Sermons

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

Last week we heard that wonderful account from the Book of Nehemiah in which Ezra the Scribe reintroduced the Law to the Jewish people outside the Water Gate of Jerusalem. As a reminder, the Jews had been permitted to return to their homeland after the Persians under Cyrus the Great defeated the Babylonian Empire, under whose rule the Jews had lived in exile for around seventy years. With the help of the Persians, they rebuilt the Temple and the city walls and resumed their common cultural and religious life, with the major exception that they had been muddling through without the benefit of knowing or having easy access to the Law of Moses for over eighty years. So Ezra read the Torah, the Five Books of Moses, to them and interpreted it for them and then sent them on their way telling that instead of immediately mourning their generations-long disobedience they should first rejoice and celebrate that the Law had come back to them.

What I failed to mention was that there was yet one more critically important element of the Jewish religious heritage which Ezra was incapable of bringing back to the people. The temple had been rebuilt and its system of sacrificial worship restored. The edicts of God had been rediscovered and renewed. But(!), the Ark of the Covenant and the stone tablets of the commandments which it contained remained lost. Indeed it remains lost to this day.

The mystery of its whereabouts came up in our adult Sunday school a month or two ago when we were considering the Books of the Maccabees. In the second chapter of Second Maccabees we learn that the Prophet Jeremiah hid the Ark somewhere on the mountain where Moses had first received the Law. Some of his followers attempted to mark a path (a sort of treasure map) so they could find it again when the exile was over, but the prophet rebuked them, explaining that its hiding place should remain a secret to future generations, but that it would be found again when “God gathers his people together again and shows his mercy.” One would think that he had meant by this the year 538 B.C., when the Babylonian Exile had ended, but this was apparently not the case.

So where is it? I explained to the class that it was not actually recovered by Indiana Jones, rescuing it from the Nazis who wanted to use it as a weapon of mass destruction, before placing it in a warehouse under the vigilant eyes of “top men.” The likeliest candidate for its actual location (though it’s hard to say, because so many of the theories have an element of strangeness and conspiracism) is Axum, where the Ethiopian Orthodox Church claims to have it under lock-and-key, but they won’t let anybody but monks and senior prelates see it, so who knows?!

Now, what if I told you the Ark had been found? You’d think I was crazy, that I had delusions of being the real-life Indiana Jones! Well, I can’t make a claim for the literal, historical artifact, but when we read scripture typologically, understanding that the Old and New Testaments make once hidden meaning clear, that prophecy is fulfilled in unexpected ways, then in a real sense we can say that the Ark has been found, and this is what we are celebrating on this great feast day.

Now, before I explain what I mean, a disclaimer is in order. It used to be that one of the worst things you could be called in certain circles of progressive Christianity was a “supercessionist”, which in those circles is a theologically loaded way of accusing somebody of being an anti-semite. I’m not sure that this is still the case, since so many on the extreme end of those circles have moved from expressing absolutely legitimate concerns about human rights in Gaza and elsewhere into honest-to-God anti-semitism themselves, under the euphemism “Christian Anit-Zionism.” This is all complicated and sensitive, but suffice it to say that you can lament and even denounce violations of proportionality under just war principles without saying nonsense like “Hamas are good guys, actually.” It seems to me a lot of presumably well-meaning people on all sides have lost the plot, as they say.

Anyway, the charge of “supercessionism” by those who use the term, is that it is inherently anti-semitic to claim that the New Covenant has fulfilled the Old. Well, the problem with saying supercessionism is bad, then, seems to mean that we’re not actually supposed believe what the New Testament says. There’s a lot of rhetorical mumbo-jumbo to try to claim that it means something else, a lot of hermeneutic hand-waving, but in my opinion that’s essentially the crux of the matter. So, I could be perhaps legitimately accused of supercessionism, and like I said, at least at one point in very recent history that would mean there are plenty of cocktail parties I’d not get an invitation to at the American Academy of Religion annual conference, if I ever went to it, but I can live with that.

Lastly on this matter, before finally returning to the point, I’d say that you’ve got to hold this truth together with the fact that God doesn’t go back on his promises, and so he’s absolutely not sending faithful, observant Jews to hell or anything like that! They are God’s people AND God has extended that definition to include Christ’s Church in which, through Jesus, we have all been made citizens with the saints. If you want fancy theological terms to explain this, punitive supercessionism is illegitimate but economic supercessionism seems inescapable in a genuinely Christian systematic theology, at least in my opinion.

And here’s the point I’ve been creeping up on with the preceding disclaimer–the location of the physical, historical Ark of the Covenant is ultimately irrelevant, because this day, the Ark of the New Covenant and even more importantly, the New Covenant itself made manifest, return to the temple. The ark is Our Lady, who bore the Word in her spotless womb. The Covenant itself is manifest not in tablets of stone, but in flesh and blood in the person of Jesus Christ.

There were two rites being fulfilled in the Jerusalem temple that day more than two millennia ago. One of them used to be the title of this feast day–the Purification of the Blessed Virgin Mary. The belief, understandably de-emphasized by the holiday’s name change because it seems so backwards by contemporary standards, that a woman was ritually unclean after giving birth was actually, probably the primary reason for the Holy Family’s visit to the temple. You hear me complain enough about certain updates to our liturgical practices in the latter half of the last century, but one change for which I’m extremely grateful is that the old service of “The Churching of Women” which seemed to assume something like this belief (and, lets face it, the inability of a lot of men to see women’s bodies as either objects to be possessed or mysterious, icky things to be covered up either ritually or literally) has happily been replaced by a service of thanksgiving for the birth or adoption of a child. In all events, if there were ever a woman who didn’t need a ritual purification after giving birth, it was Our Lady, and yet faithful to the law under which she was still living, she dutifully presented herself at the temple.

The second rite, which we focus more on these days, is the presentation of the Christ Child. This is actually another requirement of the Law, but there’s a twist here. The redemption of the firstborn was a sign of the deaths of the first-born sons of Egypt and the redemption of the first-born of the Israelites at the Passover. To redeem the Israelites that were spared an offering to the Temple was expected, either a lamb and a pigeon or turtledove or, for the poor (as was the case for the Holy Family), no lamb and two birds. There are apparently conflicting traditions here, as in Exodus and even elsewhere in Leviticus (from which the reference in the Gospel comes) the price of redemption was not sacrificial animals but money, specifically five shekels. In any event, some offering was to be made. What is not expected in the Law, though, is that the first-born son himself be presented, just the offering. It would have been more likely, were he an ordinary first-born son, that Jesus would have been left with his Aunt Elizabeth or some other relative while Mary and Joseph went to the temple to fulfill their obligations. So the child’s presence in the temple is significant. Six hundred years after Jeremiah hid the Ark and the tablets, they have both returned in an unexpected and glorious manner.

So is the fact that it was not the priests but an elderly man and an elderly woman known for their devotion who understand who the child is. The temple elite, no doubt, would have preferred the armies of Israel to rise up and return with the Ark of the Covenant to presage the successful Jewish revolt against the Romans that was in fact never to come. The wisdom of Simeon and of Anna was to see that the Ark was before them, the Law had become flesh, the whole world had changed because God had chosen to save his people by means the powerful had not anticipated, but which had been anticipated by the prophets of old.

And the Fathers also bear witness to the return of the Ark and of the Word of God in the reopening of the temple to the nations, albeit not the temple made with hands, a copy of the true one. St. Jerome remarks in a rather earthy section in his tract against the Pelagians, which considering the hour and the company I’ll put delicately rather than quoting directly, that the east door of the temple through which only the high priest may pass on his way to the Ark and which had been closed for century upon century was indeed opened in the moment of Christ’s birth in Bethlehem.

An image which I love most of all pertaining to this day, and with which I’ll conclude is given by St. Ephrem the Syrian, who explains the Prophetess Anna’s prediction that a sword should pierce the Blessed Virgin’s soul. Yes, it is the sword of grief which she felt standing at the foot of the cross. But it is also the flaming sword with which the cherubim guard the tree of life in Eden. Whereas Eve’s trespass closed the door to Paradise, the new Eve, Mary the Mother of God, has disarmed the sentries and opened the way once more. As Adam fled with his spouse, the New Adam, Christ Jesus, has first stormed the gates of Hell and then opened the way back to Paradise, where with his Mother he awaits his Spouse, the Holy Church of God, to welcome her, to welcome us, back to the Temple not made with hands, heaven itself, where he will reign over us for all eternity. To him be the glory to the ages of ages. Amen.

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

Our yearly Christmas gift exchange in the family typically takes a long time for various reasons, even after we imposed a two-gift limit on each household. One reason is that my mother-in-law is famous for coming up with obscure things to write on the gift labels which we have to figure out before we can open the ones she gave. This year, each of the gifts had a quote on the label whose speaker we had to identify. Some were said by family members, some by family friends, some by deadpan comedian Steven Wright, and still others by Friedrich Nietzsche. Anyway, everyone knew who said the following immediately: “cats do not need to be baptized, because contrary to popular belief, they are born without the stain of original sin.” Those were my words, in a text message reply to a cartoon about the dangers of trying to baptize a cat my mother-in-law had sent me.

While true, the connection between baptism and original sin makes the event we commemorate every year on this Sunday, the Baptism of our Lord, a bit tricky. If Baptism is for the remission of sins, and Christ was like us in every way but sin, why in heavens name did he need to be baptized?!

It’s a natural question, but I think it stems from a misunderstanding of the nature of Holy Baptism. It is certainly the case that we believe Baptism to be for the forgiveness of sins. The Nicene Creed says as much, and the Church Fathers explain that even those who are not guilty of particular sins, primarily infants, are nonetheless subject to the stain of original sin, that sad state of affairs enacted by the fall whereby no man can escape sin’s reality. Thus, we are all in need of Baptism for the remission of sins, but to view Baptism as only effecting our state in this regard is to take a rather narrow view of a complex Sacrament which effects us in more ways than that, and it confuses the nature of Christ’s own baptism.

Let’s take another look at the Gospel Reading:

When Jesus also had been baptized and was praying, the heaven was opened, and the Holy Spirit descended upon him in bodily form, as a dove, and a voice came from heaven, “Thou art my beloved Son; with thee I am well pleased.”

Now, Jesus’ baptism seemed to effect something quite different than the remission of sins, of which, remember, he was not in need. Instead, we learn from his Baptism something about his relationship to the Godhead. We learn about his intimate connection to the Father and the Holy Spirit. For Christ, this was a relationship which was already a reality. The Creation Story in Genesis makes this much clear, when we see the Father creating the world by means of the Word (or Logos) of which Jesus became the embodiment, and we learn of His Spirit moving over the deep.

This relationship preceded Creation, it has been for eternity in fact, but in the Waters of Baptism, it is made tangible. The Holy Spirit does not arise as a feeling, but descends as a dove. The Father is not presented as a concept, but as a person with a voice which can be heard.

This is very important, because it is what is so unique about the Christian faith. If there is one thing I am reminded of by Jesus’ baptism it is this. It’s not all about some mental or spiritual transcendence whereby we leave the world and live on some different plane of existence. Rather, God is made known in ordinary, tangible stuff.

The mystery of the Trinity is made real when Jesus, a flesh-and-blood human being, stepped into regular old water. Our relationship with the Trinity is effected with regular old water which, by the Grace of God, becomes something extraordinary. The Mystery of Salvation, of Christ’s death and resurrection, is made known to us not through mental gymnastics, but through ordinary water and ordinary bread and ordinary wine which by the Grace of God becomes something extraordinary. We learn from Acts that the presence of the Holy Spirit is effected not by some sort of transcendental meditation, but through the laying on of physical apostolic hands onto a flesh and blood person, just as today, the Grace of the Holy Spirit is made real when the successors of those first apostles lay their hands, ordinary old hands, onto an ordinary head to confirm or ordain someone.

So, Baptism is about more than just the remission of sins, though for us sinners that’s part of the story. Baptism is also about the ability of God to create a relationship with flesh-and-blood people in the material world. It’s about Christ being known not primarily by spiritual athletes who stay in their studies or their cells and just think a lot (as edifying and gratifying as that practice can be from time to time). Nor is it about having some grand “spiritual” experience (again, not a bad thing, but not the point). Rather, the power and glory of God is made present in the midst of remarkably ordinary things: water, bread, wine, flesh, blood. The Grace of God is made present in the gathering of flesh-and-blood people, who’ve been regenerated by the Holy Spirit and maintain holy relationships with God and each other.

We as Christians, and particularly as Anglicans, have an Incarnational faith, which is to say that the reality of God becoming man in Christ Jesus makes all the difference for how we view the world. The world is no longer just a place for “stumbling blocks”, but has become the setting of God’s saving work. Christ’s Incarnation, His Baptism at the Jordan, His whole life of woe, and his physical, bodily Resurrection all point to the fact that the way to holiness is not by some kind of world-denying levitation, but by being Christians in the material world, among ordinary stuff, acknowledging reality, and watching God make his presence known around us in the midst of that which is commonplace, whether it be ordinary water, ordinary bread and wine, or ordinary people. It is the ordinary things that serve as the vessels God uses to make His Grace known and felt. In just a few moments, we’ll see that Grace made powerfully present again. May it be a reminder for us of just how extraordinary it is when God comes rushing into our midst and changes us and makes his love known and felt. He does it for us all the time, but how much more wonderful it is when we recognize it: in plain old water, in pretty tasteless bread, in not fantastic wine, in that person sitting next to you, in the midst of ordinary stuff. It takes a great God to forgo thunderbolts and a booming voice and the like to make Himself known in quotidian things; it takes a God who values us, who values our experience, who wants to be in a relationship with us all the time. Thank God that’s our God!

+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 year on this Sunday our Gospel lesson is taken from the prologue of the Gospel according to John, and we hear the Christmas story from a different perspective–that of cosmic history rather than the particular history recorded in the nativity stories found in Matthew and especially Luke. I loved what our new Presiding Bishop, the Rt. Rev’d Sean Rowe wrote in his Christmas message this year–namely that for him the moment Christmas truly arrives is when he hears those words, “and the Word was made flesh and dwelt among us,” again, as indeed we did in the traditional “Last Gospel” Christmas Eve, again the next morning in church on Christmas Day, and yet a third time today for those who attended all three services. It occurs to me that I have preached on this text fifteen years in a row on this Sunday, and though it is among my favorites, I’m going to do something shocking this morning and preach on the Epistle instead. I think you’ll find that it does connect, though, because it explicates what Christ, the Word of God, coming into the world means for us in very practical terms. Namely, so as not to bury the lede, it means that we have obtained freedom in the Gospel, the purpose of the Law of the Old Testament being to prepare us to accept the same.

“The law was our custodian,” Paul wrote to the Galatians, “until Christ came.” The word translated custodian here, or disciplinarian in some other translations, is a bit different and more specific in the Greek. Paul actually says “The law was our paidagogos until Christ came.” A paidagogos was a person with a very important job in the Hellenistic world. He was usually one of the highest ranked and most trusted slaves of the household and he had but one job: convey the children of the household to the gymnasium, the local school, and get them back home again safely at the end of the day. I don’t suspect you see this so much around here (and I know we didn’t when I lived in rural Arkansas), but back when I lived in New York City, there was an equivalent profession- the nanny. Like an uptown Manhattan nanny, the paidagogos had to be trusted a great deal for those parents to turn their kids into his hands. He had to care for the children as if they were his own to execute his job rightly.

So, Paul is saying something like- the Law of the Old Testament was our nanny. The Law got us to school safely and got us back home. The Law kept us from stepping into the oncoming traffic of worldly concerns; it kept us out of the hands of those who would kidnap our hearts and minds, not to get a ransom from wealthy Upper East Side parents, but to pervert our faith and morals, to convince us that the God of Israel is not even our Father after all.

Now, if we were a Jewish synagogue rather than a Christian church, that would be the end of it. But for Paul, and for us, the metaphor must go one step further. We are no longer children. We are expected to approach God as adults, to have a mature relationship with him. Like adult children, we no longer have the threat or the comfort of getting straightened out when our parents get home. “We are no longer under a disciplinarian”, a paidagogos, a nanny. We are expected to live faithfully by our own choice.

Paul was addressing some very specific issues when he made this point. The Church in Galatia was in an uproar as it struggled to determine the requirements of Christianity. There were those who maintained that a gentile, should she or he wish to become a Christian, must first become a Jew. Specifically, for men this meant undergoing the rite of circumcision- less of an issue for an eight-day-old child as for an adult convert as you can imagine. On the other hand, there were those who claimed that Christianity was for all, not only for Jews and those who would become Jews. Believe it or not, this was probably the most controversial issue the church has ever faced. Forget about all of the fights we’ve had about new prayerbooks, and women priests, and human sexuality. Whether or not a gentile could become a Christian without becoming a Jew was far more controversial, and, at least in some sense an even more important question, because it was about the availability of salvation itself to the 99% of the world’s population that wasn’t fortunate enough to be born Jewish.

Paul, as you may be aware, sides with the so-called “uncircumcision party”. He says that you don’t have to become a Jew to become a Christian:

For as many of you as were baptized into Christ have put on Christ [he writes]. There is neither Jew nor Greek, there is neither slave nor free, there is neither male nor female; for you are all one in Christ Jesus.

For Paul, and for the Church, the Law was certainly God-given, it was certainly good, but it was like one of those nannies, and it took us to school and back home while we were young, but now we’re older and it’s up to us to get on without a nanny. Our parent, God himself, who is the perfect embodiment of fatherhood and motherhood, trusts us to do that. It’s a lot harder than having our hand held by a nanny; it’s a lot harder than knowing all the time exactly what the rules are, exactly what the boundaries are, exactly where all the dangers lie on the road. Even so, God trusts us to take on the challenge.

But, oh how we love rules! Maybe not all of you are preternatural rule-followers, but I know I am. I’m not sure sometimes if I’m a very good Christian, but I believe I’d make an excellent Orthodox Jew. Knowing what is permitted to eat and what not, when and how precisely to pray, being given a specific moral guide in the form of “shalls” and “shall nots”: it would be very comforting to me, and in some sense easier than having my relationship with God predicated on something so vague as faith. This is not to say that following the laws of the Torah was an easy way of life for those who followed it and still do; but for folks so disposed, like I am, to appreciate clear direction, it is at least more straight-forward.

I wonder sometimes whether or not the majority of Christians are still, in a sense, living under the law. While the Old Testament injunctions against pork and the requirement of ritual circumcision and the rest are no longer deemed requirements, many have set up alternative sets of rules. What precisely the rules are is beside the point. The point is that the natural view of religion is that it must have at its heart certain rules which serve as the center of the religion. Whether or not we preach it, it is only natural to see our faith as an exercise in rule-following, to boil Christianity down to the “shalls” and “shall nots” and see them as the central message.

What Paul tells us is that, to the contrary, Christianity is not about rules but about a relationship: a relationship of faith with a God who has literally come down to earth to establish the preconditions that make such a relationship possible. While it is easier to follow rules than to truly trust God, the latter is what it’s all about. What’s more, rules by themselves can breed elitism and contempt. Rules can divide. But a trusting, loving relationship with God is open to all, Jew and Greek, slave and free, male and female.

Don’t get me wrong–there are certainly moral and spiritual expectations that could and maybe should be seen as rules. The ten commandments are still important, and Jesus gives us some rules himself: “love the Lord your God with all your heart, mind, and soul and your neighbor as yourself” is a pretty good one. But the rules aren’t the center. They all proceed from the relationship of faith and love which we have with God. That relationship is the core. So, for those of us who are rule-followers this might be difficult, but the Good News is that we are now free to build that relationship on terms other than laws. We can build that relationship through our own prayer and discernment, through our own loving relationship with God with the guidance of the Church and the strength given by her Sacraments. Without the nanny holding our hand, we’re now able to enter into our own personal relationship with God (and for that matter, to allow that primary relationship to direct how we relate to each other)- an adult relationship, just as fraught but just as rewarding as an adult child has with a mother or father. There is still trust and support and love. Indeed, these qualities are even richer because they are love and trust and support based on mutuality and respect. So it is when we nurture an adult relationship with our heavenly father. True, the way is beset by dangers, but the kind of relationship we can have is all the better because of this freedom we have in Christ Jesus who came as at this time to dwell among us and promises to enjoy eternity with us in a relationship of perfect love.

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