Sermons

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

Not being a sports fan and not having access to cable television I don’t know if this is still a thing or not, but one used to see people on tv in stadia holding up signs that read “John 3:16.” Is this still a thing? Well, I’ve joked before with some of you that I wish all those people who carry around those signs would change it up once in a while and write “Matthew 25” on some of them. Of course, they’re both important bits of scripture, but there’s a danger when one plucks a single verse out of context instead of understanding it in light of the whole body of scripture and how the church has interpreted it over the course of two millennia. You see, my worry is that the folks who carry around the John 3:16 signs assume that the verse means something like “in order to go to heaven, you have to give cognitive assent to the proposition that Jesus of Nazareth is the Son of God who died for our sins.” Now, of course I believe that proposition to be true with all my heart; you’d be rightly concerned if a priest of the church couldn’t agree to that without qualification.

The problem is that the Greek in John 3:16, “πιστεύων είς αὐτòν”, believing in him, can mean an awful lot more than just agreeing to propositions about Jesus. It’s my professional opinion that the belief envisioned by Jesus in John’s Gospel as well as the church fathers whose creed we recite every week to affirm what we believe, is more appropriately understood to trust and to act faithfully based on that trust. Simply saying “I believe that” in the same sense in which one believes 1 and 1 is 2 is just the first step.

I hasten to add (and this should not surprise those of you who’ve heard my sermons before) that this is not to say that we earn our way into heaven by being good. It is, however, to say that the fruit of the spirit, the natural outcome of having faith in Christ, are the sorts of expectations we see in Matthew 25–feeding the hungry, clothing the naked, visiting the prisoner, and so forth–which is why I joke about supplementing (not replacing) the John 3:16 signs with Matthew 25 signs. Actually, I am in the loop enough to have read about the “He Gets Us” advertisements at this years Super Bowl, and their message might be a good example of doing something like this. (I realize there was some controversy over those because of some of the ad campaign’s funders and their politics; I can’t say I agree with the politics of every person who may have funded it either, but people applying that kind of purity test when the message was clearly about Jesus loving us and healing our divisions probably need to get over themselves.) Anyway, the point here is that salutary faith is about more than merely assenting to propositions and nothing else.

Now, all that said, I’ve got some good news for you. You don’t have to worry. You’re not going to Hell because you’re not especially good at meeting the demands faith enjoins on us. None of us is particularly good at it. But, you’ve already been saved. Now this is dangerous information to give out, because people who are afraid of Hell can sometimes behave a lot better. Geneva, when John Calvin was more-or-less in charge was one of the most peaceful, prosperous, democratic places in the world, because everyone was so concerned with showing signs of their election through good behavior, among other things.

As much as it pains me to admit it, the Puritan history of our own country has had much the same effect on our own country. While our Anglican forebears on this continent were growing fat and lazy and treating humans like property in the Southern Colonies, those stick-in-the-mud Puritans up in New England were creating communities of mutual responsibility and laying the foundations for a country that could get on without a king, because they were (for all their faults) so darned law-abiding and committed to equality, at least by the standards of the Seventeenth and Eighteenth Centuries. Unfortunately, a big part of it is that they were afraid that if they didn’t they’d go to hell quite literally.

The theological truth might at first seem socially dangerous, because people realize that they’re not going to burn because they’re bad. I’m not sure how I feel about that. Or maybe I do, but thank God I’m not God. I’m certainly not as loving and gracious and forgiving as God. In today’s Epistle, we get an extremely generous view of salvation. We are all children of Abraham, and God has reckoned us all worthy of Salvation because of the Blood of Christ. In his conversation with Nicodemus in this morning’s Gospel, before he gets to the bit sport fans keep quoting, the only litmus test Jesus gives is that we be “born from above.” (Notice by the bye “born from above” may be a more literal translation “γεννηθᾔ ἀνωθεν”, but Nicodemus clearly understands Jesus to mean “born again.”) He says we must be born again or from above of water and of the Spirit. Lots of modern Christians believe this means an affective shift within the soul (somewhere along a spectrum between the heart being strangely warmed and rolling in the aisles). We sacramentally-minded Christians tend to believe this means we must be born physically and then receive the New Birth of Baptism. Most of us (myself included) receive this regeneration when we’re too young to understand the nature of that Second Birth and are merely passive recipients of God’s Grace.

So the good news is that we don’t have to worry. We’ve been saved. God’s promise is irrevocable. We’re promised that God will bring all things to their perfection, and that includes our oft-vexed efforts to believe in the fullest sense, such that we continually pray, without contradiction, “Lord, I believe. Help thou mine unbelief.”

That’s the Good News. The difficult news, though, is that we’re not off the hook.

Okay, you’re not going to hell. So what? For about the last half millennium (since the dawn of the Reformation) we’ve been obsessed with one element of salvation- the question of justification. Who’s saved? Who’s not? How does it happen? What if I’m not saved? Who cares?

I don’t mean to be flippant, but it is to me less interesting than how we respond to the nascent form of salvation we’re already experiencing in hope of the Resurrection. God has saved us through the blood of His only Son. We didn’t deserve it. We’ll never earn it. We got it anyway. The precise mechanics of how it works are interesting for theologians, and I love being a part of those discussions as an academic exercise, and it’s certainly going to come up during our bible study of Romans beginning today, but the God’s honest truth is that you don’t have to listen to my expositions on Greek grammer to be saved.

The interesting stuff is what comes afterward. God loves you. You are washed in the soul cleansing blood of the lamb. You have been born anew, born from above, born again whether you knew it or not. You have a mission. Faith without works is dead, says St. James. That doesn’t mean your lackluster efforts in this regard will send you straight to Hell. So what? That’s where every single one of us is, even if you’re among those who’s going to get canonized after you die and at that point you’ll be having such a good time you won’t notice.

In any event, the reality of being saved and not doing anything about it seems worse to me. It means you’ve been given something and haven’t done anything with it. And it’s so simple to take that gift and use it. You’ve just got to love your neighbor. As I’ve said before, that means a lot more than having warm feelings for them. You don’t even need a strangely warmed heart. There are some people I’ve dealt with in life and ministry who don’t get my cockles much above tepid. But I love them. Or at least I try to do. And that’s what we’ve all got to do. To be loving. To return the gift of Grace which we’ve been given. That, my friends, is what it means to believe in something greater than ourselves, to believe in Christ and be saved, and there’s no life filled with more joy and peace than a life lived in the light of that reality.

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

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

So, apparently this holy season in which we find ourselves has been re-branded. At least you might think this was the case if you saw a particular chyron on the Today Show on Ash Wednesday morning. Henceforth, Lent shall be known as “Mark Wahlberg’s Forty Day Challenge.” I’m glad Marky Mark is doing this, but what of the rest of the Funky Bunch?

In all seriousness, I’m grateful that Mr. Wahlberg is using his fame to encourage faithfulness, and what little I know about him suggests that his Christian faith has truly changed him for the better. From engaging in a couple of racially motivated assaults in the late-eighties and early-nineties, to seeking forgiveness from and reconciliation with his victims and becoming (at least to all outward appearances) a family man who spends his time raising funds for at-risk youth, volunteering in homeless shelters, and engaging in pretty public evangelization efforts. He seems a pretty good, public example of God’s transformative power. (We are fortunate that our program at coffee hour today on the Welcome to a New Life program promises to give us an example of how that same sort of transformation is being encouraged right here in Findlay.)

All that said, we must be very careful here, because as I said on Wednesday, Lent is not a self-improvement program, nor is the Gospel about how we can become better by trying hard enough. It is, rather about the Law having convicted us and Grace having freed us. It is about the imputation of Adam’s sin and the imputation of Christ’s righteousness, which has nothing to do with keeping score (as if God has a massive excel spreadsheet for each of us, totting up the sins in one column and the good works in another and seeing if we’ve got a positive or a negative balance when we die). Yes, through fruits of faith can make things better. However if God is most concerned with how we are on our worst day, we’re doomed, and if we think he’s primarily concerned with how we are when at our best, we can start to get the idea that it’s about our own efforts rather than the free gift of grace, setting us up for yet another fall.

That is what it’s all about, and why it’s so appropriate that we have both the story from Genesis about the Fall and the reading from Romans about its reversal appointed on this first Sunday in the season in which our increased attempts to be faithful in prayer and self-denial and works of mercy might get us putting the cart of human striving before the horse of God’s infinite grace. I’ve heard it said that the doctrine of Original Sin is the only empirically verifiable Christian tenet, and I’m inclined to agree. That is to say, while we must rely solely on faith to put our trust in things like the Incarnation and the Resurrection, one need only look around to prove the fact that we’re fallen.

I do have one minor quibble with our appointed readings this morning, though. I wish that reading from Genesis went on just two verses further. Adam and Eve’s disobedience caused them to become ashamed of their nakedness (Nota bene: not because nudity is inherently sinful, but because they had just contracted a concupiscent nature) and they made themselves some rather flimsy clothes. Then what happened?:

And they heard the voice of the LORD God walking in the garden in the cool of the day: and Adam and his wife hid themselves from the presence of the LORD God amongst the trees of the garden. And the LORD God called unto Adam, and said unto him, Where art thou?

Where are you? I think this question God asks can be taken two ways, both of them correct. On the one hand it is an accusation. God knows the answer, but wants the man and woman to come clean, like the parent who asks the child “who took the cookie from the cookie jar?”

But it is conversely a question which would presage not something frightening but wonderful, namely–that God would always search for and find us no matter how far we’d fallen.

This project begins immediately. I think we misunderstand God’s passage of judgment on Adam and Eve, as purely punitive when I think it is more gracious than we might expect. (This whole story is richly metaphorical, after all, and for every rock … or fig leaf … we turn over, there is some new insight.) Should the man and the woman take the fruit from the tree of life, they should stand under God’s judgment in his presence for all eternity. An eternity of shame. Their ejection from the garden is both punishment and protection. The toil that would accompany their labors would provide a means not of atonement but at least of partial penance. The entry of death into the world, though tragic, would provide for a rest from those labors. In what is the first sacrifice in scripture, God provides the skins of animals to clothe the man and the woman in a manner more suitable in the harsh reality they were entering.

And then for countless ages, the Lord God would continue to ask “where art thou?” To the children of Israel captive in Egypt and the Jews in exile in Babylon. Again and again through the prophets whenever they went astray. And finally, most wonderfully, (as Paul makes clear) through his supreme condescension in the person of Christ Jesus, the New Adam, by whom many have been made righteous. And to each of us still, God asks “where art thou?” because he desires that each of us should be inheritors of the promise.

Whatever Lenten discipline you’ve adopted (or whatever goal’s you’ve set for yourself in Marky Mark’s Forty Day Challenge) my prayer is that it serves not merely as a means of self-improvement, but rather that it primarily serves as a reminder of our contingency and our need and our reliance on the Grace of God alone, whose sacrifice is sufficient to call us to himself and to strengthen us in this life and to give us hope for unending life with all the saints who have been brought through the ordeal and washed clean in the blood of the lamb.

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

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

There is a medieval aphorism that has become seen as a truism in modern times. Non gustibus non est disputandum. “There is no disputing about tastes,” morphed, sometime in the nineteenth century to “there’s no accounting for tastes.” A philosopher of aesthetics may disagree that this is either obvious or true, and so would I. This places me firmly in the crank camp, but there you have it. Perhaps there are cases in which the quality of one’s preference is purely subjective–whether one prefers chocolate ice cream to vanilla, say–but I can’t bring myself to say that the relative value of Joyce’s Ulysses to a paperback romance novel with Fabio on the cover, or that Titian’s Assunta altarpiece and a Bored Ape NFT, is entirely a matter of subjective taste.

One of the many things that worries me about contemporary school curricula (an odd thing for me to worry about, since I don’t have children of my own, but it does) is that English classes have increasingly replaced set reading lists with an allowance for students to read and write reports on whatever they want, under the assumption that it is more important for children to read something rather than nothing, whether that be Dostoevsky or a comic book. Now, I’ve got nothing against comic books, but Dostoevsky is more important. I love what Flannery O’Conner (who should be on the required reading list, now I think about it) said about the High School English teacher’s responsibility in her essay “Total Effect and the Eighth Grade”:

And if the student finds this not to his taste? Well, that is regrettable. Most regrettable. His taste should not be consulted; it is being formed.

I couldn’t agree more. Like I said, I realize this makes me sound like a crank.

I say all that, because I might be about to contradict myself. I’m drawn to a particular aesthetic, both in art and in real physical spaces, which many would understandably find off-putting, and I couldn’t blame anybody for saying “that is not to my taste.” I find what has been called “liminality” extremely compelling, particularly when it comes to spaces which evince that quality. A liminal space is one that is disconcertingly empty when one would expect the opposite, and it can evoke seemingly contradictory feelings of comfort and unease. You can see such spaces in some contemporary visual art and experimental film. One of my favorite filmmakers, David Lynch, does a lot with this. I follow an automated twitter account that posts photographs of liminal spaces at @spaceliminalbot (I selfishly hope Elon doesn’t get rid of all the bots). But I particularly like to inhabit these spaces in real life.

What am I talking about? Some examples. Nearly empty hallways in cheap hotels; streets in declining urban centers early in the morning with shuttered metal security gates over the storefront early in the morning; K-Marts with a third of the stock and none of the customers as one would have seen inside, say, thirty years ago. There is, no doubt, a level on which seeing and being in spaces like this appeal to my nostalgia and my melancholic bent. I think it’s also that they give one the sense of transition and impermanence, which is, I think, the nature of the material world and the human condition as opposed to the divine reality of the one God. The very word, liminal, from the Latin meaning threshold, suggests that the aesthetic is about these sort of transitions from unknown to unknown, and before the word was used to refer to creepy art, it was used by anthropologists to refer to the disorientation brought about in rituals which transitioned a subject from one state or way of life to the next.

So what does all this have to do with the Transfiguration? I think that Christ upon the mountain peak, and for that matter Moses entering into the cloud, can be seen as liminal events. They are, for the disciples in the former case and the children of Israel in the latter, these transitional, in some sense elegaic moments, in which confusion and perhaps dread cloud the present moment (literally and figuratively), making the future seem uncertain but certainly different.

And they have a choice. Push through that uncertainty to the unknown future or stay right there or feebly try to revert to some former, familiar way of being. This, I think, is why Peter wants to build huts on the mountain and stay forever. This, I think, is why the Israelites respond by almost immediately devolving into disobedience. Since the future is uncertain, it is scary.

But the future for Moses and the Israelites and for Jesus and the disciples is in one way quite unlike the mostly empty K-Mart or the blighted urban center, as much as they might have felt similar. They were different, because whatever came about on the other side of those mountaintop transitions was a matter of general providence, of God’s overall plan for salvation for those involved and for the whole world. If you believe, like me, that there is special providence in addition to general providence (to put it simply, if necessarily a bit inaccurately due to the simplification, that God chooses to exercise some level of control on the micro-level as well as the macro-) then there may be hope for the K-Mart and the urban center, too, but that is a larger discussion.

The point, here, is that the simultaneous comfort and unease, the tension between compulsion and revulsion, we feel on the cusp of any transition into an unknown future, is a natural response to our human desire for the familiar and the Spirit’s dragging us into the unfamiliar, and (should we seek it) giving us the courage and consolation to move through and forward, being reminded that we too are in God’s hands.

We come down the mountain this Wednesday and start the journey with our Lord to Calvary. We get all the alleluias and perhaps inordinate love of pancakes out of our systems and start a journey which is in one way familiar if we’ve been in the Christianity thing for a minute, but which can be both fraught with peril and full of new discoveries every year if we’re prayerful and paying attention. Lent thus serves as a microcosm for all those seasons of our lives in which we move through the unknown, hoping and praying and sometimes though not always knowing, that God’s hand is leading us to something greater if we walk that road with patience and humility.

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