. It is good news for all people that Jesus is the Lord, the true King who upholds them and overturns abusive powers.”

The words of our liturgy, derived from Holy Scripture, and the words and prayers given to us by Jesus are sacred words. While the liturgy is open to revision, we must always keep at the front of our minds its power to transform and change us. We cannot simply intellectually evaluate all of its words as if they were on the level of any other mere human speech. The liturgy is not merely words, but also the place where all of God’s people hear the Word of God, offer worship to God, and are transformed to go out into the world to continue God’s work on earth.
My point in bringing this up is not only to hash out the merits or demerits of this argument for revision, but to more importantly point out in how our theological imperative for revision is lacking. When the Book of Common Prayer was revised in 1979, there were two core theological issues at play: our common identity as Christians is found in Holy Baptism, and the centrality of the Most Blessed Sacrament of the Body and Blood of Christ. In all of the “pro-revision” discussion there was quite a bit of talk about gender and identity, but there was no change in our theology or our understanding of any core doctrines driving this change. Rather, the claim is to adjust the language of liturgy in order to more easily accord with what the Church already teaches and believes. And if that is the case, then perhaps what we need is catechesis, and not revision. Before any kind of revision is possible, we need to be clear about who we are and what it means to be the people of God, what it means to be the Church. Who are we as God’s people? What are God’s plans for us and how can we live into that?

Today’s epistle reading is a beautiful summary of what it means to be the people of God, of what it means to be the Church. This passage gives strong support for the doctrine of prevenient grace, which is a divine grace that precedes any human action. Hear the emphasis in these statements: “as he choose us in Christ before the foundation of the world.” And again in the next verse: “He destined us for adoption as his children through Jesus Christ.” The focus is on what God is doing, and not on human action. Ultimately God is sovereign over all that is, and is in no way dependent on anything from any human person. Here it is shown that sin is not pardoned merely on the account that we are sorry for our sins and repent (though repentance is important). No, the primary vehicle for redemption and forgiveness is given “according to the riches of his grace which he lavished on us.” This is God’s abundant love pouring out on us, not because we deserve it, but because God choose us. Indeed, God choose us in Christ before the foundation of the world.

We might also have some difficulty with prevenient grace from and intellectual angle. For example, if God choose us from before the beginning of the world, then that seems to imply that there are others (perhaps non-Christians, or those who leave the faith) who were not chosen by God. It could be construed that if one is not chosen by God then there is nothing they can do about it. In order to avoid the incorrect reading that God is capricious and possibly cruel, we have to consider two points. First of all, this passage says nothing about damnation anywhere. This is a letter from Paul (or more likely someone else writing in Paul’s name to a Christian community). This is insider language, about the identity of God’s people. This is about who we are as God’s people, who we are as God’s Church.

To extrapolate that the opposite of lavish grace must be what is given to other people is reaching for something that is not presented here. This is not about damnation for non-believers. We can know this if we pay attention to the wording. “Just as he choose us in Christ before the foundation of the world.” Christ is the lens through which we understand our election. This is the same Christ who told the repentant thief that he would be in paradise, the same Jesus who told the parable of the Good Samaritan. Being chosen is not about being better than others. We are redeemed through Christ’s blood, and we are called to live as God’s disciples in the world, loving God with all our hearts and loving our neighbor as ourselves. We are also called to pick up our cross and follow Jesus, bearing humiliation and shame for the sake of our Lord should we be called to do so. Our Christian duties are given to us by God, and to whatever degree we participate in God’s plan for us, we must remember that before our will to do anything, it was God’s will that for us to be adopted as His children through Jesus Christ.

That is who we are Christians, and it is ultimately the entire reason or existence itself. The epistle is talking about issues of cosmic and eternal significance. Whatever a group of laity and clergy in Austin Texas do about any issue pales in comparison to the ultimate, foundational truth of this epistle. We need to be united in prayer around the core of our faith before we are in any position to revise our words of prayer.

As it turned out, our bishops are not going to allow the Book of Common Prayer to be revised at this time. They have implemented a compromise position, where a much smaller budget will be allocated for the creation of some new, optional liturgical resources (possibly similar to Enriching our Worship), but the Book of Common Prayer 1979 is to be retained in its entirety. The day may come for a complete revision of the Book of Common Prayer, but today is not that day. Too much emphasis was placed on issues that divide. We will never all agree on everything, but if revision of the prayer book is to be successful, then we to begin not with divisive issues, but with what we all share. We are all God’s children, destined for adoption through Jesus Christ before the foundation of the world.