Sermons

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

It won’t surprise many of you that my idea of a “beach read” is not shared by those whose relaxation is enhanced by light romances or heart-pumping thrillers. There’s nothing wrong with these, naturally; it’s just that I discovered that I have a rather puritanical view of vacations. So if the holiday in question is not planned around cultural experiences–and my time away a couple of weeks ago was not, by necessity–then I tend to choose reading material which is either difficult or in some way intellectually improving. So, among my most recent vacation reads was the collected biographies of the first twelve Caesars by Suetonius. My gesture toward the “beach read” impulse was to read them in translation, though this frequently had me pulling the original Latin up on my phone to determine what the translator had rendered as anachronistic English idioms, lexigraphic “rabbit holes” being one of my chief pastimes.

Anyway, one of the things that kept coming up, and which might strike some as less interesting than the frequent, flagrant depravities of these emperors, was how often manipulation of the grain dole was used to curry favor with the rowdy Roman populace. You may have heard the phrase “panem et circenses” before; it comes from a contemporary of Suetonius, the satirist Juvenal, who wrote “Everything now restrains itself and anxiously hopes for just two things: bread and circuses.” In other words, to keep the crowds in line, give them grain and put on spectacles, particularly gladiatorial contests and chariot races.

Indeed, the grain dole which began as an emergency measure during the Republic but morphed very quickly during the First Century A.D. into a permanent entitlement system, became even more important, I would argue, after the influence of Christianity ended violent spectacles. You can’t let the people enjoy watching other people get brutally murdered in the arena anymore, so you better give them even more grain to keep them from rioting! I’d also argue that this is why the Empire was so determined to integrate North Africa and the Levant into the imperial system and why there were constant attempts to keep Persia as a client state–these regions being far more productive than anywhere in Western Europe at the time, and why the eventual fall of the Western Empire was preceded by Vandals taking control of so many of those regions. Bread is life, and bread was also control until very recently in Western societies.

Some of you know I’ve been on a low-carb diet for a while now. I only mention it to say that this would have been an absurd and impossible project for human beings for nearly the entirety of human history (and, indeed, human prehistory). Even today, this reality obtains in much of the world for the vast majority of people, who would see a diet full of proteins and vegetables and fruit as a benefit of great wealth. Their primary source of calories remains wheat or rice or corn. I saw a horror-comedy movie not too long ago (which I liked a lot, but would only recommend to those of a stout constitution) called The Menu in which an obsessive chef, played by Ralph Fiennes, gives a lavish but deadly meal to a group of obscenely wealthy diners. The funniest moment to me, was when this chef presents his patrons a “non-bread bread course,”–just tiny cups of stuff one might spread on bread if he had any. Bread, he basically says, is what ordinary people eat to stay alive, you are not ordinary people, and so you will get no bread.

Conservatively speaking, bread probably became the primary source of our caloric intake in about 10,000 B.C. More than a thousand years before Christ and the Caesars, Joseph’s brothers arrive in Egypt. We heard the climax of the story today–Joseph is reconciled with the brothers who sold him into slavery–but what brought them to that point? They needed bread. Egypt had full granaries, and they did because Joseph proved himself an able and prophetic manager of that Kingdom’s system of storing and distributing grain. The need for that most simple thing which sustains life was transformed into the means of providing mercy and loving-kindness. Bread in this story is Grace.

What I really want us to consider (here Fr. John finally gets to the point!) is the final verse from this morning’s Gospel: “Good measure, pressed down, shaken together, running over, will be put into you lap. For the measure you give will be the measure you get back.” The image here is of one in a marketplace or perhaps at the local, imperial granary, the θησαυροζ, (literally, treasure house, and the word from which we get the English thesaurus). Unlike in the city of Rome, this would not have been an impressive structure with a courtyard and people milling about. In the Middle East it would have been a ταβὲρνα, a little shop basically, and there would have been a line stretching out into the city in the heat of the day. Now, Roman officials were famous for efficiency and officiousness. No doubt some state agent would verify that you were an adult, male Roman citizen as soon as you finally got inside to see if you were on the dole or if you’d have to pay for the grain at an extortionate price. Then some other official would quickly measure out your allotment and send you on your way. What they almost certainly wouldn’t have done was take your sack, fill it, shake it and push it down, add more, and repeat the process. They certainly wouldn’t fill your grain sack until it overflowed and let you keep whatever excess fell into your lap. The profligate generosity of this image would have struck those listening to Jesus’ sermon as wildly improbable, yet Jesus assures them that God’s Grace and the Grace we are to extend to others as his disciples works just like this.

Now the form which this call for us to serve as we have been served takes many forms. Charity in terms of alms and other practical means of offering support to the poor is absolutely one of them. I love what St. Augustine said in one of his sermons: “Come now, let’s see if you can cheer the poor up today. You be their granaries.” Elsewhere, in reference to the foolish landowner who kept expanding his farm before dying, he wrote that “the bellies of the poor are safer storehouses than barns.”

It is more than this sort of charity of which Jesus speaks today, though that is certainly part of. Our fallen, human obsession with what’s fair over what’s merciful, will balk at much of what Jesus says here. Love your enemies by doing good things for them, whatever they might have done to you. If somebody steals from you, don’t just let them go, give them some more. Don’t just avoid usury, don’t just avoid charging reasonable interest, but don’t expect a debtor even to pay you back. Most of all, and most difficult of all, don’t judge anybody, and not even in the “who am I to judge” way in which we rightly avoid condemning people whose offenses have nothing to do with us. Don’t judge anybody, even if they’ve harmed you.

Now these must be some of the hardest of Jesus’ teachings, full stop. I’m not smart enough to figure out how this radical selflessness is to be weighed against competing, Christian moral principles like justice, particularly when there are victims of real abuses that we just have to say–that victim needs to see something done on his or her behalf pertaining to make things right. I don’t know, and that’s why I’m glad I’m a priest instead of a judge or a cop.

Even more than not being able to sort it all out from a moral-theological standpoint, I know I’m not good enough, I’m not enough of a saint to succeed in living it out. None of us is, and maybe that’s part of the point.

But what I do know is this: as Christians, as followers of Jesus, as people who have been extended unmerited, unimaginable, infinite Grace through the Blood of the Lamb shed for our salvation, the most important thing we can do is to try our level best to extend grace to others. Grace doesn’t look on deserving. It has nothing to do with the way I, sinner that I am, tend to approach life–namely by the application of the priciple “what’s fair is fair.” It is, rather, the outworking of the kind of love which bears and hopes and believes and endures all things. It is tautologically gratuitous. It’s a hard thing to do sometimes. Or maybe it’s the hardest thing to do at any time! Thank God that God’s Grace can cover even our un-graciousness borne of ingratitude. Thank God that His Holy Spirit, working in us, can sometimes accomplish through us those acts of mercy and compassion that we cannot do on our own.

+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.

In light of just having heard St. Luke’s account of the beatitudes from Jesus’ Sermon on the Plain (the Lukan parallel of the Sermon on the Mount from St. Matthew’s Gospel), I want to speak briefly this morning about a somewhat controversial theological claim articulated during the latter half of the twentieth century- namely, the preferential option for the poor.

This concept, the preferential option, was first championed by the Peruvian theologian and Roman Catholic, Dominican priest Gustavo Gutiérez in his 1968 outline “Toward a Theology of Liberation.” The claim, in its simplest form, is that when Jesus said “Blessed are the poor” he was, in some sense, summarizing the moral and socio-political dimension of the entire biblical account, that there is a special place in God’s heart for the poor and marginalized, and that one of our chief moral duties as Christians is to help model the Kingdom of God insofar as its promise is to restore “the least of these” to wholeness, both spiritually and materially.

Now, this seems uncontroversial enough, doesn’t it? Over and over, scripture demands that those of us with means are obliged to serve those without. But consider when Gutiérez’s outline was released–1968–and the year his seminal monograph, A Theology of Liberation: History, Politics, and Salvation, was published–1971–and you might realize how this would have gone over. It was the height of the Cold War, and “enemy number one” was the “growing threat” of international Communism. The intellectual movement which Gutiérez’s work sparked, and which came to be known as liberation theology was, thus, labeled Marxist.

In fairness to the critics of liberation theology writ large (and I’d actually count myself among these critics) the movement strayed into what I, for one, would consider serious theological error. Many of the proponents leaned into Marxist analysis, reckoning class struggle the animating force of history rather than the death and resurrection of Christ Jesus and the sanctifying presence of the Holy Spirit. Too often praxis preceded theoria, the experience of well meaning but sometimes misguided activism took precedence over reflection on the truths given in Scripture and the Church’s tradition, that the movement produced what we might call a “false soteriology”- that is, a mistaken view of what constitutes salvation.

What do I mean? When the establishment of a particular socio-political reality by our own efforts becomes the chief end, when we call that our salvation, then our hope is founded in something at best merely adjacent to and at worst at odds with, the true salvation which is only in Christ Jesus. The same, naturally, can be said of liberation theology’s political polar opposite, the prosperity gospel, which has become popular in North American mega churches. This view seems to place salvation in the realm of the personal accumulation of wealth. Not to put too fine a point on it, but anything that places itself rather than Christ as the source and summit of salvation is, by definition, antichrist. Now, there’s a qualitative moral difference between a system whose intended end is social equality and one whose end is the sanctification of personal greed. I don’t mean to make a false equivalency here. But neither can in itself be the Gospel, and if either claims to be, then we are in real trouble. Either soteriological perspective falls victim to “trust[ing] in man” as the Lord spoke to Jeremiah in this morning’s old testament lesson, and the result, we are told, is curse rather than salvation.

But let’s take a step back and consider two questions: first, what does scripture teach with regard to the status of the poor in the heart of God and what is our concommitant obligation? And second, how does this relate to a true soteriology?

Answering the first question is easier. James tells us God has chosen the poor to be rich in faith. Our Lady, in the Magnificat, celebrates God’s choice of the lowly to be vessels of his Grace, herself chief among them. The Psalmist continually reminds us of God’s special desire for the poor. The Law of Moses, over and over again, makes special note of Israel’s responsibility for the indigent who dwell among them. Matthew 25 identifies the moral center of the Gospel as being based on how faithful we are in loving those with less. I’ll hold back from peppering prooftexts all over you, but suffice to say, the biblical account is clear.

I think most of us acknowledge this. Christians, indeed all people of goodwill, have genuine differences of opinion on what the most effective way of aiding the poor is, and a lot of our political disagreements about things like tax structure and social programs come from people with different views about what the best approach is to lifting the poor from their poverty, but that they nonetheless desire a more equitable situation. Perhaps I’m a Pollyanna on this point, but I feel I have to hold on to that so as not to despair. Of course, there are some who simply “despise the poor in their poverty.” But, I think most of us care enough about the moral demands of the Gospel to recognize our obligation to help those in need.

So, that was the easy question, believe it or not. Now to the difficult question, the one pertaining to salvation. It is worth noting that Luke’s version of the beatitudes has several differences with Matthew’s more popular version, but the difference you might have noticed this morning is the inclusion of “woes” after the “blesseds.” The blessedness of the poor and the hungry and the mournful and the persecuted is contrasted with the coming doom of the rich and the full and the joyous and those who are praised in this world. This should remind us of earlier passages in Luke’s Gospel. It should remind us of the Magnificat, which I’ve already mentioned. It should remind us of Jesus’ first sermon in the synagogue in Nazareth, in which he proclaimed the year of Jubilee and was nearly killed for it. It may also, and this is where it gets awfully uncomfortable, remind you of Jesus’ conversation with the rich young man in Luke 18, in which the young man’s wealth made him despair of his ability to follow the Christ who said “it is easier for a camel to go through the eye of a needle than for a rich man to enter the Kingdom of God.”

So, here is the really difficult question, not necessarily difficult because the answer is unclear but difficult because the clear answer makes us so uncomfortable. Is it easier for a poor person to get into heaven than a rich person? Yes. The answer is yes. Now, to be fair, in Luke 18, after the rich man’s desolation, Jesus himself reminds us that “what is impossible with men is possible with God,” but possible does not mean easy.

But, why? It is not because the wealthy are inherently more sinful nor that the poor are more inherently ethical. I believe that we should neither fetishize the poor nor engage in class struggle. This, too, is idolatry. It is, rather, that the more comfortable one is, the more advantages one has, the closer such idols, such false sources of hope for salvation, lie at hand.

I say all this as a sinner in need of saving from the selfsame tendency toward idolatry. I know for a fact that I have–at least on occasion–sought to find my own salvation in money or security or my education or my professional attainments or my innate cleverness instead of in the Lord Jesus Christ, who is the only thing that can actually save me.

The one benefit, then, the most poor and distressed have in this life is an ease in recognition that the hope for salvation must be built on something greater and more eternal. God does not will penury, no more than God would will any other difficulty that has befallen our world due to sin. Nevertheless, it is in these extremities that men and women can catch a glimpse of the saving power of God in ways that our own comfort and self-reliance can obscure.

It is, then, our obligation as those with more-than-enough to get by, not only to aid the poor (and feed the hungry and welcome the stranger and visit the sick and the prisoner and do all the other things our Lord requires of us) but also to tear down the altars we have erected to false gods in our own hearts (to the gods of wealth and comfort and security and all the rest) until we can be assured that our hope is built on nothing less, nor anything more, than Jesus’ blood and righteousness. In other words, we ask God to purify our hearts to be a temple made even for himself.

+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 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.