Sermons

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

Over the years I have been asked by a number of people, both Christian and non-Christian, what precisely the “Maundy” in “Maundy Thursday” means, and I wonder if we don’t use a more updated term because the real meaning has the potential to embarrass us. Let me explain…

Maundy comes (by way of Middle English and Old French) from the Latin word mandatum, which means, as one might guess, “mandate” or “commandment” or “obligation”. Two specific obligations are highlighted today: firstly, the obligation to be faithful in observing Holy Communion which was established this night so many centuries ago, and secondly, the obligation to love each other sacrificially as it is so powerfully symbolized in the washing of feet.
I said that we might be embarrassed by the meaning of Maundy Thursday, and that might be why we’ve retained this rather precious, old-fashioned word for the day rather than calling it something like “Obligation Thursday”. The concept of obligation seems so foreign to our modern sensibilities. It seems to us modern people to be almost quaint; it’s an imposition, we might say, that we grew out of generations ago. We are so taken with ideas like “self-determination” and “individual choice” that the very suggestion that we have obligations beyond those we determine for ourselves flies in the face of the our contemporary, individualist dogma.

If you don’t believe me, consider how so many people approach religious life, and I only point this out because I have fallen victim to the same misdirected approach more than once over the years. We might ask ourselves “what do I get out of going to church?” or “do I feel inspired by the service?” as if that’s the most important thing. Certainly, our theological edification and spiritual growth are terribly important secondary effects of participation in some kind of religious life, but at least it seems to me that those benefits are just that- secondary. Our primary task in church is to worship God as well as we can (particularly in that paramount expression of worship which is the Lord’s Supper), and doing so is an obligation.

Likewise, our contemporary discourse about charity is beset by the modern obsession with benefit to self. I remember being in college, spending a great deal of time doing various kinds of charitable work through my alma mater’s center for outreach and volunteerism. Too often, people were enticed to volunteer by promises of what they would get out of the experience- benefits which ranged from how attractive such experience would look to potential employers or graduate admissions boards to the seemingly less mercenary incentives of “receiving more in terms of emotional satisfaction than one can give in terms of effort” or of “learning about oneself and one’s priorities in the light of those suffering from homelessness or hunger or whatever.” I was, I am sure, no less motivated by such self-interest than were my classmates.

Again, though, it seems to me that the warm feeling we get after showing humble loving-kindness to a brother or sister—of metaphorically washing his or her feet—is a secondary benefit. We love our neighbor, which doesn’t necessarily mean that we’re fond of him but that we treat him as a beloved child of God, that we sacrifice our interests for his, and this is our holy obligation.

“I give you a new commandment,” Christ says, “that you love one another. Just as I have loved you, you also should love one another.” He does not say “I give you a new suggestion in your quest for self-actualization” or “love one another when it is convenient” or “love one another as long as it doesn’t interfere with your own agenda” but he calls it a “commandment” and says, “love one another just as I have loved you.” That “just as”, by the way, is the Greek word καθος which doesn’t mean “because” but rather “in the same manner”. And so, we are to love each other “in the same manner” as Christ loves us, and (as we will no doubt be reminded tomorrow) that is to say that we are to lay down our lives for each other. This is true whether or not we have warm feelings after we sacrifice our good for another’s. This is a commandment, our obligation.

If you’ll forgive me for reminiscing, which I know I do far too often, I’ll never forget a series of class sessions we did in my parish’s youth group when I was a teenager. Our teacher was this lovable hippy type fellow with whom I never felt much commonality aside from the fact that we all loved each other and we all loved the church, which was, of course, enough. Anyway, he wanted to do a course on other religions and other expressions of Christianity, so we visited the local mosque and the local synagogue and we had one of the Benedictine Sisters give us a tour of the local convent. (I remember being shocked to discover a swimming pool in the basement of the convent and wondering if nuns had pool parties!) On a number of occasions, one young man in the group would say admiringly about the religion du jour something like “they seem to take their religion so seriously; they follow these rules just because they’re supposed to.” I was confused at first, and then I was saddened after I realized what was at the heart of his interfaith admiration. The Muslim prays five times a day and gives alms because he’s supposed to. The Jew follows the Mosaic Law and practices hesed (that is “loving-kindness”) because she’s supposed to. The young man’s implication was that if we (teenage Episcopalians) went to church or practiced loving our neighbor or refrained from sin, it wasn’t just because we were “supposed to”, but because we were getting something out of it.

Of course, we were all churchgoing young people and most of us (myself included) weren’t forced by our parents to go to the young churchmen’s meetings on a Tuesday night, so we probably were “getting something out of it” and that’s great. But what if we went through a period in our lives when we stopped “getting something out of it”, or at least stopped “getting something discernible out of it”? I suppose that if my young friend’s assumption were correct, we’d stop practicing Christianity.

But then, at least for most of us, a nascent sense of obligation finally arose. We might have preferred (especially in our college days) to have slept in on a Sunday morning. We might have preferred (also especially in our college days) to spend that extra ten bucks on cheap beer rather than the fellow on the street needing some food or to spend Spring Break in Cancun rather than on a mission trip. But, (you know what?) we finally realized that our status as disciples of this Jesus fellow (that status given us in baptism whether we knew it or not) came along with some obligations.

We will, at the Easter Vigil (just as we do every year) rehearse that list of obligations again; we will again remind ourselves to renounce evil, to believe in God, to remain steadfast in the church’s common life, and to reach out to those who need our love. This year we will even welcome a new follower of the way, young Elijah whom many of you know, taking on for himself those obligations and joining us in the lifelong work of loving God and neighbor with all our life and substance.

For now, though, let me leave you with a recommendation; unlike Jesus, I give recommendations rather than commandments most of the time. Try to forget, at least for a little while, that axiom which we tell ourselves and others so much: “Don’t do such-and-such because you have to; do it because you want to.” Try for a little while to sacrifice your time or treasure for another just because you’re supposed to. Try to take time out of your day to pray for no other reason than that it is your obligation. Try divorcing for just a bit your spiritual practice from an assessment of how you’re benefiting from it. The benefits will, of course, remain, but you might just realize that they’re icing on the cake, as it were, that there is something to that old, starchy, stick-in-the-mud preoccupation with obligation after all.

We practice loving-kindness, not because we want to, but because we owe it to God, and then our desire to do good will grow stronger in us. The obligation won’t be so onerous and we’ll probably forget we did it out of obligation to begin with. But beginning the process by asking what it is we owe God, what we are obliged to do, will grant us strength to keep on doing it during those periods when the benefits seem to have ceased, to remain steadfast in prayer when our prayer seems to avail little, to continue sacrificing ourselves for others when we find it harder to get that warm fuzzy feeling. We must continue to run the race with endurance, knowing that our goal is ever before us and the risen Lord himself beckons us toward it.

+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.

Last year a cinematic milestone occurred that not a lot of people noticed. The ultra-violent comic book adaptation Deadpool became the highest grossing R-rated film of all time. Perhaps that’s not surprising, but you might be surprised by the film it replaced, which had held that title for well over a decade- Mel Gibson’s controversial film, The Passion of the Christ.

The controversy mostly revolved around the claim that the film inculcated the centuries old claim that the Jewish people were guilty of killing Christ. Whether there was really a case against the film on this point or not is debatable, but Gibson didn’t help his case when, a couple years later, he was pulled over for drunk driving and said something along the lines of “the Jews are responsible for all the wars in the world.” Interestingly, one of the chief complaints against the film in this regard was the inclusion of the line from Matthew’s Passion which we all said together just a few moments ago- “His blood be on us and on our children.”

The historical question of who killed Jesus, what their motives were, and so forth has been around almost since Christianity’s inception. We know that the Roman government crucified Jesus in collusion with Jewish religious authorities in Jerusalem. The suggestion that a whole nation or all adherents of a particular religion are thus responsible is ludicrous- just as ridiculous and, frankly, racist, as suggesting that all Arabs or all Muslims are terrorists.

That’s all, I think, that needs to be said about historical question of who killed Jesus. It seems to me that it is a perennial distraction from a far more interesting, more fundamental theological question which Gibson’s film, for all its controversy, actually addresses.

A particularly difficult bit to watch in the film is the moment when Jim Caviezel, the actor playing Jesus, is nailed to the cross. We see a pair of nondescript hands doing the deed and if one were to do a bit of research one would discover that those hands are Mel Gibson’s own. What is it that made this filmmaker feel that he had to be the one to nail Christ to the cross?

One initial reaction might simply be that this must be the result of some sort of emotional or mental problem. This, I am told, is an interpretation some art historians give to explain why Caravaggio painted himself as Goliath and, indeed, as one of Christ’s captors. Shouldn’t one distance oneself from those wicked men who killed our Lord? Aren’t those who take it upon themselves to fill those shoes full either of unhealthy guilt or, worse, of a menacing delight in being “the bad guy”? Well, it seems that the Church doesn’t think this is always the case in any event. Remember the words we, the congregation, read aloud in today’s Passion Gospel: “Let him be crucified!… Let him be crucified!… His blood be on us and on our children!” The church casts us in the liturgical role analogous to the cinematic role in which Gibson cast himself. We are made the ones who crucify Christ!

This practice of liturgically placing ourselves in the shoes of the crucifiers goes back at least to the fourth century and St. Ephrem the Syrian, whose antiphonal Good Friday homily had the congregation take on the role of Satan and a lesser demon arguing about the implications of the crucifixion. We see the connection made more literally in Johann Heerman’s utterly lugubrious, but simultaneously beautiful holy week hymn “Ah holy, Jesus”, which we will sing during Communion this morning, particularly the second verse:

Who was the guilty? Who brought this upon thee? Alas, my treason, Jesus hath undone thee. ’Twas I, Lord Jesus, I it was denied thee: I crucified thee!

And no doubt this is true in some sense. If we spend all our time trying to determine who actually killed Jesus we fail to look at ourselves, to see where it is that we have denied Christ, how we have each crucified him.
Lest we begin beating our breasts, rending our garments, and sitting in ashes right now, we must recognize that this is not the end of the story. That would miss the point of the passion. Heerman’s hymn goes on:

For me, kind Jesus, was thy incarnation, thy mortal sorrow, and thy life’s oblation; thy death of anguish and thy bitter passion, for my salvation.

Though we have each denied Christ in some way or another, Christ willingly took up the cross for our sake. We must take our sins and set them at the foot of the cross, for it is there that we are forgiven. In order to do this we must reckon where it is that we have each gone astray. In this, the season of Lent has come full circle; the task of Palm Sunday is much the same as that of Ash Wednesday. Placing ourselves into the passion narrative helps us to reflect on how we have denied Christ, where we have either participated or been complicit in offenses against God and each other.

And when we have laid our sins at the foot of the cross, when he has drawn us back to him yet again as, indeed, he is drawing all of humanity to repentance, we needn’t go about beating our breasts any longer. We needn’t be dismal because of our sin or because of our Lord’s death. Our sin is forgiven and our Lord is victorious. This is the mystery of the cross; it is, as the Apostle Paul said, a stumbling block to Jews and foolishness to Gentiles. For the powers of hell believe they have won the day, but we know their schemes have come to naught. We know that on the cross, God waged battle against sin and death thereby winning for us the victory. I close with a poem of George Herbert, which I believe captures the paradox of Christ’s victory on the cross better than any sermon I might preach ever could do:

O My chief good,
How shall I measure out thy bloud?
How shall I count what thee befell,
And each grief tell?

Shall I thy woes
Number according to thy foes?
Or, since one starre show’d thy first breath,
Shall all thy death?

Or shall each leaf,
Which falls in Autumn, score a grief?
Or can not leaves, but fruit, be signe
Of the true vine?

Then let each houre
Of my whole life one grief devoure;
That thy distresse through all may runne,
And be my sunne.

Or rather let
My severall sinnes their sorrows get;
That as each beast his cure doth know,
Each sinne may so.

Since bloud is fittest, Lord, to write
Thy sorrows in, and bloudie fight;
My heart hath store, write there, where in
One box doth lie both ink and sinne:

That when sinne spies so many foes,
Thy whips, thy nails, thy wounds, thy woes,
All come to lodge there, sinne may say,
No room for me, and flie away.

Sinne being gone, oh fill the place,
And keep possession with thy grace;
Lest sinne take courage and return,
And all the writings blot or burn.

+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.

As many of you know, I love fly-fishing, particularly for trout. I generally practice catch-and-release fishing, and if any of you happens to do the same, you will know that there is some technique involved in releasing trout to help them avoid mortality. One doesn’t simply casually toss the fish back into the stream, but holds the fish very gently underwater facing the current until it can swim away on its own power.

A couple of things usually occur to me whenever I take part in this sort of piscine resuscitation. First, I’m usually confused and amused by the amount of sympathy I feel for the trout. It is, after all, just a dumb fish; I’ve been assured that a fish’s nervous system doesn’t communicate pain in the same way that a mammal’s does, and I have no qualms at other times about killing, cooking, and eating the same fish. But there’s something about the intention with which I set out on a catch-and-release trip which causes me to have a great deal invested in the survival of this slippery, fishy-smelling thing in my hands.

Secondly, it occurs to me that this fish may well end up on someone else’s dinner table that night, or even perhaps my own on some later date. I wouldn’t say this reality particularly bothers me, but it does remind me of the rationale behind catch-and-release—namely, encouraging a healthy trout population—and releasing the fish becomes for me a sort of sign and symbol of my affirmation of that rationale. That the fish may well die later on in the same day is beside the point.

The raising of Lazarus in this morning’s Gospel is something like this. We often forget or else fail to consider the rather obvious fact that Lazarus eventually died again. We don’t know if it was a few weeks later or a few decades later, but Lazarus died, and remains to this day “stone dead.” Jesus knew he would eventually die, just as much as I know that trout was probably just somebody else’s dinner, but that’s beside the point- the point to which we shall arrive in a moment, but first let’s consider why we don’t talk about what eventually happened to Lazarus.

I wonder if our oversight is a result of the death denying culture in which we live. One needs only to turn on the television to see things he or she can buy to look or feel younger, which is to say farther away from being dead. In popular American religion there is a movement away from the recognition of death in funerals themselves, which are too often a mashup of anecdotes about the deceased and death denying speculation about the pie that surely awaits him in the sky by and by. There is, of course, nothing wrong with eulogizing a departed loved one or expressing the hope that we have for eternal life, but divorcing this from an acknowledgment of the reality of death—from the realization that even “in the midst of life we are in death”—fails to give the whole story and, what’s worse, belittles the grief of those who mourn.

You see, death is real and the tears we shed on the account of the dead and the prayers we utter on their behalf are just and good. Christ himself wept at the tomb of Lazarus; even in the mind of God death is not illusory. There is nothing about the way we are created that makes us invulnerable to it, so it’s not just a matter of our souls flying out of their earthly shells automatically because that’s what souls do or something. When we’re dead, we’re dead.

When Jesus raises Lazarus from the dead, he’s not showing us that death is an illusion, but rather that though death is very real God has the power and the will to defeat death. An interesting thing to note about John’s Gospel, is that while in the other Gospels miracles tend to be a display of Christ’s power, in John they’re didactic. Indeed, John calls them “signs” rather than “miracles”, because they are meant to point to some truth more profound than the effect of the miracle itself. So, that Lazarus dies again later really isn’t all that important, because Jesus’ intention wasn’t just to ensure that Lazarus would go on living for ever, but to teach us that God has the power to raise us all from death to life.

The catch is that we haven’t seen it yet, at least in its fulness. We believe that Jesus raised Lazarus to continued life, and we believe that God raised Christ to eternal life, but we don’t have to back quickly away from the cemetery plot after a funeral so that the body can spring up. This means that we have to retain that theological virtue called hope.

If you’ve never noticed it before, pay close attention when we recite the Nicene Creed in just a minute. We believe in this and that, but when we get to the last bit we don’t say “we believe” but “we look for the resurrection of the dead and the life of the world to come.” This distinction between faith and hope, between believing something and looking for it is really beyond the scope of this sermon, but it will suffice to say that the fact that the general Resurrection is a thing not yet accomplished means we approach its reality differently. Specifically, we hold these two truths which seem so contradictory together: that our old enemy death is real and it wins little victories every day, and at the same time death is defeated and we live eternally.

So, like all metaphors, the analogy with which I started the sermon—comparing the raising of Lazarus with catch-and-release fishing—breaks down at a certain point. I can hold that slippery, fishy smelling thing in my hands and feel some kind of connection with it just as Jesus can enter that smelly, dirty tomb and love the rotting thing in it. I can let the fish go knowing it’s just going to be somebody else’s supper and Jesus can raise Lazarus knowing he’s just going to be some worm’s supper eventually. But in the case of Lazarus and of all of us there is a blessed assurance that that’s not the end of the story. We have the capacity for mourning the dead and looking for their resurrection simultaneously. Indeed, that is not only our capacity but our obligation.

We are obliged to see the death all round us and not to lose hope. We are obliged to bury the dead and look for the day when the cemetery plot does burst open. We are obliged to prepare for our end and to know that it won’t always be the end, because our Lord who truly died is both resurrection and life, and though we shall likewise die yet shall we live.

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