Sermons

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

Nearly a decade ago, I had the lovely but very strange experience of preaching and serving as Deacon of the Mass at the parish where I grew up. It was lovely, because I got to see several wonderful friends from my teenage years- people whose support during my awkward adolescence did as much as anything to keep me attending and being active in the Episcopal Church during my college years (the time when too many of our youngsters fall out of that habit).

But it was strange, too. I had preached from that pulpit as a lay-person thanks to special dispensation from the Bishop as I was discerning a call to ordination. It was different this time, though. I was an ordained person, actually set apart to do that sort of thing. I had been up at the altar years before as a server, but now I had a dog collar and a stole on, and I was touching these holy things. As strange as I felt, I imagine it was stranger for the people who knew me as a kid.

I suspect some of what was going through the minds of the good people at church that morning was also going through the heads of those attending synagogue in Nazareth in this morning’s Gospel. Here’s Mary’s son. They knew the kid, but things are different now. He’s different. How strange!
Now, it would have been much weirder for the people at the synagogue that morning than it had been for my old friends for three reasons. First, I’m not the Son of God except in the sense in which we’re all daughters and sons of God. Jesus was (and is) the Son of God in a much more literal sense. Second, I was not (and am not) famous in any sense. News of Jesus, though, had spread throughout the countryside. No doubt word had come to the members of Jesus’ childhood synagogue that one of their own was making quite a name for himself. Third, I’m pretty sure I didn’t say anything controversial or earth-shatteringly interesting that morning. I don’t remember what text I preached on or anything else about my sermon that morning, but I’m pretty confident it would have been pretty standard stuff as far as my own interpretation was concerned. Jesus, on the other hand, came out with something nobody was expecting. He came out with something which must have been more than a little shocking.

Back to that in a minute. First, a little more regarding the context. A synagogue in Jesus’ time would not have had professional clergy. That would come several decades later, after the temple was destroyed and the sect of the Pharisees would evolve into the clergy (the Rabbis) of modern Judaism. Instead, each synagogue would have had a president elected from within the congregation-a sort of Jewish Senior Warden-and that person would (among other tasks) assign somebody in the synagogue to read and teach that particular Saturday. Most likely they didn’t have schedules, so the synagogue president would round somebody up on his way into the service.
This method had its pluses and minuses. On the positive side, it meant not only that everybody was eventually going to contribute something to the life of the synagogue, but that everybody had to get literate enough in biblical studies to be able to say something. When the teacher is eventually going to call on you, you’re more likely to do your homework. On the negative side, this probably meant that most synagogue services were rather dull and uninspiring. Familiarity and literacy do not necessarily translate into creativity, and most sermons in the Nazareth Synagogue were probably just a dry recapitulation of the reading.

Not so the morning Jesus showed up. The synagogue president was probably pretty proud that he got the local boy who’d made good… that is until Jesus opened his mouth. Then he probably wanted to hide behinds the nearest Torah scroll. You see, Jesus not only said something interesting (again, probably not a regular occurrence in the small-town synagogue), but he said something controversial:

The Spirit of the Lord is upon me, because he has anointed me to preach good news to the poor. He has sent me to proclaim release to the captives and recovering of sight to the blind, to set at liberty those who are oppressed, to proclaim the acceptable year of the Lord… Today this scripture has been fulfilled in your hearing.

What that unsuspecting congregation heard was Jesus placing himself in the place of Isaiah (the prophet from whose book he had just read) and he could have been taken as claiming to be better than Isaiah. “Isaiah wrote it,” he might have said, “but he wrote it for me to say.”

As if this weren’t bad enough, the content of Isaiah’s prophecy would have been too much for some in that synagogue to bear. It seems like a pretty comforting reading to us, but a closer look suggests that it is anything but comfortable to some. Jesus, using Isaiah’s words, proclaims “the acceptable year of the Lord.” Other translations read “the year of the Lord’s favor.” What Isaiah and Jesus are referring to, though, is not a vague period of special blessing, but a specific biblical concept. Every fiftieth year, the Law commanded, was to be observed as yovel or jubilee, and as the Book of Leviticus explains:

This fiftieth year is sacred—it is a time of freedom and of celebration when everyone will receive back their original property, and slaves will return home to their families.

Universal emancipation, the forgiveness of all debts, the termination of every lease agreement, and the redistribution of all property were supposed to take place every fifty years according to none other than God’s command.

That is “the acceptable year of the Lord,” and the majority of those in the Nazareth synagogue would have been biblically literate enough to know it. How do you think that would have gone over? Well, if there were slaves in the synagogue they would have liked the sound of that, but there probably weren’t any as Jews couldn’t enslave other Jews according to the Law. Poor folk would have liked the sound of it. Others wouldn’t have. Slaveholders really would have hated it (they tend to get a bit irritable when their “way of life” is challenged, no matter what century we’re talking about). If you had recently leased some land that happened to produce a lot of figs or olives, you would have been furious at the suggestion. If you’d had bad harvests for a while you might have been happy to get out of the contract for the land.

No matter who you were, the observance of the jubilee year would have led to complications and uncertainty. This is probably why the Jubilee may never have actually been observed, even though it was one of God’s commandment and was still very much in effect.

Guess what happened next. Our lectionary reading ends a bit to soon. As soon as Jesus finishes his teaching in the Nazareth synagogue, Luke’s Gospel continues:

When they heard this, all in the synagogue were filled with wrath. And they rose up and put him out of the city, and led him to the brow of the hill on which their city was built, that they might throw him down headlong. But passing through the midst of them he went away.

These were the people Jesus grew up with-his parents’ friends and neighbors-and so outrageous was his teaching that they tried to murder him.

Yet his teaching wasn’t all that outrageous. It was exactly what the prophets before him had said. He was just quoting the scriptures which all in the synagogue had affirmed was the Word of God. Perhaps it wasn’t outrageous but it was courageous. The word of God, as I have said so many times from this pulpit, is not some pablum which merely affirms and comforts us. Rather, it convicts us of our hypocrisy, and that can make us not only uncomfortable but furious.

There is nothing comfortable people are more uncomfortable with than the suggestion that they’ve got more than enough and they’d better give it away. It makes me uncomfortable, because I’ve got more than enough to get by pretty comfortably. To dip my toes once more into the shark pond of contemporary political rhetoric, do you notice how often we actually hear people in power talking about the indigent. I don’t hear it very frequently. No matter what the political party of the person talking, the conversation is always about the middle class. It’s meant to encourage people like me and most of my compatriots who are firmly in the middle class. Talk about the underclass, the truly poor-which in this country is a larger group than in any other developed country-is uncomfortable. It might make people feel guilty and then they might act out defensively in anger instead of feeling convicted to give more of their wealth for the care of the needy. It’s what happened in the synagogue in Nazareth that day after all.

One might argue that Jesus’ words in this morning’s Gospel are meant to be taken only figuratively- that the poor, the captive, the blind, and the oppressed of which Jesus speaks are the spiritually poor, those spiritually imprisoned, the spiritually blind and the spiritually oppressed. One might argue that the jubilee year he proclaims is only about the remission of our sin-debts, the manumission of those enslaved to sin, the return of Israel’s spiritual inheritance.

Well, if that’s all the Gospel is, we may as well stay home on a Sunday morning drinking tea and reading Chicken Soup for the Soul instead of getting up and coming to church. I think I’d just as soon be a secular humanist as be in a religion that doesn’t demand anything of me other than adopting some vague sense of comfort and self-affirmation. Show me your faith, the Apostle James wrote, and I’ll show you my works.

Thank God the Gospel demands more of us. Thank God that Jesus keeps reminding us of our obligation to lift up the poor, to free the captive, to give relief to the oppressed. Thank God that the acceptable year of the Lord has been fulfilled in our hearing. It is now ours to act on that reality. To give and give and give some more to the work of spreading that Good News of release and relief and redemption.

+ 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.

During the process that brought us the 1979 Book of Common Prayer and that sustains its current use, there was a watchword (if you’re being charitable) or a buzzword (if you’re being a bit more honest) which has come to the fore in our theological and liturgical discourse- “baptismal ecclesiology.” In terms of noticeable differences, perhaps the most obvious was that Baptism, rather than Confirmation, became the requirement for the reception of Holy Communion. Many of you have noticed that when I recognize there are first-time visitors I make an announcement to this effect–that all baptized Christians may receive–so, you may correctly assume that I don’t find this an especially problematic thing.

The other major effect is that we’ve started in the last forty years or so to talk more about ministry being not the sole province of ordained bishops, priests, and deacons but of all the faithful. This is also, I’d argue, a very positive thing. One of the things I’ve most loved about being the Rector here at Trinity is that I don’t feel like I’m doing the work of the Church and of the Gospel all on my lonesome. I do not take this for granted! Sometimes clergy get the feeling that they are the “hired hand” expected to do all the working, praying, and dying-to-self that some others had felt they had outsourced to them. I’ve said it before, and I’ll say it again: I am extremely grateful for you people.

So, all that is good stuff, and it’s based on some pretty good theology. Baptism is not only the mystical washing away of original sin- it is that, and it’s more. It is full inclusion into the body of Christ, and the baptismal promises of the 1979 BCP are like the ordination vows of the laity – a metaphor which some are uncomfortable with because of a perceived clericalism in its expression, but I think it help us appreciate the responsibilities the Christian life places on us.

So, what’s the problem? Well, I am not the first person to suggest this, though it is considered somewhat impertinent these days to do so in ecclesiastical circles. We have, I fear, displaced the Sacrament of Confirmation, and thus forgotten its importance as a Sacrament. Indeed, some have derisively spoken of Confirmation as having been maintained merely to give bishops something to do in addition to Ordination which priests cannot. Others have spoken of it, less stridently but just as dismissively, as a rite in search of a meaning.

I’ll speak next week during our Christian Education class after coffee hour more extensively about the nature of the Sacraments and of their number- namely seven: two being the Dominical Sacraments of Baptism and the Eucharist (so-called because they were established by our Lord in the Gospels), and the five others, Confirmation among them, being no less Sacraments of the Church (this is not the universally held view, but it is at least the majority view, and the one which I hold, as well as it being the position taught invariably within the Western Church for a thousand years).

Anyway, to refer to something as a Sacrament (this is a spoiler for next week’s class) is to claim that it is an objective means of God’s Grace mediated by the Church. This is not to say that God’s Grace cannot be experienced subjectively (say through personal, spiritual experience) or outside the mediation of the institution of the Church (say through acts of Divine Providence or even miraculous intervention), but rather that we have received seven means whereby God’s Grace may be said to be effective by virtue of the Church’s action, as Augustine said ex opera operato, or simply from the work itself being carried out. This is why you don’t need to worry about whether or not I’m an especially personally holy man when you receive Communion, for example. It is the very Body of Christ you receive regardless of Fr. Drymon’s personal qualities or lack thereof.

So it is with Confirmation, and this is why simply calling it a rite of passage or a mature affirmation of faith is insufficient. To bring this back, at long last, to the text which inspired this rant, today’s lesson from Acts, Peter and John did not travel to Samaria because the Samaritans had reached the age of accountability or memorized the Apostles’ Creed and the answers in the Catechism (which I still had to do back when I was confirmed during the Dark Ages), but because the Grace of Baptism was to be completed by the pouring out of the Holy Spirit upon the Faithful by the laying on of Apostolic Hands, the importance of which we recognize today and thus continue in faith even if the rationale has been obscured in the wake of baptismal ecclesiology.

During last week’s eschatology lecture I mentioned my favorite New Testament scholar, N.T. Wright, and coincidentally (or providentially? I don’t know!), he wrote something about this passage in his popular Acts For Everyone which I think gets to the point. It’s a somewhat lengthy quote, but its pithier than I’d manage, so it’s a net gain in terms of your time and attention, for which I am ever grateful:

“More important still, from Luke’s point of view, than the fact of Samaritans hearing about Jesus as Messiah, is what happened next. Many of the local people believed and were baptized in the name of Jesus. News of this reached the leaders in Jerusalem, and they made an unprecedented move. It appeared that, despite the Samaritan converts coming to faith and being baptized, they had not experienced the holy spirit in the same way that Jesus’ followers in Jerusalem had done on the day of Pentecost. This seems to have been interpreted in terms of the significant move that was taking place across the traditional boundary of culture and suspicion. It was important, they appear to have concluded, that what was happening in Samaria would not be dismissed by suspicious people in Jerusalem or elsewhere as merely some eccentric occurrence which could be waved away and discounted, leaving the new movement belonging only to bona fide Jews. So, just as church leaders in the fifth century decided that it was important for the bishop and only the bishop to lay hands on people in what has come to be called ‘confirmation’, thus making it quite clear that the new believers really are being welcomed into the central life of the church and not merely into some sort of private club, the Jerusalem apostles decided to send Peter and John to Samaria to lay hands on the converts and pray for the holy spirit. This they did.”

Thus, the Grace of Confirmation was, in fact, doubly gracious. You see, the Samaritan converts were objectively given the gift of the Holy Spirit, confirming their Baptisms before the larger Church, and the Church herself received the Grace of God giving growth in numbers and in faithfulness thanks to the inclusion of these formerly lost sheep from outside the fold of Israel.

And so it remains today. No doubt, a mature affirmation of one’s faith, the personal acceptance of the promises one’s parents and godparents made at Baptism, is an occasion for a significant, subjective experience of God’s Grace. There’s nothing wrong with that. But far more important, I’d argue, is the objective gift of the Holy Spirit, that same Spirit confirming the Grace of the first Sacrament, whether or not we appreciate or understand it. More important even than the realization of God’s grace in our all-too-human hearts and minds, is the objective reality of God’s Grace, God’s undeserved favor and love, whether or not we can contemplate or even fully accept it.

So, yeah, I’m going to start Confirmation classes again on the first Sunday of Lent, as has become my pattern, but I feel I should amend my typical plug in light of what I just said. Instead of “are you ready to make a mature affirmation of your faith?” how about “do you desire to receive the Grace of the Holy Spirit in a new and different way, whether you understand it or not?” We’ll take some time exploring that question, trying to make sense of what it even means to receive the Grace of the Holy Spirit, but perhaps that desire is enough, at least to start.

Stay tuned for that, and in the mean time, give thanks that the good work of Christ’s saving love has already been begun in you in Baptism, and pray that the same Grace may be visited on those who are struggling with their faith, have lost it, or do not yet believe. God stands ready to bless us all, because he has already claimed us. As Isaiah wrote: “Do not fear, for I have redeemed you; I have called you by name, you are mine.”

+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.

For some time I’ve been playing around with this idea that the splits in Western Christianity which began in the Sixteenth Century Protestant Reformation (the results of which we’re still dealing with today) were less about differences of opinion about what Jesus said, but more about differences of opinion about what St. Augustine said. I’ll not bore you with too much more than that thesis (unless I ever get round to writing a book on the matter, in which case I’ll play it for all it’s worth). I would suggest, however, that our sad divisions have too much to do with questions about justification, that is, the precise mechanism by which one avoids hell and gets into heaven.

Specifically, I think they have to do with how Roman Catholic and Protestant theologians read Augustine’s denunciation of the heretical soteriology of Pelagius differently. Perhaps this is surprising, though perhaps not to those who came to my soteriology lecture last month, but that particular question (“By what mechanism in particular are we saved?”) is disputable by faithful, fully orthodox Christians. This is not to say that questions of Justification are irrelevant. Rather, the debates of the Sixteenth Century (which are still debates I hear people engaging in) often try to oversimplify the terms of the argument such that it is no longer a good faith argument.

There are, nonetheless, some ideas from this centuries-long debate which I find useful, not because I can get on board with a reformed view of the mechanism of Justification, but because they are insights with broader implications. One of these, believe it or not, is a Wesleyan concept called “prevenient grace.”

If any of you grew up Methodist you might have been taught this belief. In brief, it’s the idea that God’s Grace is already at work in us at birth. Before a child is baptized, before somebody in some far-flung land with no experience of Christianity hears the Gospel, God’s love and favor already abides with him or her.
We see this phenomenon, I believe, in this morning’s Gospel reading. The Magi were neither Jews nor Proto-Christians. They were likely Zoroastrian priests who practiced astrology and aimed at acquiring other esoteric knowledge. They were, in short, occultists. We even get the English word “magic” from them. Our English translations of scripture tend to chicken out and call them simply “wise men”, since we Christians don’t tend to look too kindly on the occult (nor should we, I’d argue), but let’s call the wise men what they were: pagans.

Yet, these pagan priests knew there was something to see in Bethlehem. They even used their “wicked” astrology to get there. (I wonder how many of us make this connection when we put a star on top of our Christmas tree.) The Magi were drawn to the Christ Child and thanks to what was no doubt divinely granted intuition they protected him from Herod.

I think this has something to teach us about how we approach those who don’t believe or who believe in something very different from us. I think it teaches us that we should go beyond just being civil, just being polite because our mothers taught us never to talk about politics or religion (at least mine did… see how that worked out).

We should, rather, see those who disagree with us as children of God, endowed with Grace from their Creator. This is not to say that all religions are just different paths up the same mountain, as it were. There are some who believe that (there are some here who do, and that’s fine) but I don’t. What I think most of us can affirm, though, (unless you’re a hyper-Calvinist and believe in a capricious God who has only given Grace to a few) is that each of us has an innate desire to seek God and to please God, and that should give us all a common purpose and mutual love.
May our own epiphany, our own striking realization this season, be of God’s presence as it is made manifest in friend and stranger, in coreligionist and non-adherent, in those from whom we are now estranged but pray will be reconciled to us and to God through the perfect love of Christ which binds all Creation together.

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