Sermons

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

When I was a teenager I attended several events aimed at young Episcopalians, like church camp and “Happening” (which is like a youth version of “Cursillo”–a sort of three-day spiritual retreat). These things certainly helped form me as a Christian, and I remain grateful for that, though there was always one element that left me cold–namely the sort of music that we were made to sing at such events. Your mileage may certainly vary in this regard, but even as a teenager I always found traditional hymnody accompanied by organ to be more edifying than contemporary praise choruses and the like. That’s still certainly my preference, though I’ve become less stuck-up about it (at least I hope so). Anyway, one song which particularly rubbed my adolescent grandiosity the wrong way was the 1987 Graham Kendrick worship song “Shine, Jesus, Shine.”

This, is no doubt, a divisive one. I was shocked several years ago when the BBC program Songs of Praise, which I’ve always loved, named this Britain’s tenth favorite hymn. Conversely, English journalist Damien Thompson declared it “the most loathed of all happy-clappy hymns.” So whether you love it or hate it, you’re not alone.

Like I said, I’ve mellowed as I’ve grown more mature in the faith. If that sort of music floats your boat, then that’s great. Even so, I think its unqualifiedly cheerful tone misses the rather more ambiguous nature of being exposed to Christ’s glory and I’m particularly troubled by the implications of its final verse, which says “As we gaze on your kingly brightness, so our faces display your likeness, ever changing from glory to glory.” I think that sentiment gives us way too much credit and muddies the distinction between our Creator and us as fallen creatures.

We learn in today’s Gospel that on the holy mountain, Peter, John, and James do not exactly cover themselves in glory, much less do they themselves shine with the radiance of their Lord. They fall asleep when they ought to be keeping watch. Peter profoundly misses the point in seeing this as an opportunity to avoid the terror of Golgotha and retire from the Apostolic mission. And of course, as is a theme we see over and over in the Gospels, the first reaction of these mortals to being exposed to the unfiltered glory of God is to become terrified. The Israelites in our Old Testament lesson become afraid to get just a little taste of God’s glory, when Moses’ face shone. How much more then must the disciples have been frightened by the recognition that their friend and teacher was none other than very God or very God in seeing Jesus transfigured?

On this feast of the Transfiguration I want to focus on two implications of this event in the life of Jesus and the disciples for our own lives as Christians.

First, though perhaps this is obvious, it’s increasingly necessary in our skeptical age to say that this really happened. It is not myth or metaphor, but a real event in which the overwhelming glory of the divine broke into human history. What Peter is essentially saying in this morning’s Epistle is “folks, this really happened!” I say this not just to make it clear that we should have a high degree of trust in the reliability of scripture, though I do believe that. I say it because this makes it clear that our God is ready and willing to break into our world in dramatic and miraculous ways.

I read an article several months ago which attempted to explain why Christianity, often reckoned as being in decline in the West, is growing by leaps and bounds in Africa and Asia. Among the most striking data was the fact that converts to Christianity in the Global South were far more ready to recognize God at work around them and identify apparent miracles as honest-to-God miracles. I believe our tendency as modern Western people to chock this up to superstition should be a scandal, not only because, to be blunt, it seems more-than-a-little racist. It also suggests that many of us have traded in a robust, supernatural faith for functional deism. I’m by no means faultless in this regard. I think, though, we should all bear it in mind.

Second, the Transfiguration, is one of several examples of how the light of God’s glory is not essentially about feeling warm and fuzzy. It’s not about some inner light that we naturally possess giving us gentle nudges toward discerning God’s will, as a Quaker might have it. Still less is it about the Spirit’s transforming us via moral progress alone (as much as we might pray that this is a fringe benefit, as it were, of our justification). Experiencing God’s glory is, rather an awesome and terrible thing, in the older senses of both of those words. It can be overwhelming, frightening even, because we are not accustomed to that gulf being bridged by the very person of Absolute-Being and Perfection and Love. We see this not only in the Transfiguration, but any time men and women in scripture are exposed to the light of divinity. We see it at Mount Sinai. We see it every time an angel appears in the Gospels. Most powerfully, it is experienced by Mary Magdelene and then by the Apostles when our risen Lord meets them.

This is not to say that there is not consolation to be found in the presence of the Almighty. There certainly is, but so too is there conviction. The most important thing, I think, is that the fruit of this conviction is not about being better under our own steam. It is, rather, on learning to rely more-and-more on the infinite Grace of God in Christ Jesus. It is about recognizing that the Law will always condemn us, but conversely the Gospel will always save us.

We recapitulate this pattern every time we gather on a Sunday. We call to mind and confess what we have done amiss or left undone and then proceed directly to receiving unearned, objective, salutary Grace in the Sacrament of our Lord’s Body and Blood. So, be not afraid. Approach the throne of Grace here. And steel yourselves to do the same on that last great day, when finally God’s glory will no longer be veiled under the accidents of Bread and Wine, on the day of judgment, remembering that that same day is the day of triumph for all who love the Lord and pray ceaselessly for his appearing.

+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.

There are few things as potentially amusing and as potentially instructive as listening to a small child pray. It is typically a mix of both the amusingly selfish and the inspiringly selfless, expressing those two truths about all Christians (namely, our transformation into new people in Baptism and our constant struggle with our old, creaturely obsession with self) which we adults are usually too clever to make so obvious.

If you have a child in your life and you’ve not listened in on his or her prayers before bedtime (which I hope children still do) I would encourage you to do so. You’ll likely hear some rather selfish stuff—prayers for a new bicycle or a less irritating sibling—but you’ll likely also hear some rather moving examples of Christian charity: prayers for sick friends, for mom and dad, for that sibling (despite how irritating he or she might be), and so forth.

As I said, we adults are clever enough to monitor the prayers we give around others. But how often in our private conversations with God do we forget to ask ourselves if we’re really praying aright? There are two prayers from our Book of Common Prayer which are directed for use as concluding collects for the Prayers of the People which I think we are wise to think about. One asks God to “Accept and fulfill our petitions, we pray, not as we ask in our ignorance, nor as we deserve in our sinfulness, but as [God] know[s] and love[s] us in [His] Son,” and the other asks God to “Help us to ask only what accords with [His] will; and those good things which we dare not, or in our blindness cannot ask, [to] grant us for the sake of [His] Son Jesus Christ our Lord.”

How often do we fail to consider the fact that God may know what’s best for His people? How often do we pray without reflection for personal benefits and even for the benefit of self at the expense of others?

A little over twenty years ago a very popular book called The Prayer of Jabez came out. It was written by a fellow named Bruce Wilkinson, and he based the book on a rather obscure passage from 1 Chronicles. So popular was this volume that three versions for children of different ages were released in the years following its publication. And what did this book instruct its readers to do? To pray very specifically for personal benefits in the areas of finances, social influence, and the like. Throughout the volume is an unstated assumption that God ought to respond to our desires rather than the other way round. Sadly, whether we want to acknowledge it or not, the popularity of this book and of the “prosperity Gospel” more broadly suggests that it is very easy to pray for oneself unreflectively, to forget to consider others in our intercessions.

In this morning’s Old Testament lesson we are introduced to a figure better than most in regards to being reflective in prayer. At Gibeon the Lord seems to give Solomon a blank check, as it were: “Ask what I shall give you,” he says. God forbid that He should say the same thing to me. I’d probably ask for a trust fund and a vacation home. But Solomon responds, “Give thy servant therefore an understanding mind to govern thy people, that I may discern between good and evil; for who is able to govern this thy great people?” Solomon prays that he may have the gifts to serve God’s people, rather than for “long life, or riches, or the lives of [his] enemies,” and for this God grants Solomon’s request.

Of course, not all prayers for ourselves are selfish, and we don’t have to pray only for God to give us gifts to do His work (though, this is one thing we should always pray for). It is perfectly appropriate to cry out to God in our distress and ask for relief. When we are ill or sad or frightened, God is ready to hear us. The danger is when we cannot see past ourselves, past our own needs and desires, to see how God might be needed in the lives of others, and how we might, through prayer, be given strength to reach out to those in need of His Grace.

The difficult truth is that we’ll never be so adept at discerning the complex motivations that do battle in our souls to become perfect in prayer. Unless you’re a lot more self-aware than I, prayer will always include at least a hint of self-interest. Does this mean it’s a losing battle, that we may as well not pray? By no means! We hear in St. Paul’s Epistle to the Romans the good news that we who have been redeemed, who have been regenerated in Baptism, have a prayer-partner who prays for us and in us and who finally perfects the complex, tortuous words we offer up to the Almighty:

[W]e do not know how to pray as we ought, but the Spirit himself intercedes for us with sighs too deep for words. And he who searches the hearts of men knows what is the mind of the Spirit, because the Spirit intercedes for the saints according to the will of God.

Remain steadfast in prayer, then, with confidence that God will hear and answer us “not as we ask in our ignorance, nor as we deserve in our sinfulness, but as [He] know[s] and love[s] us in [His] Son, Jesus Christ our Lord” and that the Spirit which gives us the words we need has given us the strength to say those blessed words against which even the Gates of Hell cannot triumph: God the Father has made us His sons and daughters through Jesus Christ and loves us and listens to us as any father should: with compassion and understanding and an overwhelming desire that we should live in peace and felicity all the days of our lives and in eternity with the Triune 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.

I’ve discovered over the years that it is to my benefit (and I hope to some extent the benefit of those subjected to my sermons) to read theologians and biblical scholars for who I have a great deal of respect and with whom I find some common ground but who at the same time challenge my own ideas. This is like threading a needle. I mustn’t stick exclusively to those with whom I am in nearly perfect agreement (probably the closest would be the so-called “radical orthodoxy” of theologians like John Milbank and Catherine Pickstock), as they’ll serve largely to reïnforce what I already take to be the case. On the other hand, it does me little good intellectually–and perhaps it is positively harmful spiritually–to spend too much time poring over texts whose basic assumptions are so beyond the pale that it becomes questionable whether the authors are even making good faith arguments. Here I class things like the Jesus Seminar and Process Theology.

So the “sweet spot” as it were is where intellectual honesty and rigor meet the challenging of my own assumptions, and there are plenty of good examples of this. I love much of what Karl Rahner wrote, particularly regarding “unthematic revelation” as the precursor to Christian inquiry, but I can’t fully embrace his definition of the Trinity. I think N.T. Wright is a tremendously careful, faithful reader of the bible, but (as I mentioned during our Christian education series on Romans) I’m not sure I can fully embrace his reading of Paul’s use of the word faith (πιστις) in that letter, and I think in some ways he’s over-corrected when it comes to his view of the afterlife. There is a great deal I find compelling in the work of Karl Barth, but sometimes I can identify with one critic who wrote “the first time I read a volume of [Church Dogmatics]… I felt like a ferret swimming in a bucket of Thorazine.”

Probably the best example of this “Goldilocks zone” of theology for me, though, is the work of Orthodox Theologian David Bentley Hart. His first monograph on aesthetics and theological truth was a game-changer and his work metaphysics (insofar as I understand it, anyway) seems similarly on point. But his 2019 book That All Shall Be Saved strayed too far, I believe, from the biblical witness and teaching of the church in its argument for universalism (that is, to put it simply, the idea that it is impossible for anybody to choose perdition rather than salvation). I could maybe go so far as the Orthodox Church in America’s Archbishop, in echoing the great Kallistos Ware (himself, like Hart, an Anglican convert to Orthodoxy) “we can’t teach universal salvation as doctrine, but we can hope for it.”

That said, what we mustn’t ever do, is presume to claim who makes the cut and who doesn’t, whose faith is genuine and whose isn’t, who’s elect and who’s reprobate. Some sadly do so presume. The Westboro Baptist Church, that cult from Kansas, that homophobic Kansas cult that protests soldiers’ funerals, famously have done. I’ve done a fair amount of driving the last couple of weeks, and I’m always struck by the billboard on I-75 that just says “Heaven or Hell” and gives a toll-free phone number. I’ve not tried calling, but I wonder what verdict they’d give me.

This morning’s gospel should serve as a warning to avoid this kind of speculation. The slaves approach their master and ask if they should pull the weeds out of the garden, a rather obvious thing to do, one should think. The master, however, is afraid that some of the wheat would be thrown out with the weeds, and instructs the slave to let them grow, leaving the separation for the reaper.

I had always thought it rather strange, not having a background in agriculture, that the weeds could not be distinguished from the wheat. I had always assumed a farmer could tell the difference. Having done a bit of research, though, I discovered that the weeds in question were likely lolium temulentum, or darnel, which indeed cannot be easily distinguished from wheat until very late in both plants’ maturation. So Jesus’ audience would have known the dangers of trying to pull up these weeds from a wheat field prematurely. Some of the crop would invariably be lost.

And notice whom Jesus identifies as the reapers: they are the angels. They’re not us. They are not the clergy or the matriarchs and patriarchs of a parish church or the vestry or the General Convention of the Episcopal Church or any other human agent. The angels make the separation, not us.

It goes without saying that this should lead us to a degree of tolerance. I think it’s easy enough for most of us to avoid speculating out loud about a person’s ultimate destination, but I think our hearts have more trouble in this regard than we might expect. I have thought to say and very occasionally actually said to somebody those three horrible words that lie in wait, ready to pop out of our mouths when we’re angry: go to hell. Rarely do I really mean it literally, but sometimes, maybe deep down, I do. That’s my problem; that’s sin.

In a sermon on this very text, St. Augustine had this to say:

O you Christians, whose lives are good, you sigh and groan as being few among many, few among very many. The winter will pass away, the summer will come; lo! The harvest will soon be here. The angels will come who can make the separation, and who cannot make mistakes. … I tell you of a truth, my Beloved, even in these high seats there is both wheat, and tares, and among the laity there is wheat, and tares. Let the good tolerate the bad; let the bad change themselves, and imitate the good. Let us all, if it may be so, attain to God; let us all through His mercy escape the evil of this world. Let us seek after good days, for we are now in evil days; but in the evil days let us not blaspheme, that so we may be able to arrive at the good days.

Here that great father of the church not only tells us to withhold judgment—not knowing as well as the angels who might be a weed and who might be wheat—but he also warns us not to blaspheme. Blasphemy is irreverence, and it may take the form of us presuming to carry out the divine task of judgment ourselves. To presume to say somebody is going or has gone to hell, to take upon ourselves the authority to proclaim damnation, is perhaps the greatest blasphemy of all.

Let’s make a go, then, of withholding judgment, knowing that judgment is not our prerogative when it comes to eternal matters. In fact, let’s go one step further, by really trusting that God knows what he’s doing. We might be surprised on our own heavenly birthday, when we go to join the saints in light, when we see who’s there. They will have been changed, perfected, made into what God meant them to be, as will we. If we hadn’t got it be then, we will finally realize how wrong we were to condemn so quickly, but, thanks be to God, that that realization will not inhibit us, but will free us to live in that land where our sinful arrogance has been purged and we can live in perfect peace and unity.

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