Sermons

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

It seems that when I ask folks how they’re doing these days, the answer is always a variant on the word “busy.” I don’t know how often I respond to this question by saying “It’s a busy time of the year,” without thinking, “When was the last time I wasn’t busy?” We’re coming up on Summer, which is supposed to be relaxing, right? But everyone I know seems nearly overwhelmed with end-of-the-school-year stuff, or family obligations, or something at work. It seems to me that what many of us need is just a chance to do what Jesus said: Abide.

Both today’s Epistle and Gospel use this word “abide”, which is our translation of the Greek “meno”. It was one of John’s favorite verbs, by the way. It appears 40 times in his Gospel and another 29 times in his letters. It’s one of those complex, Greek words that has layers of meaning. On one level it simply means “to remain”, but it also means “to rest”, “to be held continually” and “to await”.

We are told this morning to abide in the vine, to abide in God, and to abide in love. These aren’t very action-oriented commandments. Rest in love. Be held continually by the vine. Await God.

This is a hard teaching for many of us. Our culture values productivity and efficiency above all else. Even in that lovely image of the vine, my own mind turns to labor rather than renewal. In fact, the image which always comes to mind for me is that of my grandmother, carrying my dad around in a nineteen-fifties version of a baby bjorn (I doubt such a thing actually existed), tending the vines with her in-law’s relatives in California while my grandfather was in Korea. It’s an image of hard work. But in this morning’s Gospel it’s God tending the vine. It’s God doing the hard work. We must first abide, rest in the vine, if we are to bear fruit.

And bear fruit we must. Lest we think that we are being taught to be lazy, Jesus concludes his teaching by saying, “By this my Father is glorified, that you bear much fruit, and so prove to be my disciples.” “Faith without works,” James’ Epistle reminds us, “is dead.” But on the other hand, works without faith are nigh on impossible. The trick, then, is to rest in God, to abide in the vine, so that we have sustenance to bear fruit.

And what is that fruit? It is easy enough to say that it means good works, acts of charity. But consider the metaphor Jesus is using. It’s not an orange grove or an olive tree; it’s a grapevine. And what do grapevines produce? Well, grapes obviously. And what do grapes become? Grapes produce wine. And, at least as ancient people understood it, wine produces happiness. Scripture continually uses the image of wine to talk about joy.

Anyway, the fruit we bear brings joy to the world. The knowledge and love of Christ which we spread, which by our Baptims we are commissioned and required to spread, is nothing less than the only source of true happiness there really is in this world. We certainly have work to do.

But if we’re not connected to the vine, we cannot produce good wine (or even Welch’s for that matter). We must stay connected to flourish.

How we do that is something we are reminded of over-and-over again, but which bears repeating as often as possible. First and foremost, it is the Blessed Sacrament, the “food for pilgrim’s given.” It is also daily prayer, daily re-acquaintance with scripture, and – yes – rest. A popular modern metaphor says that we should “recharge the batteries”. I think the vine is a better metaphor. You have to take the batteries out of a device to charge them. The branches, though, are always connected to the vine. That means that in even the most draining of circumstances, we don’t have to shut down (or “burn out” as some of my clergy friends talk about). We’re still connected. We just need to open ourselves to more of the good stuff that Jesus is pumping through the vine instead of trying to grow grapes without nourishment. So maybe we need to take a lesson from Jesus, and from time-to-time permit ourselves to abide.

+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.

This sermon gets a little heady, so I thought I’d start with a reflection on something a bit less daunting- namely, television. Many of you know that we don’t have cable, but I still try to keep somewhat in touch with what is going on in the zeitgeist, and I’m fully aware of the ascendancy of reality television as a phenomenon. Some years ago I heard about a program called Ghost Hunters, in which a team calling itself The Atlantic Paranormal Society (or TAPS) investigates old buildings rumored to be haunted. I’ve looked up some clips online from time to time, and, as you will have already guessed, I find the program to be more-than-a-little silly.

You may think this is an example of the pot calling the kettle black, since some of you know that I quite like scary movies, but I find Ghost Hunters especially silly because it presumes to be based in reality. That said, the show has been a phenomenal success in terms of ratings. It’s no wonder, since polls have shown that nearly one-third of Americans believe in ghosts (I am, by the by, among the two-thirds that don’t, but I suspect – simply because of the statistics – that not everybody here agrees with me).

I bring all this up, because I’m afraid that the popular view of the afterlife is more like a ghost story than the traditional, orthodox teaching of the church. The view of American folk Christianity, which has progressively found its way into the mainline, historic churches, is that at the moment of death one’s soul leaves one’s body behind, springing from these ugly bags of mostly water, the husks which contain our essential being until freed by death.

But this is about as far from the Christian view of the Resurrection as one can get. Consider this morning’s Gospel reading. The disciples were terrified because they thought Jesus was a ghost. So, Jesus has them touch him, and see that he is as much a flesh-and-blood person as they. To make the point even stronger, Jesus asks for food and eats it. A ghost doesn’t need breakfast, but a man certainly does (preferably with bacon, but broiled fish will do).

We are told over-and-over in scripture, that our Resurrection will be like our Lord’s. Paul, in his Epistle to the Romans writes:

For if we have been united with him in a death like his, we shall certainly be united with him in a resurrection like his.

In the First Epistle to the Corinthians he writes that at the last trumpet blast the bodies of the dead shall be raised incorruptible.

Likewise, look to the Old Testament. Ezekiel’s vision of the valley of dry bones doesn’t have ghosties flying around, but bones and sinews and flesh and skin coming together.

Or take the Fathers of the Early Church for that matter. For example, the following is excerpted from Justin Martyr’s treatise on the Resurrection from A.D. 153:

Indeed, God calls even the body to resurrection and promises it everlasting life. When he promises to save the man, he thereby makes his promise to the flesh. What is man but a rational living being composed of soul and body? Is the soul by itself a man? No, it is but the soul of a man. Can the body be called a man? No, it can but be called the body of a man. If, then, neither of these is by itself a man, but that which is composed of the two together is called a man, and if God has called man to life and resurrection, he has called not a part, but the whole, which is the soul and the body

Examples from both scripture and Christian tradition could be cited ad nauseum, but it should suffice to say that orthodox Christian belief unequivocally rejects body-soul dualism and affirms the bodily Resurrection not only of Christ but of all believers.

Two questions remain. First, if this were the case, why have so many Christians got it wrong? Second, why does it even matter?

The first question is easier to address. It seems to me that the Christian insistence on a bodily resurrection requires more explanation than the dualistic approach to be pastorally satisfying. I am often asked if a departed loved -one is now in the presence of God, and I can say “yes” in all sincerity, but it requires more explanation. We have not yet heard the final trumpet blast nor have we seen the bodies rise from their graves, but this is a function of our human need to experience reality as chronological. The passage of time is a constraint neither of the mind of God nor of the life of His Kingdom. So, while from our perspective our loved-ones are now plainly dead, resting in peace awaiting the Resurrection, from God’s perspective they can already be said to be alive. For this explanation to be emotionally satisfying, it requires us to think philosophically. It is much easier to say “yes, Aunt Myrtle’s soul just sprung from her body, and now she’s a ghosty living in the clouds.” It’s a rather lazy approach, and patently false, but I suppose it’s one way of comforting a person.

The second question is “So what?”. Why does this matter? Well, believe it or not, it matters a great deal. The sort of dualism which claims that the body is nothing more than a shell in which the soul resides suggests that the material world is somehow lacking. It ignores God’s declaration in the Creation story that His Creation was good. We start to see our bodies as prisons and the world we inhabit as inherently bad.

Our bodies and the rest of the material world are not crude shadows of the real. God made them and called them good. God reaffirms this truth in choosing to raise us from the dead with bodies real enough to touch and to eat and to do everything else a body is meant for. God reaffirms this truth in choosing not to consign us to some cloudy never-never land but rather to create a new heaven and a new earth on the last day.

When we fail to see this, there are serious implications. When we see our bodies and the world as temporary hindrances rather than gifts, we abuse them. We abuse Creation by polluting it, because deep down we believe it’s bad and it has no effect on that dull world inhabited by clouds and harps which we created out of whole-cloth without consulting Scripture and Church Tradition. When we start to see bodies as aberrations, violence (against ourselves and others) stops being so shocking.

Doctrine has moral implications. Bad theology can lead to poor morals. Take, for example, the homophobic hate-group Westboro Baptist Church that pickets military funerals. Good theology, conversely, can lead us to moral maturity. So, if this romp through the theology of the body does anything, I hope it helps us start to treat our bodies and the rest of creation with love and respect. Christians of all stripes haven’t done a bang-up job of this all the time. We, however, have the added benefit of knowing that God is with us. He has promised to restore to fullness whatever has been broken by human sin. He has promised to restore our bodies and our earth, making them whole once again on the last day. How we act as stewards of these gifts now, though, is of eternal significance. Thanks be to God that we have His Word and Sacraments to sustain us in this task. Pray that we may rise to so great a challenge.

+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.

Friday night Annie and I attended the premiere in Toledo of I Dream, a new opera based on the life of Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. I thought it was really cool that the 50th anniversary of Dr. King’s assassination was being marked with an opera here in Northwest Ohio. The music was beautiful and the direction and production quite interesting, and while it was technically a little bit rough (perhaps taking it to New York, where audiences are a bit less forgiving, would have been premature), I could see the piece really making waves in a larger market as soon as the kinks are worked out.

My favorite aspect of the opera was that it didn’t shy away from acknowledging Dr. King’s own doubts and fears, both during his work in Birmingham and Selma and, especially, leading up to his death in Memphis in April 1968. It is widely known that Dr. King was remarkably prescient (prophetic, even) when it came to his assassination. The opera does a masterful job investigating King’s own doubts about his mission and the legacy of his work in this final hour before being consoled and inspired (quite literally) by visions of his grandmother, who had first taught him to overcome hate with love, and his wife Coretta who had kept him focused on the struggle during his times of desperation and insecurity. It was beautifully done, and I guess this would be a kind of advertisement for the opera except that (as those of you who are Toledo Opera patrons know) there is only one more performance – this afternoon’s matinee – and when I checked yesterday morning there were very few seats remaining!

Anyway, the reason this element of the opera – its recognition of King’s own doubts and fears – struck me so profoundly might be because I was considering it in light of this week’s Gospel, our annual reminder of poor “Doubting Thomas.” Last year I said that we miss the point of the story if we turn Thomas into a charicature – the icon of incredulity – whether we lambaste his doubting ways or affirm them as the saint par excellence of modernity and scientism. His life as a whole and his response to this Risen Lord in particular is more rich and nuanced than that straw Thomas.

This year I want to focus not on the doubt itself, but what grew out of it- viz., a stronger belief and a commitment to living out that belief as an apostle after the Resurrection. The more I consider doubt as a part of the believer’s life, the less ready I am to make a normative judgment about it. This goes both ways, you might say. Some would reckon doubt of any sort a serious moral failing. I don’t think I’ve ever been of that opinion. Unequivocally denouncing all who would question their own beliefs can lead to a shallow sort of faith or, even worse, to the kind of unquestioning obedience to a set of beliefs and actions which strikes me as an element of cults rather than true religion.

On the other hand, there are those who would elevate doubt itself to a kind of article of faith, as ironic as that may sound. Such an approach might hold that one must question everything to come to any kind of certainty about anything. Now, I love wrestling with hard questions (it’s the philosophy major in me, I guess) and I think new insights often depend on our being open to admitting we were mistaken about some article of faith, even a central one, like the Resurrection. That said, if doubt is the primary mode of religious imagination, it seems to me we’ll never be able to find our footing. We’ll be captive, it seems, to infinite regress. What’s more, to climb back onto my favorite hobby horse, such an approach is helplessly individualistic, finding no recourse to the community of the faithful, the communion of saints of which we are a part, and, thus, more-than-a-little arrogant. No, it seems, if we’re to have any foundation at all, it must be upon convictions which have by some process and at least to some extent been inoculated against doubt.

What if, however, we didn’t view doubt and faith as moral antipodes, but rather as spiritual givens? Each, no doubt, abides alongside the other. Thus the father of the epileptic boy in Mark’s Gospel can without self-contradiction proclaim, “Lord, I believe; help thou mine unbelief.”

The blessedness (or happiness to use the more literal translation of the Greek Μακάριος) of those who have not seen and yet believe, then, does not make them morally superior to Thomas, but simply spiritually better off in the moment. It is what is done by that small seed of faith, no matter the concomitant doubt and fear, by which we are judged. That mustard seed of faith was enough to raise Thomas from doubt and despair to a heroic life spent, even to the last, in service of the Gospel. Likewise, young Martin’s faith in the God of love and the moral nature of the universe that same God had created gave him strength throughout his life and to the last to rise above doubt and despair and personal imperfections to do the Good God had intended.

Just so must we acknowledge our misgivings, our uncertainties, our lack of perfect confidence and ask the God of all confidence to give us the strength to persevere in belief and in trust that he will not leave us comfortless. We’ll not be on the wrong path so long as we keep praying for that assurance, so long as we can honetly say, “Lord, I believe; help thou mine unbelief.”

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