Sermons

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

One of my more nerdy pastimes is looking through older Episcopal hymnals and comparing the development of our own Church music over the years. Primarily, this takes the form of looking at which hymns were removed or added between, for example, the 1940 Hymnal and its immediate successor, the 1982 Hymnal which is currently in use. Sometimes it is obvious why hymns were removed. Despite its rousing tune, the hymn “Once to Every Man and Nation” fell into an unfortunate emphasis on human effort and a lack of any theology of grace and divine action. Some hymns, on the other hand, were taken out for reasons neither I nor some experts I’ve asked could determine. Chief in this category for me is Phineas Fletcher’s text “Drop, Drop Slow Tears”, set to Orlando Gibbons beautiful and memorable tune. Some of you may know that one.

And then there are those hymns that one has a hunch why they were removed, but bemoans their absence nonetheless. One of these is a great 12^th Century hymn by the Cluniac Monk Bernard of Morlaix. Now, Bernard of Morlaix was a bitingly satirical writer in his time, and some of his works come across as a touch lugubrious. I commend to you his extended poem De Contemptu Mundi (On Contempt of the World) for a great, depressing read. Anyway, he wrote a hymn, which is really quite lovely, but I suspect it is its opening line which kept it out of our present hymnal. The hymn begins with the unequivocal declaration that “The World is Very Evil”.

Most of us don’t like to think or say much about the reality of evil, not only because it’s a little creepy but also because it presents a theological problem which all of us have probably encountered whether we knew it or not. The so-called “problem of evil”, or to use the technical term “theodicy”, has likely confronted each of us in very profound ways. We’ve all asked the question “why do bad things happen to good people?” Underlying this question is a more basic, though often unspoken problem. If God is all good and all powerful how could he allow evil to exist. How could he permit the pain and suffering which so many of us experience in such profound and life-altering ways.

We shall return to this problem, but first it must be noted that whether we find it palatable or not, evil does exist. There are “powers and principalities” to use the biblical language, which attempt to work against the purposes of God. There are circumstances, and I would go so far as to say “spiritual forces” which attempt to separate us from the love of God and which strive to hinder the progress of the Kingdom of God.

Let’s take today’s Gospel reading for an example. On the surface, it appears to be a frightening, though altogether natural situation. Jesus and his disciples are at sea, and a storm threatens to harm or even kill them. A close reading of the Greek and a more fulsome understanding of geography, however, suggests that there is more at play here than a natural inconvenience.

So, first to the Greek text, there is one particular word we find in it which colors the meaning of the story, and which our English translations do not take account of. The word is epitimao and it is what our version translates as “rebuke”. In fact this little verb shows up a number of times in the New Testament and it is always associated with the demonic. Whenever Jesus casts out a demon, he rebukes it. When, in the eighth chapter of Mark, Jesus tells Peter “get me behind me Satan”, the imperative is called a rebuke. So strong is this connection that when Jesus rebukes the storm at sea, we may be sure that Mark means to tell us that Jesus is literally demonizing the storm. Jesus recognized that this particular storm was not just an ordinary effect of weather patterns, but was animated by a spiritual force which meant to consternate the work of God.

If this weren’t enough, it is significant that this particular storm is meant to have happened on the sea of Galilee. Now, some of you may have been to the Holy Land and seen the Sea of Galilee. Nearly twenty years ago now, I had the opportunity to cycle around this body of water; I am no athlete, more was I back when I did it, but I did it all in a day. Calling it a “Sea” is exceedingly generous. It is a smallish lake, about 33 miles in circumference and only eight miles across at its widest. So, Imagine driving to Fostoria and back- you’ve just about driven far enough to circumnavigate the sea of Galilee. Needless to say, we’re not talkng about being in open water, and it’s unlikely that a violent storm could come upon a ship so suddenly. Mark knew this when he wrote the Gospel, and Jesus knew this when he quieted the mysterious storm. It is not meant to be a surprise to the reader, then, that there was something dark and supernatural at work in this particular storm. That it should come upon Jesus and his disciples in the midst of their ministries suggests that there was a force working against the purposes of God which was accountable.

The scriptures affirm that there are truly forces at work against God and his people, that hardship is not always coincidence or bad luck. To put it bluntly, the Gospel affirms the reality of radical evil. In hemming-and-hawing about the matter or by the materialist conceit, the explaining away of everything in terms of natural phenomena, this evil is permitted to do its worst work. As C.S. Lewis put into the mouth of the devil in The Screwtape Letters, “the greatest trick we can play is to convince them that we don’t exist.”

So, we know that evil, radical evil, is a reality and attempts to tear apart the work of God. But this still leaves us with the question with which we began. If God is all loving and all powerful, how do these forces get away with it? Why do bad things happen to good people? If you figure that one out, write the book, get it published, and see countless theologians put out of a job, because you’ve solved the problem about which more ink has been spilled among Christian thinkers than any other.

In fact, the problem will stay with us unanswered until the end of days, because that’s precisely what God tells Job in today’s Old Testament lesson. Most of you know the story of Job. He was that righteous man in ancient times who suffered so much at the hand of the evil one. Ultimately, Job complains in words similar to our modern questions. “Why do bad things happen to good people?” God responds thusly:

Where were you when I laid the foundation of the earth? Tell me, if you have understanding. Who determined its measurements– surely you know! Or who stretched the line upon it? On what were its bases sunk, or who laid its cornerstone when the morning stars sang together and all the heavenly beings shouted for joy? Or who shut in the sea with doors when it burst out from the womb? — when I made the clouds its garment, and thick darkness its swaddling band, and prescribed bounds for it, and set bars and doors, and said, `Thus far shall you come, and no farther, and here shall your proud waves be stopped’?

God’s answer, in a nutshell, is “you can’t understand.” None of us created the universe. None of us knows precisely where it’s going except for the glimpses of our future hope we find in Scripture. This isn’t an anti-intellectual shrug of the shoulders, as it were. It is, rather, a recognition that our own capacity for understanding is limited, which is the recognition that none of us is God. Thus, trying to solve this particular problem, the problem of evil, is actually somewhat presumptuous. In my office I have a lovely framed print a friend gave me with a quote from Flannery O’Connor which makes the point more pithily than I can do: “Evil is not a problem to be solved, but a mystery to be endured.”

And it is certainly something to endure. It is something which each of us will endure at some point in our lives. We cannot possibly reckon why “bad things happen to good people”, why evil exists, and that means it’s okay when any one of us cannot possibly understand the travail in which one finds oneself. We don’t need to think it’s our job to figure it out, or worse, come up with some explanation for why “God is punishing us”. That’s not how it works.

While we cannot understand the pain and distress which we face from time to time (or for some, all the time) we nonetheless have a tremendous reason for hope. Maybe Bernard of Morlaix was right and “the world is [indeed] very evil,” but ours is the God who ultimately quiets the stormy sea of our existence. We will continue to undergo much strife in these days, but we know that there is a safe harbour at the end. We know that God will ultimately put all things to rights for His faithful people. We may from time to time face ineffable fear, not knowing how God will fix things, but just like the disciples on the boat that stormy night, we may take comfort that the Lord will come and not be slow to act. For as the psalmist said:

They mounted up to the heavens and fell back to the depths; *
their hearts melted because of their peril.

They reeled and staggered like drunkards *
and were at their wits’ end.

Then they cried to the LORD in their trouble,
and he delivered them from their distress.

He stilled the storm to a whisper *
and quieted the waves of the sea.

Then were they glad because of the calm, *
and he brought them to the harbor they were bound for.

May we live confident in that hope, knowing that the harbour for which we are bound is absolute and eternal fellowship with the Lord who saved us from the stormy sea.

+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.

I wonder how many of us have been through a situation similar to Jesus’ in the morning’s Gospel. Our Lord was, let’s be honest, causing scandal, and his family was afraid he’d gone mad. I think that the first time my parents learned that I wanted to be a priest, they thought I’d gone mad. When Jesus’ family finally approaches, Jesus’ response is not especially polite:

“Who are my mother and my brothers?” And looking around on those who sat about him, he said, “Here are my mother and my brothers! Whoever does the will of God is my brother, and sister, and mother.” 

One wonders how Jesus’ family—the mother and father who raised him and the kinsmen with whom he grew up—felt about this. One suspects they might have felt horribly betrayed!

This is certainly a shocking story, though I think it has something to tell us, and it may be something which some of us are unwilling to hear. Even though I joked about my parents probably thinking my choice of vocation to be madness, I am fortunate in that they never stood in the way of what I felt God was calling me to do and who God was calling me to be. This is not always the case. I didn’t know how fortunate I was that my mom and dad found it entirely appropriate that I should move off to a college 1,500 miles away, or live in the big scary city (that’s New York, which is big, but honestly not scary) afterward. They never told me, when I was in my early twenties I couldn’t go hang out with missionaries in Pakistan or cross the border from Israel into some of the more “iffy” parts of the Palestinian Territories or try (unsuccessfully) to insinuate myself into one of the underground churches in Southwest China. I was more or less an adult, after all.

These are extreme examples, but I have heard stories of family expectations seriously impeding a young man or woman’s development into the kind of person they feel God wants them to be. Going off to college? That’s madness! Choosing to live somewhere besides the family property? Madness!

I don’t mean to suggest that we have no responsibility to honor the expectations and hopes of our elders. I do, however, mean to suggest that parents and other family and friends need to respect the potential vocations of their loved ones. When I say “vocation”, I don’t mean profession, but rather calling. Perhaps God is truly calling a son or daughter into a life which takes them far away. Perhaps God is calling that child to an endeavor we might think is irregular at best or foolish at worst. The trick is to help that loved one discern God’s call and support him or her when he or she has made a prayerful decision.

The risk in not doing so is to be either purposefully at odds with God’s will or uncomfortably convicted by Jesus’ assessment of his mother and brothers when it’s too late to say “I don’t understand, but I support you.”

We know that in Jesus’ case, even if his family were caught off guard by the comments in today’s Gospel, reconciliation was effected. Our Lady was present at the cross, keeping her vigil, surely knowing that as horrible as it all seemed her son was following the Will of his Heavenly Father. None of us is as gracious as the Blessed Virgin, though, so we must be all the more reticent when we may be dissuading or manipulating somebody against God’s will for them. When we’re conscious of this pitfall and prayerful in our response, we not only avoid a great deal of grief. We are able, at last, to see just how unexpectedly God can work through loved ones and circumstances we never would have imagined.

+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.

“Unless one is born of water and the Spirit, he cannot enter the kingdom of God.” In his nocturnal conversation with Nicodemus, Jesus establishes the sine qua non of what it means to be a Christian. My temptation when encountering this text again earlier this week was to preach about a debate being held in some quarters of the church over Communion of the unbaptized- something for which some dioceses and clergy have expressed support in recent years, but which I, frankly, cannot reconcile with the historic teaching of the church. Instead of wading into that controversy, though, I’d like to talk about Baptism more generally this morning and in particular how it relates to our Trinitarian theology.

This conversation between Jesus and Nicodemus will be familiar to some, but what precisely Jesus means has been interpreted in different ways. Some have suggested that “being born of water and the spirit” isn’t necessarily about Baptism at all. Apparently there is some water involved in the physical process of child birth. These people suggest that Jesus is here distinguishing physical birth (with its concomitant water) from spiritual birth (some sort of charismatic “anointing” as a pentecostalist might say).

I don’t buy this argument, because the context of the passage in John suggests an explicitly Sacramental focus in the first three chapters of the Gospel. Jesus is baptized by John, he turns water into wine in Cana at a wedding (that’s two Sacraments—Eucharist and Matrimony—foreshadowed in one story), and then he meets up with Nicodemus. I would contend, then, that Jesus is most assuredly talking about Baptism here.

Others have taken the story to indeed refer to Baptism, but to suggest a very different idea about the Sacrament than what the Church has always taught (and here I get a bit polemical, for which I apologize, but I want to be clear about what we believe). This began with small groups of sixteenth century reformers known as Anabaptists and gained popularity in evangelical and fundamentalist sects in the last two centuries. These would claim that for Baptism to be effective the baptizand must believe. Whether this simply means granting cognitive assent to Christian truth or having some sort of spiritual experience, such sects would reject infant baptism.

This position comes, I believe, from a misunderstanding of Jesus’ words to Nicodemus. First, it assumes a disconnection between water and spirit which the Greek can neither support. More importantly, though, said interpretation makes a mistake in how it understands Jesus’ insistence that one must be “born anew”. Some translations read “born from above” and others read “born again”, which is the standard translation cited by opponents of infant Baptism. All these translations are technically correct. The Greek word anōthen could mean “born again” or “born from above”. Nicodemus mistakenly assumes it is the former, and those who teach so-called “believer’s baptism” make the same mistake as Nicodemus. Jesus’ response to Nicodemus’ confusion is one of correction. “No, Nicodemus, I didn’t mean that you had to be ‘born again’ exactly,” he might have said, “but that you need to be Baptized.”

So, the rebirth (or regeneration) is not a discrete experience symbolized by Baptism. It is, rather, the actual, objective effect of Baptism. Though a small child may not know precisely what’s happening (indeed, though even an adult cannot fully grasp the nature and importance of the great mystery of this Sacrament), God does, and we all, regardless of our understanding, receive the grace of the Sacrament, which is the forgiveness of sins and inclusion in the Kingdom of God.

Today is Trinity Sunday, and I’m going to break the tradition I’ve established over the last few years of introducing a complicated theological concept with a funny Greek name (though surely some of you remember my previous Trinity Sunday sermons on perichoresis and kenosis). Instead I want to conclude by saying how the mystery of the Holy Trinity relates to Baptism. It is obvious enough that we baptize in the name of the Trinity, but why?

If there’s one point about Trinitarian theology I repeat ad nauseum it is that the fundamental reality of the Trinity is not about a division of labor, but about a relationship of love. It’s not that the Father does some stuff (create the world, say) and the Holy Spirit does other stuff and the Son still different tasks. The whole of God is active in the work of God. The reason the Trinity matters is because it means that God was Himself a relationship before all worlds and, even more exciting, God is a relationship in which we are invited to participate. This is a relationship we maintain our whole lives through prayer and acts of loving-kindness and (most especially) through the Sacraments. It is, however, a relationship which has its beginning in and for us. Perhaps this isn’t language everyone is comfortable with, but it’s language I’ve become comfortable with: we have a life-long love affair with the living God, and that love affair begins at Baptism. Treasure that relationship. Nurture it. And support those who, through Baptism, are caught up in it, too.

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