Sermons

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

I mentioned in both my extemporaneous homily on Ascension Thursday and at Sue Bowman’s funeral yesterday, that we find ourselves in a peculiar time in the church calendar–Ascensiontide: a season within the Easter season which highlights the great tension we Christians have all the time, namely the concomitant truths that Christ has conquered sin and death and yet sin and death are still with us. Christ reigns over all from the right hand of the Father and yet in a very real sense the nations have not been brought fully into his fold. Just like the apostles had this strange ten day period between Christ leaving earth and his sending the Holy Spirit to comfort and empower them, so do we live in a strange period between Christ’s Resurrection on the one hand and his second coming and the General Resurrection on the other.

Sometimes this tension lends itself to an intellectual meditation on eschatology, on how precisely the world has changed and how it hasn’t and how that is to be understood in light of the coming glory. Other times, though, our response to this tricky reality is more emotional, and quite rightly so.

For many of us recent events–the murder of 19 children and two adults in Uvalde, Texas last week, shortly after the racist attack which killed ten people at a supermarket in Buffalo and the politically motivated attack on Taiwanese-Americans at their church in Southern California–elicits this more emotional response.

In today’s lesson from Revelation, our Lord pronounces “Behold, I am coming soon,” and sometimes in light of human tragedy and the fact that sin and death still seem to reign, our response might be more pointed than John’s seemingly joyful “Amen. Come, Lord Jesus!” Indeed, it may be for us a cry of profound grief or even anger. “Lord Jesus, we really wish you’d come back already! Where are you!?” This may be how one naturally reacts after a tragedy, whether that tragedy is personal or common, and this I think is appropriate. God is big enough to take our grief and anger, and indeed, he is capable of transforming it into something more salutary.

Perhaps the greatest thing God can give us and the whole world at this moment and in all moments which cause sorrow and pain is the one thing that seems most lacking, most needful, in our society these days: unity achieved through love. This was Jesus’ final prayer before he was handed over to death:

I do not pray for these only, but also for those who believe in me through their word, that they may all be one; even as thou, Father, art in me, and I in thee, that they also may be in us, so that the world may believe that thou hast sent me.

This, I believe, is the greatest gift the church can give the world right now. This is our witness. It is what Jesus himself tells us is the chief way people will be drawn to this peculiar life we’ve been called together to share as Christians.

Despite our differences (socially, politically, racially, economically), we love one another. We find a greater unity because we know, to use the old proverb whose origin has been misunderstood to mean precisely its opposite, that the blood of the covenant is thicker than the water of the womb. Jesus brings us together regardless of the divisions the world seeks to impose. The greatest Christian apologist and theologian of the late Second- and early Third-Centuries in th West, Tertullian, wrote that the pagans of his native Roman North Africa would say, “look at these Christians, how they love one another.” No doubt they’d say it initially with a sneer, but in the long-run the power of this witness could not be ignored.

I say this is the greatest gift the Church can give, because the world tells us, particularly after a tragedy, that this is the time to pick our corners and get ready to tear each other apart. It has become cliché to say that our nation is more divided than ever. I pray this isn’t literally true, since during at least in one period in the 1860s we seemed at least a bit more divided. That said, we’re in pretty bad shape.

The defining moment of my youth was the attack on September 11, 2001. I was 17, and perhaps I was naive but it at least seemed like folks by and large genuinely came together and tried at least for a little while to be a bit kinder, a bit more forbearing, a bit more unified despite all that divided us. One would have hoped that hundreds of thousands dying in a pandemic, the spectre of a major war in Europe for the first time in living memory for all but the most seasoned of our fellows, and now the murder of nineteen grade school children would have had the same effect. Sadly, this does not seem to be the case.

We may blame the news media. We may blame social media. We may blame the fact that we live in a far lonelier society today, the institutions of civil society (from churches to civic clubs to bowling leagues) losing people to the choice to sit at home alone watching television or doom-scrolling on twitter. Whatever the proximate cause of this sickness, the ultimate cause is sin, the fallen-ness of our nature, and the only cure is unity brought about by love in the face of all that the power of evil employs to try to keep us apart.

Don’t get me wrong. There are two things which this does not imply. On the one hand it does not imply unanimity. It does not mean we have to agree on everything, even big hot button issues that tend to get us riled up. You all know what those issues are. On the other hand, it does not imply cheap grace, the idea that none of what divides us matters; that we can just have the Proud Boys and the Nation of Islam sit in a drum circle and play hacky-sack and sing kumbaya without repenting of evil and all will be peachy.

So, we may continue to pray, whether in joy or sorrow, “Come, Lord Jesus” and one day that prayer will be answered. But in the meantime, we have a job to do, because love takes work. It takes work to disabuse ourselves (or rather to let the Holy Spirit in us disabuse us) of the notion that we must like everything about our neighbor in order to love him. But it’s worth it, because by this the world will see how these Christians love one another in the midst of a world defined by nastiness and hate. And when we don’t know what else to do, or even how to pray in the face of grief and rage and the power of evil, St. Paul tells us, that the Holy Spirit intercedes for us, praying in our hearts with sighs too deep for words.

+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.

As a consequence of both having poor eyesight and being a rather clumsy person, I’ve never much enjoyed the dark. I dislike that feeling of waking up in the middle of the night and stumbling around to find my glasses, perhaps tripping over a cat or the shoes I left in the wrong place or whatever. I’m lucky to live in the developed world in the twenty-first century where electric lighting is ubiquitous.

Imagine, then, how surprising the imagery in this morning’s reading from Revelation would have been to people living in a literally much darker world:

And the city has no need of sun or moon to shine upon it, for the glory of God is its light, and its lamp is the Lamb. By its light shall the nations walk; and the kings of the earth shall bring their glory into it, and its gates shall never be shut by day – and there shall be no night there … And night shall be no more; they need no light of lamp or sun, for the Lord God will be their light, and they shall reign for ever and ever.

Light and dark imagery is seen throughout scripture, and I suspect it would have been more striking to these ancient people for whom the dark was a very dangerous reality. Bandits and predators struck in the dark. At nightfall you’d lock the gates to the city, and you’d probably stay in your house unless you were looking to get into some mischief.

And as dangerous as the literal darkness would have been, the metaphorical darkness in which the early church operated was a necessary evil. The church was being persecuted, and the best way to avoid death was to act like the bandits- move in secret, don’t get found out, worship God in locked rooms and catacombs.

How heartening, then, was this message of daylight! No longer would Christians need to scurry about in the dark, hiding from their torch-bearing persecutors. Finally, the true light which came to enlighten humanity could shine for all the world to see! The glory of God and of the Lamb would shine into every corner, bringing the righteous into a new and everlasting day and showing the designs of the wicked to be but vanity.

And now for the really interesting question, the question which makes the book of Revelation such a problematic text: Has this taken place? Are we, God’s faithful people, enjoying the light or is it an as-yet dim but growing hope.

I think it’s both. On the one hand, the majority of Christians can now be pretty open about their religion. Since Constantine, the Church has enjoyed a privileged place in Western society, even if she no longer has the authority she once had in the day-to-day lives of adherents and the larger culture. The Church continues to grow in the global south, and societies which once saw the Faith as a threat are starting to loosen up on enforcing laws which discriminate against Christians. Things are by no means perfect, but they’re getting better, at least in some parts of the world.

But we’ve not yet reached that perfect state of light. Sin and death are still with us. The vision of Revelation is not just about Christians escaping outright persecution (though that was the prevailing issue when the book was written). It’s also about all things being made subject to the reign of Christ. We’ve not yet seen “the kings of the earth bringing their glory into [the city of God].” It may have seemed like that for about a millennium, between Constantine and the Reformation, but the story was and remains a great deal more complex than that.

So, as much progress as has been made over the last two-thousand years, there is still darkness. There are still corners into which the salvific light of God has not shone. The nations have not been fully healed. Not all have the name of the lamb inscribed on their foreheads and in their hearts.

So, the image of the City of God, the New Jerusalem, is still a hope. It is a hope for which we’ve been given a foretaste in the Church and Her Sacraments, but all is not yet accomplished.

And so we pray “thy Kingdom come”, in the sure and certain hope that it is our birthright in Baptism. We don’t just wait around waiting for “pie in the sky when we die, by and by”, because the vision of the Holy City is a vision of the coming reality of this world, too. Rather, we light a candle here and there, causing the gloom to take flight, and one day, perhaps when we least expect it, Christ will return and the world will be so full of the light of Grace that the darkness will have no bastion remaining, and all things everywhere will be transformed into just what God intends for them.

+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.

Week before last when I was at our annual diocesan clergy conference, I was talking with a colleague who has some similar interests to mine who told me that he had recently read a “thinkpiece” which claimed that the quality of a film or television adaptation of a novel was primarily dependent on that adaptation’s faithfulness to the source material. I told him that this seemed manifestly untrue, since different media necessarily require different approaches, and several examples immediately came to mind for me. Stanley Kubrick’s film version of the Stephen King horror novel The Shining is superior in almost every way to the later ABC miniseries based on the same, despite being far less faithful to the book. The film version of Laurence Sterne’s bizarre 18^th Century novel Tristram Shandy was only successful, I think, insofar as it diverged from reliance on the putatively unfilmable book.

But the counter-example which I gave my colleague, because I suspected he’d be familiar with both the novel and the film, was Starship Troopers. I said that Robert Heinlein’s 1959 novel was a piece of dangerous, fascist garbage and that the 1997 movie only worked because it was a satire which held its source material in contempt. I was surprised and not a little disappointed when my friend started to look a bit irritated and proceeded to tell me that the novel was one of his favorites, that he had read it six times, and that he did not see how I could find it problematic. Goes to show that sometimes I should know my audience better, or at least I shouldn’t assume my interlocutor always sees things the way I do.

Anyway, his response made me wonder if I had a similar appreciation for a work of art or literature whose actual message would not sync up with what I actually believed or how I really felt. I’m sure there are many examples of this but the one which came to mind immediately was William Blake’s 1804 poem which is most famous for being sung to Hubert Parry’s hymntune “Jerusalem” with Edward Elgar’s rousing orchestration. I’ll avoid the temptation to sing it at you; it goes like this:

And did those feet in ancient time
Walk upon England’s mountains green:
And was the holy Lamb of God,
On England’s pleasant pastures seen!
 
And did the Countenance Divine,
Shine forth upon our clouded hills?
And was Jerusalem builded here,
Among these dark Satanic Mills?
 
Bring me my Bow of burning gold:
Bring me my arrows of desire:
Bring me my Spear: O clouds unfold!
Bring me my Chariot of fire!
 
I will not cease from Mental Fight,
Nor shall my sword sleep in my hand:
Till we have built Jerusalem,
In England’s green & pleasant Land.

The heartbreaking thing for me is that this is such a wonderful poem with such compelling sentiments, but the last two lines lose me when I think about it.

Blake begins with these rhetorical questions based on a legend that Joseph of Arimethea brought a young Jesus to England, and the obvious answer to them, the poet realizes” is “no, those feet did not in ancient time walk upon England’s mountains green nor did his countenance divine shine forth upon the clouded hills.” Blake fully realized that Jerusalem was not built on his lovely homeland then being despoiled by “the dark satanic mills” of encroaching industrialization. The second half of the poem is a rousing call to action, inspiring the reader to take up the arms of spiritual warfare against the forces of evil. So far so good. But then he gets to the point, and it’s this point (the whole point of the poem) that I, sadly cannot affirm: namely, that it is up to us to build Jerusalem, to bring about the Kingdom of God on earth.

The message we get from scripture is precisely the opposite. It is God’s divine intervention that brings about the New Jerusaelem on the last day, as we heard in this morning’s lesson from St. John’s Apocalypse. Listen to those words again:

Then I saw a new heaven and a new earth; for the first heaven and the first earth had passed away, and the sea was no more. And I saw the holy city, new Jerusalem, coming down out of heaven from God,[not being built by us, but coming down out of heaven from God] … And he who sat upon the throne said, “Behold, I make all things new.” [I, God, make it so, not human effort and ingenuity, but the divine will working out that which we cannot.]

We are no doubt called to make the world a better place, but if we think our own efforts can eliminate sadness or death, we are sadly mistaken. If we think it’s all on us to build Jerusalem in England’s green and pleasant land or in Western Ohio’s cornfields, we are setting ourselves in the place of God, and we’re setting ourselves up for disappointment.

This might at first sound discouraging, but it is, in the final analysis, very good news indeed. It means that eternal life in the presence of God is not some metaphor for peaceful human society built by human ingenuity, but is exactly what it sounds like: eternal life with God. It’s good news because it means that it’s not all on us to make it a reality. God makes all things new. He’s not just in some process of helping humanity perfect itself and build its own Kingdom; he will on the last day raise us from the dead and he will dwell with us in eternity. This takes a lot of the pressure off. It does not, of course, exempt us from living a Christian life and loving our neighbors in word and deed; but it does mean that our own eternal happiness is not ours to effect, but God’s to give as his greatest gift. We need only to be humble enough to recognize that it is God who gives us the victory and not we ourselves, and to offer Him the only thing we can, which is genuine gratitude.

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