Sermons

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

Something that I often forget about my religion is just how weird it is. It’s sometimes an interesting exercise to try to look at what we do and what we believe from the perspective of an absolute neophyte. I’ve been so steeped in church culture for so long that this is a rather difficult exercise for me, but I thought it useful since Easter is one of those days where someone with little or no background in my (or perhaps any) religion might feel more comfortable going to church for curiosity’s sake; it is a little easier to blend in on Easter morning. I think that’s great, and if you’re in that boat, welcome.

Anyway, my little exercise in looking at Christianity (and liturgical Christianity specifically) with new eyes remindes me, as I mentioned, just how strange a lot of what we do must seem. I mean, I’m up here in front of a crowd of people dressed like a Fourth Century Roman official who decided to wear his own clothes and his wife’s clothes all at the same time. We sing songs together. Outside of church, most of us haven’t done that since we were forced to go to summer sleepaway camp. We make a sacrifice, albeit a bloodless sacrifice, on an altar to which we bow and kneel. To an outside observer, say an alien anthropologist, this looks positively primitive.

And that’s just stuff we do. Think of what we believe. We believe a virgin conceived a child. We believe someone turned water into wine. We believe that same person fed five thousand people with five small loaves of bread and two small fish. We believe a dead man just got up and walked away from his own grave. We believe that two-thousand years later he is still alive. This stuff is crazy!

And that is why I believe Christianity to be the single most compelling worldview for the modern person. Because, in its purest form, it conspicuously rejects modernity. It is predicated on an epistemology which would cause most analytic philosophers to run screaming into the night. It eludes one’s ordinary human reason. It always will. That’s why we need it. We’ve forgotten how to be creative. We’ve forgotten how to be enticed by the big questions which our existence necessarily entails. We’ve forgotten how to be bowled over by the mystery of it all.

It drives me crazy when I read someone trying to make an empirical argument for a point of faith, particularly the Resurrection. It doesn’t drive me crazy for the typical reason I hear, though; it’s not that evidence precludes faith. Rather, it’s because these arguments don’t allow for mystery, don’t realize that there are just some things in the world we cannot know, and that, far from being a source of disappointment, this is a very exciting thing.

You see, the Resurrection (Christianity in general, actually) is not the kind of mystery that you find on the shelves at Barnes & Noble. Those all make sense by the time you reach the last page. No, the mystery of Christianity is strange. It’s something for which you have to use your imagination and, along with the entire body of the faithful, create some sense and meaning.

This for me is a whole lot more interesting than being given all the answers on a silver platter. It’s a great deal more difficult and a great deal more rewarding than just having to accept a set of propositions. God created us in God’s own image, and that means we are trusted with the capacity to join in on the very act of creation. Don’t be afraid of that. In fact, you can have fun with it. New insights can come from a playful approach to scripture and theology.

So, let’s take an example: “Supposing him to be the gardener.” I remember an image, perhaps from a film (and maybe of you remember this, and can tell me what it’s from): Jesus is hiding behind a bush when he and Mary Magdalene start talking and that’s why she doesn’t recognize him. Now that’s about the most boring, un-mysterious, reasonable explanation possible. Maybe that’s how it went down, but I’d be terribly disappointed if I got to heaven and found out that’s all it was.

What if it was just the gardener, and the story is about how the risen Christ dwells in each of us? That would make sense, but, as far as I’m concerned, it’s only slightly less disappointing than Jesus taking cover in a shrubbery.

Or, maybe it was actually Jesus in the flesh, and Mary mistook him because he was down on his hands and knees with a trowel, gardening. Why would he be doing that? Was this actually the garden outside the tomb, or are we being literarily or even mystically transported back to the Garden of Eden? Maybe he’s replanting the tree of life, and this time we all get to eat from it.

Now, that’s just my weird speculative exegesis, but that’s the point. We’re dealing here with weird stuff, weirder even than funny clothes and grown-up singalongs and arcane rituals. We’re talking about the very order of things being radically changed.

Creation had been rocking along pretty well by itself for about fourteen billion years, and then something bizarre, something so outside the realm of human understanding happened, that space-time got turned on its head. The universe skipped a beat, the Creator so flagrantly breaking the laws he had created. Everything came into sharp focus for just an instant; we saw the light.

And we come back here, week by week, and catch another glimpse – sometimes almost focused, sometimes impossibly blurry, but always there in the Word proclaimed and in the Word made flesh on the altar. It’s strange; it’s inexplicable; it is totally contrary to the way we have all been trained to consume and integrate information. But, if you ask me, it’s about the most exciting, enriching, fun exercise a person can sign up for.

+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 Ghost. Amen.

Who have we crucified this day? A criminal? A radical? A terrorist? Have we not, in fact, crucified all that makes us lovely? Have we not, in fact, crucified all that makes us lovable? We demanded justice and we killed not only a God but all that makes us truly human. In despising the spark of divinity in our brother, we find we have come to hate ourselves. We have murdered a human being, but in so doing we have expelled a god, extradited our Creator from his own Creation.

It is madness, yet we continue to this day. Every man, woman, or child who goes hungry, every sick person that is denied healthcare because of poverty, every maimed or murdered body in Parkland, Florida, every young girl in Africa and the Mideast who is denied education, every young black man in the city streets of our own country who fears for his life, every immigrant whose very being has been reduced to the documents she has in her pockets, every afflicted soul that is stripped of its dignity, cries out as another nail in the hands and feet of Christ, another spear-wound in his side.

We pray. That is necessary, but just as important is that we choose. There are few moral binaries in this sin-sick world, slivers of black and white divided by a sea of gray. But there is one principle which is as zero-sum as it gets. Shall I be the crucifier or shall I be the crucified? Do I love others enough to sacrifice myself for their good, or will I stop short? To what degree will love compel me to act?

There was a song we sang at church camp when I was a kid, and I suspect they’re still singing it: “They’ll know we are Christians by our love, by our love; yes, they’ll know we are Christians by our love.” Do they know we’re Christians? Does the world see in me the same self-giving love to which I’ve pledged my life made manifest or not? Do they find my life a compelling witness to the power of sacrificial love, or do they just see some quasi-charitable window dressing?

Sometimes I look in the mirror and wonder if Christ died in vain. Sometimes I read the newspaper and I wonder what in the world was accomplished on Calvary.

But other times I see and feel and taste the love of God powerfully shared through the mediation of my fellow Christian, and I’m brought back from the brink of despair. Sometimes the faintest glimmer of the sunrise can be glimpsed. Was it really dawn or was it a trick, an illusion? Even in the darkest hour, we must hold fast to hope, Christian hope (a fool’s hope, but a folly I must hold onto), which shames the dark powers of this world.

I’ve been thinking a lot over the past few days of a poem by Thomas Merton, a seemingly inappropriately titled poem- it’s an aubode, a song in celebration of the dawn, yet its content is dark as Good Friday. It speaks of poverty and racism and injustice, the sorts of things which the dawning of the light of Christ ought to have dispelled. But listen carefully (and maybe even look it up and read it for yourself later) and perhaps you too may find a little reason for hope amidst the desperation of our world, for the coming of the true light to dispel our darkness. It is with Merton’s poem that I will conclude.

Aubade-Harlem

Across the cages of the keyless aviaries,
The lines and wires, the gallows of the broken kites,
Crucify, against the fearful light,
The ragged dresses of the little children.
Soon, in the sterile jungles of the waterpipes and ladders,
The bleeding sun, a bird of prey, will terrify the poor,
These will forget the unbelievable moon.
But in the cells of whiter buildings,
Where the glass dawn is brighter than the knives of surgeons,
Paler than alcohol or ether, shinier than money,
The white men’s wives, like Pilate’s,
Cry in the peril of their frozen dreams:
“Daylight has driven iron spikes,
Into the flesh of Jesus’ hands and feet:
Four flowers of blood have nailed Him to the walls of Harlem.”
Along the white halls of the clinics and the hospitals
Pilate evaporates with a cry:
They have cut down two hundred Judases,
Hanged by the neck in the opera houses and the museum.
Across the cages of the keyless aviaries,
The lines and wires, the gallows of the broken kites,
Crucify, against the fearful light,
The ragged dresses of the little children.

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

Wheat and grapes- they’re terribly ordinary things. The former has been cultivated for about 12,000 years, and its so easy to grow, so resilient, that it takes up more farmland than any other crop on earth (over half-a-billion acres worth). The latter has been used to make wine for at least the last 8,000 years. While today oenophiles might prefer wines from particular regions made with particular varieties of grapes, if one isn’t picky the grapes grow wild and the fermentation process is just nature taking its course. We’re not picky here, by the way. We don’t use fine wine for the Mass. It’s pretty cheap stuff- Taylor Port from New York. I think that’s appropriate, though, lest Holy Communion become a wine-tasting exercise.

Anyway, the ordinariness of wheat and grapes, of bread and wine is, I believe, at least part of the point our Lord was making when on this night, so many centuries ago, he established the Eucharist. They would have been part of every meal, as much of a given as a fact that the host of that meal would be made of flesh and blood.

An older friend of mine once told me that the worst thing her mother could have said about anybody (tantamount to a vulgar epithet) was to say that they were “common.” Now that kind of pretension can find no place in the upper room, in this sanctuary, or on the pilgrim way which is our common life, because that’s the meal we eat; those are the feet we wash (symbolically this night and metaphorically throughout our live); that’s the Lord we worship. Common.

That’s the other thing about wheat and grapes. The sustenance they give is borne of violence. The wheat grows magnificently high, but then it’s struck down with a scythe, that gleaming symbol of inescapable death. It survives the threshing floor, spared the infernal fate of the chaff, only to to face the mortar and pestle, to be ground until unrecognizable as wheat, until its former glory, its proud striving toward the sun, is but a faint memory.

Likewise, the grape- that splendid symbol of connection, of sharing that which is needful for life through the vine, finds its siblings plucked, feels the mutual love draining away, as the picker approaches. Will it be found worthy? And then, cruel irony, its worthiness once established leads to the greater indignity. It is crushed under foot until, like the wheat, its very being is diminished. It is no longer a grape but a part of the bloody mash.

Bread and wine, though common, hold in themselves the power to give life, but only through death. Flesh and blood, though nothing special, made out of carbon and oxygen and hydrogen, common elements, have somehow combined in such a way to produce beings with reason and skill, with the ability to love someone else, to live for someone else, to die for someone else.

We embark this night on a journey through the three holiest days of the year. As we proceed on the way to Calvary and beyond, I ask that you contemplate how our God is the God of the ordinary, the mundane- that the most important events in history can be made present, truly and mystically, through the common stuff of life- bread, wine, flesh, blood. Contemplate the great paradox of the fact that for God to be God – the kind of God who is all-powerful and faithful and worthy of our devotion – God became an ordinary human being, with all the limitations that keep us from approaching divinity. Consider how a Savior who can miraculously give himself to us in the form of bread and wine can transform us, our hearts and minds and bodies, to share with us a radically new kind of life.

I often think a lot about poetry during Holy Week, and tomorrow I’ll share with you a poem which helped me contemplate the crucifixion. There’s another poem which helped me consider the great moment of this night and I would like to close by sharing it with you. It’s an early poem of Gerard Manley Hopkins, while he was still an undergraduate at Oxford. Its epigraph is from a pretty terrible story about starvation and cannibalism in Second Kings, but he uses it as a jumping-off-point for a meditation on what we contemplate tonight. The poem is titled “Barnfloor and Winepress”.

And he said, If the Lord do not help thee, whence shall I help thee? out of the barnfloor, or out of the winepress?
2 Kings VI: 27

Thou that on sin’s wages starvest,
Behold we have the joy in harvest:
For us was gather’d the first fruits,
For us was lifted from the roots,
Sheaved in cruel bands, bruised sore,
Scourged upon the threshing-floor;
Where the upper mill-stone roof’d His head,
At morn we found the heavenly Bread,
And, on a thousand altars laid,
Christ our Sacrifice is made!

Thou whose dry plot for moisture gapes,
We shout with them that tread the grapes:
For us the Vine was fenced with thorn,
Five ways the precious branches torn;
Terrible fruit was on the tree
In the acre of Gethsemane;
For us by Calvary’s distress
The wine was racked from the press;
Now in our altar-vessels stored
Is the sweet Vintage of our Lord.

In Joseph’s garden they threw by
The riv’n Vine, leafless, lifeless, dry:
On Easter morn the Tree was forth,
In forty days reach’d heaven from earth;
Soon the whole world is overspread;
Ye weary, come into the shade.

The field where He has planted us
Shall shake her fruit as Libanus,
When He has sheaved us in His sheaf,
When He has made us bear his leaf. –
We scarcely call that banquet food,
But even our Saviour’s and our blood,
We are so grafted on His wood.