Sermons

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

There are about a half dozen home-bound people to whom I take Holy Communion each month and with whom I have a time of conversation. One of these people (and don’t ask me to give any identifying information or try to speculate who I’m talking about, because you’ll guess wrong) knowing that she’s not going to be in this world for too much longer has become increasingly concerned about how she’s not done enough to merit entrance into heaven. She says things like “I’m relying on you to put in a good word for me, Father John.” She has a relative who sends her bible readings or devotionals or something on a daily basis, and her take-away is something like “it’s telling me all the things I’m supposed to be doing, and I’m not doing them.” I want to say that either this can’t be the point of these things you’re getting or else it’s based on tremendously bad theology and should be ignored as much as possible, particularly at this point in her life.

It all reminds me that as much as one can say that the Gospel is about God’s free gift to us, our reconciliation to him by nothing more nor less than Jesus’ atoning sacrifice, enslavement to the Law and reliance on works-righteousness is a pernicious evil which even my most strident defenses of the sufficiency of Grace are hard-pressed to begin to dispel from the anxious soul of one being continually reminded that he or she must just “be good.” Whatever form our moralism takes, and whether it’s directed against others or creates anxiety and scrupulosity in our own souls, the message of Grace is offensive in the most wonderful, liberating way. Thus can St. Stephen pray with confidence that even the sin of those who martyred him would not be held against them.

This is the Good News we hear in today’s Gospel, taken from the fourteenth chapter of John. Jesus spoke these words at the Last Supper, the very night before he was himself to be killed and to pray with confidence to the Father that his own murderers would be forgiven. This is one of the options for the Gospel at funerals in this church, and perhaps the most popular for obvious reasons. Christ’s comforting command “let not your hearts be troubled” and his promise that he himself goes to prepare a place for us in his Father’s house are not, however, immediately understood.

Both Thomas and Philip seem to me to be caught up in the same anxiety as my friend I mentioned at the outset of the sermon. Show us the way. Show us the Father. We do not know the way. I think that these demands are a way of saying, “Lord, tell us what to do to be good enough to join you in heaven.” Give us a road map, give us step-by-step instructions on what good works we must do to merit a place in your Kingdom. How do we earn this?

Jesus rejects the premise of the question. Instead of a set of rules or a to-do list he gives them himself. “I am the Way, and the Truth, and the Life.” Yes, he promises that in coming to him, in believing in him, in being in relationship with him, the apostles and we would be empowered to do great works. But the way to the Father’s house would already be secured, and the works would not serve for self-justification but to display glory of God.

I want to ask you to think of a place that feels like home to you. It could be the town you grew up in. It could be a grandparent’s house. It could be your college campus. It could be a place you went on vacation and have fond memories of. It could be this church, and I hope it is for some of you. It could be anywhere. Does that place feel like home to you because the weather was pleasant or because it had nice amenities or because it was selected as top micropolitan area by Site Selection Magazine a thousand years in a row or whatever it is? I suspect not. I suspect it’s because of relationships with other people you had or have in that place. The city I grew up in was determined by a Gallup poll a few years ago to be “one of the eleven most miserable cities in the United States.” But it still feels “homey” to me because of the relationships I had with people there.

Why is heaven our home? We know precious little from scripture about what the life of the world to come will be like. One thing we do know, is that we will be there with each other and, most importantly, with Jesus for ever. He’s gone to prepare a place, not because we’ve earned the right to attend a graduation party or a retirement party or something. Why? “So that where I am you may be also.” Because he wants to be with us for eternity. Because he loves us, and because with what little love we have, we love him too. I’ve not earned that love. Frankly, I’ve not earned anyone’s love. That’s not how love works. That’s not why we’ve been given each of us to each other in this life. We have, rather, been created and redeemed simply to share unearned love with each other in reflection of the only one who ever earned it, in preparation for the fulsome experience of that love 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.

Two images have struck me this week as we are given our yearly reminder that Jesus being the Good Shepherd means that all we are like sheep (prone, as the Prophet Isaiah put it, to going astray). First, last summer Annie and I went to the county fair and saw one of her friend’s children showing a sheep. I’ve joked before about how I’m a “city boy”. I admit that I’d never seen anything like this before. I once saw a demonstration of a dog herding sheep, but I’d never seen a person dealing with livestock, and it became clear pretty quickly that some of the beasts were more inclined to being handled and directed by their young shepherds than others, to say the least.

The second image was from yesterday, at Bishop Jolly’s consecration. It was a beautiful liturgy with many moving moments. One of the loveliest elements was when all of the current and former bishops of Ohio presented Bishop Jolly with her crozier, the staff which symbolizes her role as shepherd of the flock which is this diocese. Most of you have seen a bishop with a crozier before, but one has to use one’s imagination to connect the symbol with the practical application of an actual shepherd’s crook. Well, not this one. You’ll get to see it when Bishop Jolly visits us in June, but I’ll tell you now, this is the first time I’ve seen a bishop’s crozier that looks like it could actually go round the neck of an actual full grown sheep, or the neck of a wayward diocesan priest for that matter. It recalled the moment a bit earlier in the liturgy, right before the consecration proper, when the co-consecrating bishop’s examine the bishop-elect. In response to one of the questions, pertaining to the bishop’s role as chief priest and pastor of her diocese, to which the ordinand answers “I will, in the name of Christ, the Shepherd and Bishop of our souls.”

If you’re anything like me, as I’ve said before on this Sunday, you probably don’t like to be compared to a sheep. But look again at what Jesus is saying. “The sheep follow [the shepherd] because they know his voice. They will not follow a stranger, but they will run from him because they do not know the voice of strangers.” Perhaps we’ve underestimated the sheep. As smelly and dumb as they may seem, as prone to straying as they are, they know that their well-being is dependent on the shepherd. They are hard-wired, through the history of their domestication, to follow the leader. They know that their safety is dependent on doing so, and they’re smart enough at least to be able to discern between one who will lead them to safety and one who will steal them away.

I wonder if most of us are this discerning. Even those of us who are intuitive enough to discern someone who’s genuine from a con-man most of the time, can nonetheless throw our lot in with a sheep-thief. I don’t just mean that we can fall in with a rough crowd, though for some that is an issue. I mean we can totally misplace our confidence, failing to follow the Good Shepherd in favor of some other leader.

And it should be no surprise that for us modern people the most common thief one might trust instead of the Good Shepherd is none other than oneself. Thanks to sin, we believe that we have everything we need within ourselves, and our own culture has exacerbated this fault of our nature. We believe in rugged individualism. We say “God helps those who help themselves” (which I hope you know, comes neither from the bible nor from a Christian thinker), we say we must pull ourselves up by our own bootstraps and we believe seeking direction from someone or something outside of ourselves is a weakness.

It is far more difficult for us to follow. On this level the sheep might have it more together than we do, because they know when they aren’t on the right path. They can recognize the shepherd’s voice, and they know they’re in trouble when they don’t hear it. 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.

So, maybe, we shouldn’t get offended when we’re called sheep. Maybe there’s something we can learn from those silly beasts after all. Maybe we can learn that we should cultivate enough humility that we can be led by another. 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 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.

The disciples knew the Lord Jesus in the breaking of the bread. What has begun fascinates me about the story is the disciples’ lack of recognition up to the point of the meal they shared in Emmaus. We so often call the events we just heard about as “the road to Emmaus”, but we forget that the moment that made all the difference for Cleopas and the other disciple didn’t take place on the road at all, but at the dinner table.

So what about that long walk they all took together? Our risen Lord was engaging in a ministry that defined his earthly life just as much as breaking bread with his disciples; he was teaching the meaning of scripture, how the Law and the Prophets pointed to the coming reign of the Messiah. Later, the disciples would acknowledge that they felt their hearts burning within them during this conversation, yet the moment of recognition didn’t come until that more intimate act at dinner.

Perhaps the disiples’ delayed discovery surprises us, but it shouldn’t. We are exposed to compelling arguments and weighty evidence of some truth or another all the time, but without some kind of personal experience, the truth sometimes doesn’t sink in. We can hear facts and figures about problems in the world, but our hearts are rarely moved if we don’t see it. We live in a society in which a large proportion of people can hear compelling arguments about some scientific or medical proposition, let the listener understand, but refuse to believe the validity of said arguments until they see it first hand (even if the proposition at hand doesn’t lend itself to that mode of scrutiny). So, I’m not suggesting that our difficulty in accepting truths on the basis of persuasive evidence is a good thing. As the youngsters say “it [just] is what it is”. We are now—as post-modern people—more skeptical creatures than we’ve ever been (with regard to science and religion and politics and every other human endeavor), and that’s neither an altogether bad nor an altogether good thing.

That being the reality, we can learn a great deal from the disciples’ delayed recognition. If we are even more prone to withhold judgment than people in Jesus’ day, which I suspect we are, that affects how we go about evangelism.

If some in the church (particularly the mainline churches) have been sadly derelict in their duty to spread the Good News in recent decades, I think that discomfort is of precisely the same nature which causes others to be uncomfortable with the propagation of very different kinds of truth. Our discomfort may well stem from the very same post-modern rejection with absolute truth and the (to my mind) completely incoherent claim that what might be true for one need not be true for another.

If we truly believe that Christ is risen, we believe something stronger than the claim that “for me Christ is risen, but perhaps not to somebody who rejects my meta-narrative”. We believe Christ is risen. We’re making a claim which is just as true as “gravity exists” or “the earth orbits round the sun”. We’re not just using code language to point to some personal feeling. We’re making a claim about the truth of a fact, a fact which is not cotenable with every other religious claim everyone else in the world may make. So important is this truth, so potentially life-changing and world-changing is this truth, that we should find it to be a truth whose universal acceptance would be a good thing.

Our discomfort with this suggestion cripples our witness. A friend of mine once said that Episcopalian evangelism is like building the most beautiful, well-appointed boat ever constructed, taking it out into the middle of the ocean, and waiting for the fish to jump in. Needless to say, you’ll not catch many fish that way, but sadly I think the analogy rings truer than we’d like to admit.

But, considering the fact that the people we live among are more like those disciples on the road than we might have thought—considering the fact that we now have a couple generations of people who might not have read Heidegger or Derrida or Foucault, but who nonetheless share their rejection of modern logic and argumentation—our approach might need some tweaking, and Jesus is once again the model.

We’ll not convince many people that Christ is “the way, the truth, and the life” by setting forth propositional arguments. Some, perhaps (and this is why apologetics is still an important activity) but not many.

We may, however, help others see the risen Christ when we break bread with them. The good news of the Resurrection is not limited to what it means for us who have been baptized on the last day. The Resurrection also means that we’ve already been risen with Christ, and we, the Church, constitute his earthly body. So, when we nurture the kinds of intimate relationships with others that are manifested most powerfully in Christ’s breaking of the bread, we open a window of insight into the Christ of whom we are a part. We permit those who do not yet believe to have the opportunity for the same recognition experienced by the disciples.

Our earthly relationships are ideally reflections of the primary relationship God has with us. This is why the marriage rite makes clear that the love shared between husband and wife is a sign of the love “betwixt” Christ and his Church. This is why parents and godpartents are so intimately involved in the rite of Baptism. Our domestic community (that is, our household) as well as our ecclesial community (that is, our parish church) are primarily contexts in which we humans in very human ways try to reflect the love of God.

What we learn from this morning’s Gospel that the most compelling evidence for Jesus’ resurrection is not to be found in any scientific enquiry, but rather in the love we show and are shown, and how in that love we point to the Christ who first loved us. May we be brought to daily conversion, to slowly turning ourselves back toward God when we experience the love His people show toward us, and may we break bread with others in the hopes that they, too, will catch a glimpse of the risen Christ.

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