Sermons

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

If you came this way,
Taking the route you would be likely to take
From the place you would be likely to come from,
If you came this way in may time, you would find the hedges
White again, in May, with voluptuary sweetness.
It would be the same at the end of the journey,
If you came at night like a broken king,
If you came by day not knowing what you came for,
It would be the same, when you leave the rough road
And turn behind the pig-sty to the dull facade
And the tombstone. And what you thought you came for
Is only a shell, a husk of meaning
From which the purpose breaks only when it is fulfilled
If at all. Either you had no purpose
Or the purpose is beyond the end you figured
And is altered in fulfilment. There are other places
Which also are the world’s end, some at the sea jaws,
Or over a dark lake, in a desert or a city–
But this is the nearest, in place and time,
Now and in England.

Those words are taken from T.S. Eliot’s poem “Little Gidding” and they echo, for me at least, the sorrow and the nascent hope of living in our own time, more than eighty years after they were written. The place to which Eliot invites us are the ruins of an intentional Anglican community, Little Gidding, founded by the scholar and deacon Nicholas Ferrar, and like so many things sadly shut down by the Puritans during the English Civil War, a year after the community had given refuge to Charles I.

There is nothing new under the sun. What Ferrar’s community experienced, what Eliot experienced during the blitz in his adopted homeland, and our current malaise brought on by polarization and technological idolatry and God knows what else all have the same result. Life seems fragmented and community appears an ideal whose ruins we may visit, but whose reestablishment feels beyond our reach.

There is another way. What Ferrar had done in Little Gidding and what St. Benedict established in the Sixth Century, what Anabaptists did in the Twentieth Century with the Bruderhof Communities, are echos of a primordial Christian impulse to live intentionally in community. Those whose common life is described in today’s lesson from Acts are the three thousand baptized on Pentecost in response to Peter’s sermon. The first large group of Christian converts came to Jerusalem (as the very difficult-to-read geography lesson we get on Pentecost reminds us each year) from every corner of the Roman Empire, speaking numerous tongues and no doubt bringing their own cultural assumptions and practices with them. One might expect that the response of this host would be to become the first group of organized missionaries, each going home to Pontus or Phrygia or Pamphylia or wherever, each to establish his or her own local church. Now the missionary impulse is not to be quashed, but perhaps it is not the ideal vocation for the neophyte. They had, after all, only heard one sermon. “Pentecostal fire … in the dark time of the year” to quote the poet again, may need some time to melt the snow round one’s own soul before it spreads.

And so these three thousand Christian men, women, and children set aside their ethnic chauvinisms and what was undoubtedly a difficult language barrier after the miraculously polyglot sermon ended, and set about to live as Christians together, to work and learn and most especially to pray together, and two thousand years and 2 billion disciples later we see the result.

The particular economic system adopted by these three thousand is always what piques the most interest and gets folks exercised for good or ill. In reality we can’t impose a modern term on what they were doing. I love to say that I am neither a socialist nor a capitalist, because that’s both true and gets people wound up and confused. I just say read G.K. Chesterton and Hilaire Belloc, and Jacques Maritain and you’ll start to understand my politics; fortunately, nobody has taken me up on that, so I don’t have to defend myself. But that’s neither here nor there, because saying that the three thousand Jerusalem disciples were distributist Christian democrats would be just as much a category error as any other attempt at pinning them down with modern labels.

The important thing about this early Christian community is just what I said a moment ago, they lived and worked and learned and (most especially) prayed together, and they did those things intentionally. Living in this way is easier the stricter a community is, but there’s an impulse here (I believe a God-given impulse) which can be adapted for various life circumstances. It’s easy in a sense for a cloistered monk or nun, with no family and little or no personal property, to pull this off. The three thousand had their own lives and families and occupations. So did those who lived at Little Gidding. So do Bruderhof brethren. But in all these communities there is mutual support and interdependence, there are common values and goals, and most important of all, there is a commitment to coming together to pray. Communes and kibbutzim rarely work out, not just because they can be too stifling or in the other direction too decadent. I think the primary reason for their failure in the long run is because they are fundamentally secular enterprises.

Now, don’t worry, I’m not about to announce the establishment of “Fr. John’s Christian Commune” this morning. I worry I’d go from gentle Abbot to authoritarian cult leader too quickly. And as much as I can appreciate people like Wendell Berry and Paul Kingsnorth for their critiques of the unsustainable nature of our current ways of living, I don’t think radical agrarianism or neo-monasticism is actually workable for about ninety-five percent of the world’s population.

What I am suggesting is what if we just dip our toes into the shallow water of the pool built by those three thousand disciples? What would that look like? Maybe it would be keeping a half hour each day as a sacred obligation to simply pray with those in our household or friend group. Maybe it’s as simple as sitting down with other human beings to eat a meal and have a conversation when one would normally eat Doordash in front of Netflix. Maybe it’s helping a neighbor clean the gutter in a more active way than giving him the phone number for Acme Gutter Cleaners, L.L.C. or (and this is radical and uncomfortable for most of us Twenty First Century Individualists) asking your neighbor to help you clean your gutters.

To what degree one can manage any of that will vary, but at least the way to start, I think, is to try to enter prayerfully into living more intentionally. We have such great models throughout our history as God’s people. And perhaps we can repair to those places, if not physically then at least in the prayer of imagination, like Little Gidding where the saints have pulled it off in the past. As Eliot wrote, right after the stanzas with which I opened this sermon:

If you came this way,
Taking any route, starting from anywhere,
At any time or at any season,
It would always be the same: you would have to put off
Sense and notion. You are not here to verify,
Instruct yourself, or inform curiosity
Or carry report. You are here to kneel
Where prayer has been valid. And prayer is more
Than an order of words, the conscious occupation
Of the praying mind, or the sound of the voice praying.
And what the dead had no speech for, when living,
They can tell you, being dead: the communication
Of the dead is tongued with fire beyond the language of the living.
Here, the intersection of the timeless moment
Is England and nowhere. Never and always.

+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 fascinates me most about this 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 disciples’ 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 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. It “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, though we’re not right if we assume everyone in the First Century was over-credulous) 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 co-tenable 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. I may have said this before but it bears repeating. 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” just by setting forth propositional arguments. Some, yes, and questions also arise early in the “conversion process”, so apologetics is still an important activity. But for most it’s probably not the entree.

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 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 each of 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 godparents 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 is 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.

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

“The old woman took up the shining basin she used for foot washing, and poured in a great deal of water, the cold first and then she added the hot to it. Now [he] was sitting close to the fire, but suddenly turned to the dark side; for presently he thought in his heart that, as she handled him, she might be aware of his scar, and all his story might come out. She came up close and washed her lord, and at once she recognized that scar … The old woman, holding him in the palms of her hands, recognized this scar as she handled it. She let his foot go, so that his leg, which was in the basin, fell free, and the bronze echoed. The basin tipped over on one side, and the water spilled out on the floor. Pain and joy seized her at once, and both eyes filled with tears, and the springing voice was held within her. She took his beard in her hands and spoke to him: ‘Then, dear child, you are really he. I did not know you before; not until I had touched my lord all over.'”

These words are not, you might have guessed, from the bible. They are from the nineteenth book of Homer’s Odyssey, in which Odysseus’ nursemaid, Eurycleia recognizes him after his return to Ithaca.

The classics major in the house asked me what I was searching for the other day when she saw me looking through the relevant bookcase. When I said “The Odyssey”she replied “Greek or English?” “I’ll be quoting a section in my sermon, so English, I guess.” I then explained why—that I remembered Eurycleia was the first to recognize Odysseus, and it was because of touching his scar. She corrected me. “The dog actually recognized him first.” Good point. I hadn’t read the whole thing since high school. Anyway, innocent beasts may have a special power of recognition we fallen humans lack. The point is that Eurycleia was the first person to recognize him. And she recognized him because of his scar. (All this, by the way, is the typical sort of conversation that happens in the rectory. So, now you know.)

I am by no means suggesting here that scripture borrowed from the epic, much less that Christ is some sort of embodiment of a Greco-Roman heroic ideal. As much as I’d love to make off-the-wall connections (say, between the harrowing of hell and Odysseus slaughtering Penelope’s suitors) I don’t actually think that would be justified. Insofar as connections can be made, it’s in how Christ generally subverts all the ideals found in the poetry and mythology of the then prevailing culture.

There is, however, one very human way in which the Christ and the man of many devices (and so many from both legend and history) can be compared. A hero can be identified by his scars.

We hear the story of “Doubting Thomas” on this Sunday every year, and the preacher’s focus is so often on the Apostle—his doubt and his belief. That’s all well and good. I’ve done it probably seventeen times, though I haven’t verified by looking at every sermon I ever preached on this day. But perhaps we should give Thomas a break this year, and look more directly to Christ instead.

Christ’s risen body is, just as ours will be on the last day, spiritual and perfected, albeit still very much a physical body. But while being spiritual and perfect, he still bears the scars of his crucifixion. It is how his identity is confirmed by Thomas after all. Are not these imperfections? Should not Christ’s body be as unblemished as his soul? Is this merely a parlor trick, Christ conjuring an image of wounds where none truly exist to convince an incredulous Apostle?

No, no, and no. These are not defects but symbols of Jesus’ victory on the cross over sin and death. Here is a hero who may be known from his scars.

There was an article in the Courier a few weeks ago in which a couple of mental health providers were interviewed about trauma. I have to be careful here; some of you know that I serve on the county mental health board, and I don’t want to be seen as going off message, but there was one line one of the interviewees gave at which I had to cringe a little. She said “everyone has been traumatized.” Now, I don’t think this is true. If trauma is everything then trauma is nothing, and suggesting that my getting a bit lonesome during Covid lockdowns or whatever is substantively the same as a victim of abuse or who served in a combat zone or who got hit by a truck doesn’t take seriously enough the impact of those experiences. So, I don’t think we’ve all been traumatized.

But I do think we’ve all been banged up at least a bit simply by virtue of living long enough in this fallen world. And in this respect we can take comfort if we follow Christ’s lead rather than Odysseus’. None of us is on a secret mission to infiltrate our own homes and kill our wife’s suitors, requiring us to stay disguised as long as possible. We are on a mission about which we can be fully forthcoming and transparent, on which we can reveal the whole of ourselves insofar as that is useful for spreading the message. This is who I am. This is my scar, the effects of which Christ healed; but the mark remains as a reminder of his great grace toward me.

One word of caution. It is the scar not the open wound to which we point. Healing of body, mind, and soul can be miraculous, but it can also be a process. Even genuine trauma is something from which one can recover; it needn’t and shouldn’t remain an acute pain for ever, and (I say this with love and sympathy) if the suffering itself becomes the totality of one’s experience and identity we may have created an idol and foreclosed the possibility of recovery which is there.

In all events, we can always look to Christ. Those dings and dents we acquire in life, whether in body or soul, do not save the world like Christ’s did, but they do open to us the possibility of identifying with him a bit more and being a bit more grateful in retrospect for both the experience and for the wholeness and healing given us when we were made to genuinely desire the ministrations of the Great Physician.

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