Sermons

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

Today we find ourselves right in the middle of the Octave of Prayer for Christian Unity, an ecumenical observance held in one form or another for over a hundred years between the feasts of the Confession of St. Peter and the Conversion of Saint Paul. It’s a time when we are called to pray for that state of affairs which was our Lord’s last desire before his crucifixion, “that they all may be one”, and that God may, as one of our prayers puts it, “give us grace seriously to lay to heart the great dangers we are in by our unhappy divisions.”

I’m often reminded, looking around not only at divisions within the church but the stark divisions within our society, of both the church’s unique potential (indeed, our unique responsibility) to bring about unity in the face of such profound division as well as our historic inability to do so, at least considering just how many varieties of Christians and churches there are. I suppose one could say that’s a good thing (let a thousand flowers bloom, and all that), but I remain convinced that unity should always be the goal for Christian bodies. It’s because keeping the people of God apart from each other is the most powerful tool of the enemy. Thus, creating and encouraging division is quite literally diabolical.

Consider our current reality in light of the situation we see outlined in today’s epistle reading. The Apostle Paul writes to the Christians in Corinth, whose congregation is fraught with controversy and division. The Corinthians were choosing up sides, demanding that their preferred spiritual leader and his ethos be made the norm. “I belong to Paul!” “I belong to Apollos!” “I belong to Cephas!” Why all of this division? If God speaks to us, as we are promised, in a clear, distinct, discernible voice shouldn’t we be able to avoid such divisions in the Church? Should not the same Lord who spoke so clearly to those first disciples beside the Syrian sea, call to us, too, and bring us together. Were these early Christians in Corinth deaf to the voice of God by their own volition? Are we still?

Well, let’s take a step back, and remember how we got here; first let’s recognize the difference between disagreement and division. It is perfectly normal and acceptable that once I have devoted a great deal of careful thought and sincere prayer in the working out of some belief, I have every right to claim that I believe my opinion to be correct. Yet, perhaps, this belief of mine which I now go round purporting as truth may be diametrically opposed to your belief. You have spent just as much time analyzing the ins and outs of the matter, you have spent just as much time in prayer, and you believe your opinion to be more correct than mine (indeed, you, too, believe that your opinion is quite properly “true”). So far none of this is very controversial.

Sometimes these differences, however, lead to fractures in the church like what we read about in the epistle. For us, though, these fractures are often more insidious. There are certainly arguments that have taken place in the church throughout its history which posed the threat of literal schism (and, indeed, sometimes did result in that), but what I mean to discuss is more the growth of a particular mindset.

There is sometimes a tendency, and this is a tendency to which I am personally disposed, to define our position in the church, first along sectarian and ideological lines, and secondly, and sometimes then only with a great deal of prodding, in terms of our baptism and our shared life with all people through Christ. In other words, we get how we prioritize our connection to Christ’s Church backwards.

That is, we are often quite ready to proclaim that we are active members of Trinity Parish in the Diocese of Ohio, in the Episcopal Church, USA (or that we are progressive Christians or traditional Christians or high-church or low-church or whatever). That’s how we define our Christianity, but we fail to first and foremost allow our Christianity to define everything else because we’re uncomfortable with whose company it puts us into. Don’t get me wrong- it is good and proper for one to strongly identify with his or her (lower case ‘c’) church or party within the church; the trick is to do so without falling victim to an ugly form of sectarianism which would claim that a part is greater than the whole (that is, the capital ‘C’ Church).

All of this is to say that our situation is much more like that of the Corinthians than we might like. We cannot, in fact, always expect God to speak to us in easily discernible ways, and this will necessarily lead to some difference among us Christians. We must, nonetheless, struggle to hear the still, small voice of God in our hearts, realizing that others will hear or interpret or act on the same voice in very different ways. Once we think we’ve heard this voice, that is once we believe we have discerned the will of God in our lives, we must also be very careful not to speak as though we know for absolute certain that we have the authority of Almighty God on our side unless we’re willing to stake our lives on it, remembering that these differences exist.

That, my friends, is a sin each of us can fall into and which I sometimes fall into myself. The need to be right or the need to sound smart, which is to say, the sin of pride, can very quickly lead us to deny the Christianity (even the humanity) of the one with whom we disagree. But this is the power of the evil one saying, “you don’t need that member, tear it off.” He was baptized by Apollos while I belong to Cephas. And the worst thing about it, is that even when I start to pray about it, even when I set out to make the most self-abnegating sorts of prayers about it, I keep coming back to what I want out of it. Lord change his heart. No, Lord, change my heart, so I can put up with such foolishness. Is that second one any better?

It seems to me that the best thing we can do when we see the seeds of division have been sewn between ourselves and a brother or sister – whether it’s because of a different view of some religious claim or politics or just conflicting personalities – is to maintain a holy silence, to listen for what God might be saying to us in the quietness of our hearts. This is important, because it has nothing to do with me trying to change God’s mind or make somebody else more like me or even my trying to understand somebody else (which itself has just a twinge of selfishness, because it assumes that I need to be able to understand them). Maybe whatever needs to happen in that relationship is better known to God than it is to me, and I just need to be quiet.

There’s a story I like from the lives of the Desert Fathers about a Fourth Century church leader named Theophilus. Theophilus was Archbishop of Alexandria when he had a dispute in his diocese and traveled to the desert to seek the sage advice of the hermit Abba Pambo. Upon reaching Abba Pambo’s hermitage, the Archbishop was greeted warmly by the brethren, yet Abba Pambo said nothing. The other monks left, leaving Theophilus and Pambo alone, and still Abba Pambo said nothing. After a long while, the Archbishop broke the silence: “Father, say something to me that I might be edified.” Abba Pambo replied “If you are not edified by my silence, you will not be edified by my speech.” Theophilus needed more than sage advice. He needed to quiet down and open himself up to what God was trying to tell him.

And, if we glean nothing else from such prayer, even if we are not yet ready or able to hear the still, small voice of God, we can at least find a greater comfort. We can take comfort that despite our inability to comprehend the mind of God, God still knows us completely. And then, even when we cannot understand why our divisions remain unhealed, we can rest in the heart of the one who knows no division and find in that place the perfect Communion which for all our pettiness and petulance and peevishness cannot permit the dividing walls we’ve constructed to stand. May that spiritual communion then become manifest in our words, in our actions, in our relationships, that all our divisions may cease and that Christ may be all in all.

+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.

“Come and see.” This is the invitation Christ gives to his first disciples in today’s Gospel reading, and I suspect these disciples were surprised by his answer to their apparently banal question. It seems a rather dull, ordinary kind of question they ask: where are you staying? It’s the sort of question we might use to initiate a polite conversation. It’s a dull question to which we might expect an equally dull answer.

“Where are you staying” has a plain meaning, and this might have been the level on which Andrew and the Beloved Disciple were asking it. The question can also be taken to be asking something much more profound, though.

You see, the word translated as “staying” in the diciples’ question is found elsewhere in John’s Gospel, though our modern translations choose different English words at different points. Most relevant to the passage in question are two such verses in John.

First, John 14:10:

“Do you not believe,” Jesus asks his disciples, “that I am in the Father and the Father is in me? The words that I say to you I do not speak on my own; but the Father who dwells (stays) in me does his works.”

Whether Jesus dwells in his own home, or a friend’s place, or the Holiday Inn isn’t the point. The important thing is that Jesus dwells (stays) with his Father and the Father dwells in him.

Then, from earlier in the first chapter of John, a verse which will probably be familiar to you:

“And the Word became flesh and lived [or stayed, or dwelt] among us, and we have seen his glory, the glory as of a father’s only son, full of grace and truth.” (1:14)

While Jesus, being the Eternal Word of God, lived on high he has come to stay among us. So, the question, “where are you staying?” in fact gets to the heart of Jesus’ identity. The question leaves an opening for Jesus to disclose the uniqueness of his relationship to God the Father, the union between God and humanity which were mysteriously held together in his very person through the hypostatic union.

Now, Jesus could have answered the disciples’ question with a theological treatise. “I am God from God,” he could have said, “Light from Light, true God from true God, begotten not made, of one being with the Father. Through me all things were made.” I suppose the first four centuries of church history, in which the Fathers endlessly debated how to define Jesus’ identity, would have been much simpler, if significantly duller, if Jesus had made it this plain.

This, however, was not his answer. Instead, he responded to the disciples’ question with an invitation: come and see. The theological reflection of the Church is very important, but the starting point is a great deal less cerebral. It is simply to keep one’s eyes open for the presence of God with us; to follow where he will lead us, and to behold his glory- “the glory as of a father’s only son, full of grace and truth”.

We must have eyes to see, as it were, but where is it that we—who do not have the benefit the disciples had of seeing Jesus during his earthly life—where do we look for the Son of the Most High? I go back to one of my favorite prayers for the answer. It’s the traditional prayer for the celebrant after the Eucharist (it’s what I mumble to myself on my way out or with the server at the back of the church), and it goes like this:

“Blessed, praised, worshipped, hallowed, and adored be our Lord and Savior Jesus Christ—on his throne of glory in heaven, in the most precious sacrament of the altar, and in the hearts of his faithful people.”

Christ has indeed ascended into heaven, and he has not yet returned. But he is still spiritually present in our hearts and he is still truly present in the Sacrifice of the Altar. So long as we have the eyes to see, so long as we are open to being in the presence of God, we may still see him in this Church, in ourselves, and in our brothers and sisters in Christ. And it is in moments when our perception of the presence of God with us is most clear, fleeting as these moments may be, that we gain strength and renewal and move toward maturity in the faith.

When in the Gospels people “come and see”, when they get a glimpse of the God who had come among them, they cannot stay in God’s presence by themselves forever. Rather, they are sent out to make the same invitation Christ made to them. Andrew and the other disciple stayed with Jesus that day, the Gospel tells us, but then they left and Andrew found his brother Simon and brought him to Jesus.

Later in the chapter, Jesus calls Philip to follow him and Philip goes straightaway to his friend Nathanael. Nathanael questions Philip’s wisdom in following this Jesus and shows a bit of xenophobia, asking “can anything good come out of Nazareth?” Philip’s response is direct. “Come and see.” Similarly, in the fourth chapter of John, a woman that Jesus meets at a well is convinced that he is the Messiah, and she goes into a village and proclaims to all the people, “come and see a man who has told me everything I have ever done!”

All of this is to suggest that the proper response to recognizing Jesus as Lord, to seeing him, is to go out and invite others into God’s presence. This doesn’t mean being overbearing or manipulative or obnoxious. It does mean that we have an obligation to represent Christ to the world by our words and our deeds, and to simply and lovingly extend the invitation to “come and see”. This is why one of the postcommunion prayers in the prayerbook asks God “to send us out to do the work [He has] given us to do, to love and serve [Him] as faithful witnesses of Christ our Lord.” And whenever we are tired or perplexed or hungry for spiritual nourishment, we come back again into presence of God who dwells in the sacrament and in the assembly of His people that we may once again “go in peace to love and serve the Lord.”

+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.

If you have attended any of our celebrations of the Holy Eucharist that take place on major feasts on weekdays, or if you have tuned into them online, you will have noticed that I’ve gotten into the habit of reading an excerpt of a sermon or commentary written by the church fathers instead of a sermon of my own. In case you were interested, these come from a book which provides readings for every day of the year called Readings for the Daily Office from the Early Church, edited by one of my seminary Church History professors–the late, great Canon J. Robert Wright.

On Friday, the Feast of the Epiphany, if you were there or if you were livestreaming the liturgy, and if you were really paying attention, you might have either been confused or assumed that I had made a mistake. While the Gospel which we invariably read on the Epiphany was what you’d expect–the visit of the three wise men–the homily, written by Gregory Nazianzus, the Fourth Century theologian and Archbishop of Constantinople, had nothing to do with the magi following yonder star and presenting gold frankincense and myrrh to the Christ Child and slipping past wicked Herod on their trip back home. Instead, it commented on the theme we encounter today–namely, Christ’s Baptism.

This was not a mistake, though. It was, no doubt, a choice the editor (my old instructor) made to focus on the Eastern rather than the Western Christian focus of Epiphany –unsurprising, since he had done a great deal of work in laying the historical and theological foundations for contemporary ecumenical dialogue between the Anglican and Russian Orthodox Churches. You see, among the Orthodox and other Eastern Rite Churches, the focus of Epiphany (or Theophany as they’d call it) is not on the Magi but on the Baptism.

Epiphany, meaning manifestation, and Theophany, meaning God’s (self-)revelation, are themes which both of these events from Christ’s life highlight. The magi and their gifts point both to the revelation of Christ to the Gentiles and his tripartite status as prophet, priest, and king. Thirty years later in Jesus’ life (though only separated by two days in our liturgical calendar this year) we see an even more profound example of God’s self-revelation–the fact that Christ himself was and is a person of the Triune Godhead. Here we see the Spirit of God made physically present in the form of a dove and the voice of the Father made audibly manifest. Such a clear, literal manifestation of the Holy Trinity would only occur once more in the Gospel accounts, at the Transfiguration which is quite appropriately the Gospel we’ll hear on the last Sunday of the Epiphany season in six weeks’ time.

The point here; the message of the Magi and of the Baptism and of the Transfiguration; the Good News of this season of the Church’s year, is that we have a God who desires to be known. We have a God who has no desire to hide himself or his purpose.

Do not let the fact that sometimes the work of theology and biblical interpretation can be difficult give the impression that the Truth of God’s word is intentionally vague or veiled. Christianity is not a religion which should have any time or tolerance for the proposition that there is secret knowledge meant only for insiders. Religions which make such claims have a name, and that name is cult. This is true of the ancient heresy of Gnosticism, which claimed one had to attain knowledge of God through a personal mystical communication. It is also true of modern cults, which might either explicitly withhold certain doctrinal claims until one has paid enough money to advance in the group or implicitly, say by instructing the young men who come knocking at your door to carefully elide more bizarre claims, like getting your own planet and harem at the resurrection if you’re a dude (let the listener understand).

Christianity has no secrets, because we believe God’s greatest desire is to be known. Because knowing God, we know love and can make love known to all. Our great privilege is the opportunity to do the same–to open ourselves to the fullness of God and then to turn round and help others come to know him, too. We can do so clearly, gently, without prevarication, with utter transparency and gratitude, because God himself did it first–in Bethlehem and at the Jordan and on the Mount of Transfiguration and to all he met after his glorious Resurrection. And he comes to us still–in our hearts, in his Word, in the Sacrament, and in this great fellowship into which we have ourselves been baptized and made a part of his own Body to be a light to the world he came to save.

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