Sermons

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

One of the most peculiar things I experienced during the eclipse a couple weeks ago was how it affected the wildlife. I knew to expect this, but it was still surprising. At one point I saw what I thought to be a bird flying past after all the others had gone quiet and hidden, but looking closer it was obviously a bat. We saw a rabbit emerge from a bush who became very confused once the sun came out. And most dramatically, a transformer exploded nearby and we later learned that a presumably confused bird had flown into it. Since Aristotle, we’ve said that the distinguishing element of humanity is that we are so-called “rational animals.” While scholars of comparative cognition will tell us, quite rightly, that we’ve underestimated the capacity of some beasts to be more adept at reasoning than they’ve historically been given credit for, complex (and especially moral) reasoning seems largely the domain of our species alone.

Thus it might have struck the disciples as somewhat rude to be compared with an animal often reckoned a rather silly, irrational creature – the humble sheep. This is an animal prone to going astray, wandering into danger, bred to be easily herded, but at a loss when shepherd-less.

Jesus may have seemed to be speaking in a manner not wholly complimentary when he referred to his disciples as sheep, but to get hung up on our assumption that sheep are just dumb creatures is both to miss the point and, perhaps, to give ourselves too much credit. We, like sheep find that we do not have the wisdom and self-control to keep ourselves on the narrow path. Like the bat and the rabbit and the kamikaze bird I mentioned, we too are prone to following appetite rather than reason. We have something to learn from sheep, though. As irrational as they may seem, they know that their well-being is dependent on the shepherd. They are hard-wired, through their evolutionary history, to follow the leader. They “know” (insofar as an animal can be said to “know” at thing) that their safety is dependent on doing so.

We human beings have more trouble with this. Thanks to sin, we believe that we have everything we need within ourselves. Our own culture has exacerbated this fault of our nature. We believe in rugged individualism. We’ve learned to help ourselves, and seeking direction from someone or something outside of ourselves is reckoned a weakness.

Too often, religion (or at least certain types of religion) is little help. Too often, we get the message that the path to health and salvation, the pathway which leads us by green pastures and still waters where our souls are restored, are our own to navigate. It’s rarely said so explicitly, but religion can become all about being perfect or saying a certain prayer with somebody on television who has given us six steps to salvation. This might all be well and good, but if that’s all there is to faith, then it’s still about me doing my own private thing to chart my own path to salvation, a path which is ultimately more about myself than about God.

It is far more difficult for us to follow. On one level the sheep and the cows might have it more together than we do, because they know when they aren’t on the right path; that’s why they run around like they’re crazy and get into trouble. We humans are so smart that we can convince ourselves that we’re going the right way when we aren’t. We tell ourselves that on the path of life there’s no need to pull over to the gas station to ask for directions or to turn on the GPS device in our car, because we’re smarter than that, by gosh.

All of this is to say that the Christian life requires remarkable humility. The Good Shepherd is always ready to lead our unruly hearts, but we must be humble enough to receive his direction. Christ is ready to bring us to the heavenly banquet, his rod correcting us and his staff comforting us along the way, but we can’t be haughty or we’ll strike out on our own, thinking our own directions better. We already find ourselves in the flock, which is Christ’s Church, and the shepherd is leading us as we hear and experience his direction in scripture and prayer and in the breaking of bread. If, then, we are modest enough to listen, to listen carefully to the voice of the Shepherd, we may rest assured that we will be led to the springs of the water of life and will dwell with God in eternity.

+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.

When I was in college, I took several retreats at a Trappist monastery in upstate New York. Some of my more secular friends and even some of my pious Christian friends thought this a rather odd thing to do. If those monks wanted to remove themselves from the messy world, they thought, it was all well and good. But why would I want to. The vision they had of the monks were that they were perfect, almost spectral figures who were advanced enough in piety to leave “the world” and dwell in some ghostly alternative dimension. For all my adolescent grandiosity, my friends knew I was essentially a rather “down-to-earth” fellow and couldn’t see me floating around with these pious, spiritual people.

As I said in last week’s sermon, popular religion often holds a rather strange view of what it is to be “spiritual”: holy people floating about, profoundly detached from the material world. This is not the Christian view, however. The goal for the monks whom I liked to visit, and the lives of the saints, and God’s hope for all of us is not some sort of world-denying transcendence in this life. Certainly, piety and the virtues are important, but they are to be acted out in this world, because God has deemed this world, as strife-torn and sin-sick as it is, as being an appropriate place in which to become incarnate, in which he himself might abide.

Again, as I said last week, I think that our popular view of holiness might stem from a misconception about Jesus, a misconception which today’s Gospel means to dispel. When the risen Lord appeared to the disciples, he had them touch him in order to disabuse them from their initial fear that he was a ghost. It seems confusing that the disciples would react this way, since Luke tells us that they were talking about how Jesus had risen from the dead.

In fact, the passage appointed in our lectionary begins a couple of verses too late and thus we miss the transition which makes sense of this. The apostles had as yet not seen the risen Christ. They had only the empty tomb and the report of a man named Cleopas and his companion who had just met Jesus on a walk from Jerusalem to Emmaus. The apostles themselves only had the word of others on which to found their hope in the reality of the resurrection.

Thus, it is into a room filled not with joy but with confusion that Jesus entered and said “peace be with you.” This is why the apostles responded not by saying “and with thy spirit”, but by growing more confused and frightened. Was this a ghost, a figment of their imaginations brought about by wishful thinking? Was it a so-called “spiritual experience” in which the memory of Jesus was resurrected in their hearts, but wasn’t really there, as some contemporary theologians are want to argue?

No. Jesus has the apostles touch his very body and even make him something to eat. One cannot touch an imaginary friend. One cannot give breakfast to a sentiment. The disciples’ Lord had risen bodily, literally. He was still made of flesh and blood and bones just like them and just like us. And he still is, his incorruptible body just as much a real body as any other.

Christ’s body and the bodies of those Christians living in his risen life are certainly “spiritual bodies”, but they are no less physical bodies. I think some confusion has arisen from a false dichotomy between “spiritual” and “physical”. These two terms are not opposites. Rather, the opposite of “spiritual” is “profane” and the opposite of “physical” is “incorporeal”, or perhaps, to use the language of today’s Gospel, “ghostly”. The risen life can thus be both spiritual and physical, and it shouldn’t have to be any other way, for why else would God have given us these fleshy things called bodies (mine perhaps increasingly fleshy as I slump into middle age) in the first place. The prophet Joel prophesied about the day of Pentecost as the time when God would “pour [His] Spirit upon all flesh”, not that He would replace our flesh with spirits.

Something is spiritual by virtue of its being animated by a spirit, whether that be the Spirit of God, or the spirit of antichrist, which John mentions in his first epistle general, a little bit later in the letter from which we get today’s epistle. The point is that our bodies can be tools for glorifying their Creator, or as occasions for sin. Anyway, the Christian, by his or her baptism, is made a dwelling place for the right kind of spirit, that is the Holy Spirit.

And on the last day, when the dead shall be raised, they shall be raised with real, spirit-filled bodies. Christianity has never held that heaven is a ghost town. Rather we believe it will be a city filled with the real bodies of the faithful. As John says in today’s epistle, the precise nature of this body is as yet veiled in mystery, but “what we do know is this: when [God] is revealed we will be like Him, for we will see him as He is.”

So, what does all this mean for us now? Well, for starters, and as I mentioned last week, it means that our goal as faithful people is not to transcend the physical reality in which we find ourselves but to be God’s children in the midst of the created order. Just as God deigned it appropriate to come into this world with a real, tangible body and to remain for all eternity in such a body, albeit transformed, so we too are to be spiritual people in a real, physical world.

What’s more, to push it a bit further than I did last week, we are called to treat the created order as something good. Our bodies are not mere shells for our souls. They are, rather, gifts from God capable of being enlivened and transformed by the Holy Spirit. Despite what my college friends thought, this is something those monks in that abbey I went to knew very well. All of the sacrifice and austerity was not a means of denying the body, but of reminding one how the body was a gift from God, contingent on His provision of sustenance for it. Despite what we might think about the saints, all of the spiritual work and even corporal mortification which they underwent was not a means of subduing the body but of remembering to conform the body itself to Christ. So too must we reckon our bodies not as something keeping us from enjoying the divine life, but temples of the Holy Spirit to be treated with reverence and respect.

Likewise, the whole earth itself is not to be considered an impediment to the Christian life, but a gift from God to be treated with care and stewardship. Just like we humans fell into sin, so too did all creation fall after the sin of Adam, but in the Incarnation it was nonetheless deemed a place worthy of God’s own presence. As I suggested may be the case in my newsletter column this month, this was certainly my own experience Monday, taking in a natural wonder and being the more convinced of the wisdom and power of the one whom we claim set the stars in their courses–not from an unscientific “argument from design” but from a profoundly emotional sense in beholding something beautiful, explicable by human reason but not made the less wondrous for it.

So, Christ’s bodily nature after the resurrection should lead us to a certain respect for the created order and ourselves as a part of it. This naturally leads to some moral implications, the general principle being that what God has deemed good enough for himself should be honored by us, His people, and preserved for future generations.

There are also some implications here with regard to prayer. When we recognize the goodness of Creation and of our own “creatureliness”, our own embodiment, prayer becomes less a matter of transcending that reality and more a matter of inviting God’s transcendent glory and majesty, His Spirit, into our midst. Prayer is not escapism, not a means of downplaying our bodily existence or the difficulties that come along with it. Prayer is, rather, a means by which we ask God to fill that reality with His presence. The world and our individual existence within it are not illusory, not gnostic demiurgic emanations–they are God’s design and the reality in which God does His work. We cannot meditate our way out of this reality, nor should we. Rather we may and should always ask God to intercede in this Creation, which is His own possession, with the assurance that He will ultimately work his purposes out.

And finally, we should be ever mindful that God continues to enter this world and proclaim it His own, good possession. He continues to enter each of us and proclaim us as His children. This He does by His glorious, yet quotidian reappearing in the creatures of Bread and Wine. In these gifts, which we shall soon enjoy once more, Christ enters creation again; He enters common objects, that the Father might claim us, common earthbound men and women, as His own. May we be so aware of His bodily presence in this sacrament that we take it to our benefit and go out from here as resurrected people, given a foretaste of that city in which we shall one day dwell.

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 the Sunday following Easter Day–commonly called Low Sunday–we hear the same Gospel reading, St. John’s account of the Lord appearing to “Doubting Thomas.” So, I’ve preached sixteen sermons about this text, and usually it’s about Thomas’ doubt and belief and how we should be a bit more understanding of the poor man, because he’s more like us than we’d like to admit. I want to do something a bit different this year.

This morning I want to focus on a matter we see running through all our readings today, namely the oft-overlooked affirmation in scripture of material reality. I say it’s overlooked because sometimes Christians, even relatively well-catechized ones, make this assumption that ours is a primarily disembodied faith.

Some years ago I even had two seminary-trained clergy (I note, not Episcopal clergy, though this confusion is not unheard of among clergy in our own corner of Christendom) who were shocked to learn that I believed Christ’s Resurrection (as well as ours on the last day) was a fundamentally bodily, physical Resurrection, not something merely spiritual or spectral. Christianity is a profoundly body-affirming faith, even in its most ascetic movements, which seek to deny not physicality but fallen fleshliness. More about that in a moment. The opposite, the rejection of material existence and the Creation which, though fallen, God deemed good, is not Christianity but Gnosticism.

Let’s consider this morning’s readings. In his First Epistle General, St. John writes:

That which was from the beginning, which we have heard, which we have seen with our eyes, which we have looked upon and touched with our hands, concerning the word of life – the life was made manifest, and we saw it, and testify to it, and proclaim to you the eternal life which was with the Father and was made manifest to us.

The word of life, the second person of the Trinity, was not merely a principle or a spiritual force. It, he, was “made manifest” such that he could be seen and heard and touched.

In our reading from the Acts of the Apostles, however one may feel about the economic policy which it may imply (and that, I think, is complicated, and we’re not well served by trying to fit this neatly into modern political terms), one thing it does make clear is that the life of Christians is communal and has material implications. We do not see these early disciples each going his or her own way, becoming hermits, and living on bread and water to simulate a total detachment from physical existence. Whatever else might be said of the economics of early Christian community, it at least recognizes the fundamentally physical nature of existence, the understanding that possessions (however personal ownership and distribution is handled), are gifts from God created to enable human flourishing and require that we view them with a more nuanced moral and spiritual approach than simply saying “I detach myself from life and call these things illusory or somehow “less real” than some primal spiritual force, that they are some gnostic demiurge which must be shunned to enable us to disinterestedly float in the lotus position or something.

And finally, we have that famous story we hear this Sunday every year, but don’t worry right now whether Thomas was really doubting or believing (again, that’s a worthy question for a different sermon). Instead consider what Jesus does. On his first appearance in the upper room, he empowers the Apostles to forgive and retain sins by breathing on them. At his second appearance, when Thomas has joined the other Apostles, Jesus offers to let him touch his wounds. Jesus is making clear that his risen body is a physical body, and he continues to teach this message in the remainder of the Gospel, eating and drinking and building fire by which to warm himself and cook his breakfast.

There is one peculiar element of this story, and I love the answer one of my professors in seminary gave in a course I took on the Gospel of John. The doors are shut and locked, so how could an embodied Jesus get in? Is this not evidence that he is some kind of apparition or specter. Our prof said something like, “of course not; the point is that Jesus is even more solid than the door.” I don’t know whether explanation this holds up. I just know (1) I love it, and (2) John goes to such pains to affirm the physicality of the Risen Christ’s body that there must be some explanation like this.

Anyway, why is this all important? Why does it matter that Christ came back bodily and that we will too at the General Resurrection on the last day? It matters because it reminds us that Creation is not some inconvenient realm in which we can never live with purpose and gratitude. We are not just biding our time in some fleshy layover between states of pure spiritual existence. This life is not some mere test to see if we can become fully detached and join some kind of Nirvana or else get reincarnated as a slug or a chicken or something. God created the heavens and the earth and called them good. Our forebears’ fault caused it and us to fall, but God’s answer was not to dispatch some phantasmal lifeboats to get us out, but rather to redeem all of it. That redemption begins with God himself not only choosing to come to us as a man, but to die as one and to come back just as much of one. It will end when all other things end, not by God or entropy blowing it all up, but by the heavenly city coming to this earth that we might dwell in it, not as ghosties but as men and women, for all eternity. And our moral obligation is not to take this earth or our bodies or the well-being of our fellow human beings as soteriologically insignificant.

Sometimes poetry says it better than my theological ramblings, and so I’d like to close with the great 20^th Century writer and Episcopalian John Updike’s “Seven Stanzas at Easter.” I cannot remember if I’ve ever included this in a sermon before. (To be honest, sometimes I can’t remember if I said something in a sermon, put it in a newsletter article, or just posted on Facebook at one point or another). So, if I’ve shared this before, forgive me, but it’s one of those texts which I think bears repeating, anyway:

Make no mistake: if he rose at all
It was as His body;
If the cell’s dissolution did not reverse, the molecule reknit,
The amino acids rekindle,
The Church will fall.

It was not as the flowers,
Each soft spring recurrent;
It was not as His Spirit in the mouths and fuddled eyes of the
Eleven apostles;
It was as His flesh; ours.

The same hinged thumbs and toes
The same valved heart
That—pierced—died, withered, paused, and then regathered
Out of enduring Might
New strength to enclose.

Let us not mock God with metaphor,
Analogy, sidestepping, transcendence,
Making of the event a parable, a sign painted in the faded
Credulity of earlier ages:
Let us walk through the door.

The stone is rolled back, not papier-mache,
Not a stone in a story,
But the vast rock of materiality that in the slow grinding of
Time will eclipse for each of us
The wide light of day.

And if we have an angel at the tomb,
Make it a real angel,
Weighty with Max Planck’s quanta, vivid with hair, opaque in
The dawn light, robed in real linen
Spun on a definite loom.

Let us not seek to make it less monstrous,
For our own convenience, our own sense of beauty,
Lest, awakened in one unthinkable hour, we are embarrassed
By the miracle,
And crushed by remonstrance.

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