Sermons

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

A week ago was the ninth anniversary of my ordination to the priesthood, and I was reminded of a moment during the liturgy that some of you know about. After the oath that I believed the Old and New Testaments of the Holy Scriptures to contain all things necessary to salvation (the one uniquely Anglican theological oath a priest-to-be has been require to make consistently throughout the last half-millennium) and the promise to conform to the doctrine, discipline, and worship of the Episcopal Church and to obey the bishop, the ordinand is supposed to sign a physical copy of that declaration. I believe obedience to just authority is a most important thing in the church, so it was not my scruples but my nerves which made me accidentally sign not in the space reserved for my own signature, but in that reserved for the bishop’s.

Of course, the Declaration of Conformity got signed properly later, everything’s legal, I assure you, and it was not the my taking that oath (as critical as it was and is), but the bishop’s prayer and the laying on of his hands that made me a priest. But in today’s Old Testament lesson and today’s Gospel we hear of some prophets who failed to do anything like attempt to sign a declaration to make things official, and they certainly didn’t have a bishop lay on hands.
First, in the passage from Numbers we learnt of Moses being overwhelmed by the demands set on him as God’s vicar, His agent, among the children of Israel. So, God had him appoint seventy men and He put some of the spirit that rested on Abraham and placed it upon those seventy, that they might share in the administration of His people. This is a foreshadowing of the priesthood which was to develop in the early church.

A bit of history: while at first there were only Apostles and those who came to replace them, known as bishops, there came a time in which the Christian population grew so large that they could not do all the work of the Church. So, they let some of the spirit given to them—the Grace of their ministry—rest upon qualified, designated people who came to be known as presbyters, elders, or priests.

Anyway, Moses ordained those seventy men to help him in carrying out God’s work. But then, as we heard, there were two elders of the tribe, called Eldad and Medad, who began prophesying in the camp. They were not present for the solemn ordination liturgy that day in the desert, and yet they showed signs of the same Spirit, the same Grace, which rested upon the other seventy. This made Joshua most upset. “My Lord Moses, stop them!” he exclaimed. They had not been ordained properly! They had not signed a declaration of conformity! And yet, they were obviously given gifts to do God’s work among the people. Thus, Moses rebuffed Joshua; “Are you jealous for my sake?” he asked. “Would that all the Lord’s people were prophets, and that the Lord would put his spirit on them.”
Perhaps Joshua had fallen victim to a certain kind of elitism, what today we would call clericalism, which holds that only those properly vetted and duly ordained can possibly be leaders of God’s people. Perhaps it was also a bit of legalism, an obsession with policy and procedure which can at times frustrate the actions of the Holy Ghost. Probably it was a little of both, and thank God Moses’ response was clear. He might as well have said, “Get over it! Your high view of your own position and your obsession with rules cannot stand in the way of God’s will.”

Jesus’ response to the apostles was very much the same. The apostles didn’t much care for this other chap who was casting out demons in Jesus’ name but who lacked the proper credentials to do so. Jesus’ response was much like Moses’ response: “Do not stop him; for no one who does a deed of power in my name will be able soon afterward to speak evil of me. Whoever is not against us is for us.” Perhaps the disciples also had fallen victim to that elitism, which today we would call clericalism. Perhaps it was also a bit of legalism. Probably it was a little of both. And one way of interpreting Jesus’ rebuke of the apostles is the same as how we might interpret Moses’ rebuke of Joshua: “Get over it! Your high view of your own position and your obsession with rules cannot stand in the way of God’s will.”

The message I get from these texts is that clericalism is deadly and an inordinate reliance on rules is deadly. This isn’t to say we ought not to have a high view of the priesthood. It is a gift from God to the Church. This is not to say that rules about how the life of the Church proceeds are all meant to be broken. There are certain Sacramental functions and certain areas of Church leadership in which only a priest is permitted to function for very good reasons. However, this text is a warning to me, lest I become so enamored with clerical authority that I withhold the privilege to serve and to lead from all of you, by either being an autocrat or by just doing all the work because I think I’m the only one who knows how to do it the right way. This last is a particularly difficult lesson for me, but I’m always trying to get better at it. These texts should also send a message to all of you. I think the message is something like: “Don’t get complacent!”

Certainly, you can be happy, if you wish to be, that you have a priest here to do the priestly work of preaching and teaching and dispensing the sacraments and providing pastoral care and leading this parish. On Thursday I had my monthly lunch with other clergy from around the deanery, a number of whom are Interim-Rectors or supply clergy, who shared with me the difficulty their parishes were having due to going a year or two without permanent, instituted clergy leadership. That, I’ve gathered, was a frustration here for you, too, before I came here two-and-a-half years ago. In all events, you’ve got what amounts to tenured clergy leadership (and I hope not too much buyer’s remorse), but, don’t let that or me withhold from you the ability to serve and to lead in ways which are meaningful to you. If I do put the kibosh on such service and leadership I’d better have good reason, and if not, you should call me out on it, just like Moses did to Joshua and Jesus did to his apostles. I promise I won’t bite, because I recognize how much this church means to so many of you. It means so much to me, and I’ve not been here as long as many. I realize how dangerous it is to preach a sermon like this, but take it at face value, because I really believe that any one of you might be an Eldad or a Medad, like we met in today’s Old Testmant, or an unlicensed exorcist, like we met in today’s Gospel. Step up and look around. There’s plenty of work to do.

+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.

Those who are somewhat aesthetically inclined will probably have experienced something I have over the years. One can take a text which rubs one the wrong way and have it sung to a beautiful setting, and the text doesn’t seem so bad. It especially helps if it’s sung in another language, but even that is not particularly necessary.
One of those texts, which I encountered in school (and I apologize if this is seen as heresy by the schoolteachers in the congregation) is Pilgrim’s Progress. I hated it. It could have been John Bunyan’s puritanical beliefs conflicting with my own burgeoning high-churchmanship, or it could have been my adolescent grandiosity which held that straight allegory was just lazy writing. Anyway, I didn’t like it until I heard Ralph Vaughan Williams’ opera based on the text.

And the text actually does make a good point. Life, Bunyan said, is a pilgrimage, a journey toward our eternal reward, and it is beset by dangers and distractions. The life of faith is a life of resolve. One must remain steadfast to get past the pitfalls which are set before us by the machinations of evil forces. That is real pilgrimage. Going to Jerusalem or Rome or to the Shrine of Our Lady of Walsingham in England (a trip I plan to make next summer) are good exercises. But the real pilgrimage is that of life, and it’s not as easy as getting your visas and jumping on an airplane. As Bunyan wrote, or actually as the hymnwriter Percy Dearmer paraphrased Bunyan, “He who would valiant be ‘gainst all disaster, let him in constancy follow the Master. There’s no discouragement shall make him once relent his first avowed intent to be a pilgrim.” There are many dangers along the way, but the pilgrim approaches them with the boldness that comes from a living faith.

The prophet Jeremiah found out the hard way. In this morning’s Old Testament lesson he wrote, “I did not know that it was against me that they devised schemes, saying, ‘let us destroy the tree with its fruit. Let us cut him off from the land of the living, so that his name will no longer be remembered!’” That the way of faithfulness, the good pilgrimage, made one to be at odds with the world was a hard lesson for Jeremiah, and yet in the end he had faith that God would pave the way for his progress. He realized that it was no one but the God of Israel who judged righteously, who tried hearts and minds and brought about justice.

Likewise, the psalmist knew that only God could deliver him from the scorn of his enemies. In one breath he laments “The arrogant have risen up against me, and the ruthless have sought my life; those who have no regard for God.” But in the next breath he proclaims “Behold, God is my helper, it is the Lord who sustains my life.”
It is, I am humbled to admit, John Bunyan, who got it right, too. “Who so beset him round with dismal stories, do but themselves confound, his strength the more is. No foes shall stay his might, though he with giants fight; he will make good his right to be a pilgrim.”

Even more, however, than the flesh and blood enemies of whom Jeremiah and the psalmist wrote, the devices and desires of our own hearts can serve as the chief enemies which confound our progress as pilgrims. And perhaps chief among these obstacles is the sin of vanity. In Pilgrim’s Progress, the pilgrim, named Christian, faces perhaps his most difficult test at Vanity Fair, where he and his traveling companion, Faithful, are put on trial, accused by characters like Lord Hate-good, Envy, Superstition, and Pick-thank. If all this sounds weird, try reading the whole book.

It is a Vanity Fair of sorts which serves as the obstacle to the Apostles in today’s Gospel:
Then they came to Capernaum; [it says] and when [Jesus] was in the house he asked them, “What were you arguing about on the way?” But they were silent, for on the way they had argued with one another who was the greatest.

Jesus, of course, knew the answer before he asked the question, and so he revealed that great paradox which is at the heart of the Christian life “Whoever wants to be first must be last of all and servant of all.”

How counter-intuitive this truth is in our day and age. If you watch much television, and watch all the reality shows found thereon, you’ll know that fame and self-promotion are now, as ever, very prevalent objects of desire. Now I don’t begrudge the fame of the American Idol or the Survivor or whoever is reckoned worthy of dating the Bachelor, and I don’t even know for sure that everyone appearing on such programs is self-absorbed. I don’t even begrudge people who enjoy watching such things; I might feel the temptation do so if we had television in the Rectory, so thank God we don’t. However, I wonder if these things are a symptom of a culture too much in the grip of vanity.

So how may one avoid this pitfall on the pilgrim’s road? How do we combat the inordinate desire for greatness and recognition which militate against our progress? I wish I knew the answer to that question better than I do. I have, however, been fortunate enough to begin to answer it for myself, not because I’m especially humble and not because I’m an especially good servant, but because I’m in a position to see some good examples. Since I sort of know what happens around the parish, I’m lucky enough to see some of the hard work that people here do with no apparent desire for recognition or reward. I know that many do the same kind of work in the community or at their workplace or in their homes. I shall not name names, because said servants might be embarrassed to be called out, precisely because they have no desire to be seen as the greatest. I’d say they know who they are, but many probably don’t because they’re not concerned about sizing themselves up against their fellows. I want to be more like those people. As much as I kinda don’t like John Bunyan, I want, to say along with him “Since, Lord, thou dost defend us with thy Spirit, we know we at the end shall life inherit. Then fancies flee away; I’ll fear not what men say, I’ll labor night and day to be a pilgrim.”

+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.

There is no Christian symbol as ubiquitous as the image of the Holy Cross. Many of us wear a cross or crucifix round our necks. I wear a crucifix underneath my clothes; an oft-overlooked fact about our tradition is that the pectoral cross is – along with the ring, crozier, and mitre – a distinctive symbol of the office of bishop, so wearing my crucifix outside my clothes would be seen as more-than-a-little presumptuous. That said, the cross I wear under my clothes means a great deal to me not only because it is such a powerful symbol of salvation but because it was a gift given me by upon the occasion of my ordination to the priesthood nine years ago.

Even those churches which historically disdained the use of any kind of imagery or symbolism in worship and church architecture seem to have come round to embracing the use of this symbol. Congregationalists and Presbyterians two hundred years ago would never have had a cross-topped steeple on their churches, instead having a more secular symbol such as weathercock-topped cupola. A cross on a steeple or around a neck would be seen as a graven image, an idol. Today, it’s not uncommon to see crosses on steeples or in the sanctuaries of churches in the reformed tradition, despite their historical reticence about images.

In any case, the use of cruciform imagery seems to have become as popular in the Reformed traditions as it always has been in Roman Catholicism, Eastern Orthodoxy, and Anglicanism. You’re as likely to see a cross worn as a necklace by a Baptist or Presbyterian as by a member of those three “small ‘c’ catholic” churches. If you see a giant cross somewhere off the freeway you are probably pretty safe in betting that it was erected by an evangelical church, despite the historical irony implicit in that assumption.

This is all well and good. We are reminded of the power of this image today, on which we celebrate the Feast of the Holy Cross, transferred (with the bishop’s permission) from Friday. This holy day was orignally added to the kalendar to commemorate the discovery of the True Cross in Jerusalem by St. Helena, mother of the Roman Emperor Constantine, and the dedication of the Church of the Holy Sepulchre built on the site of that discovery. It has become a day to meditate the sacrifice made thereon for our sake, a sort of autumnal Good Friday.
But unlike Good Friday, the most sorrowful day of the Church year, today is meant to be a little bit more upbeat. We focus today more on the gracious, joy-giving benefit of the Cross than on the dismal scene we revisit each Holy Week.

The Holy Cross is a paradox, and I think it’s appropriate for this paradox to make us feel a bit uncomfortable. It’s glorious and hateful. It’s joyous and devastating. I really believe that if the Gospel isn’t making us uncomfortable then we’re not looking hard enough. So, I beg your pardon, but now let me attempt to make you uncomfortable… Why don’t you wear an electric chair around your neck? Why doesn’t somebody build a giant replica of a gas chamber that can be seen from the freeway? We see this symbol so often that we forget that while it obliquely represents a theological claim having to do with justification and salvation, its more literal referent is a device used for state-sanctioned murder.

I say this to suggest that the meaning of this symbol has, I think, become debatable in light of postmodernity. For good or ill, there is no longer any single Christian meta-narrative, if there ever was one – no big unifying explanation of everything to which we all subscribe. Thus, the Cross’ meaning for me may seem nonsensical to somebody else and vice versa.

I suspect that it means something very different for me than it does for the kind of person who’d erect a giant cross off the freeway. The cross Sonya gives Raskolnikov in Crime and Punishment means something different from a cross in a vampire story or Paul Newman’s cruciform posture after his character eats fifty eggs in Cool Hand Luke. Maybe the crucifix hanging in your house means something different to you than what the crucifix hanging in your neighbor’s house means to them.

Now, despite what it sounds like, I’m not saying this to suggest that individualistic meaning-making is just alright. I might be biased, but I think the Faith of the Church trumps Joe Blow’s internet-assembled philosophy every time. What I am saying is that the chief symbol of our faith is so full of meaning that it’s easy to take one aspect as a sufficient definition of the whole or else to treat the symbol as empty in-and-of-itself.

So, let’s have a go at defining this symbol more thoroughly. I’m certain this sermon is just a beginning outline of that definition; it cannot be comprehensive as I’m not that smart nor have we enough time, but here we go.

Let’s start with the negative definition, what the Cross is not. First, It is not a fashion statement. That doesn’t mean wearing one is bad, whether ornate or simple. It does, however, mean that if we spend a whole lot of time thinking about whether the baroque crucifix or the funky, colorful cross best fits the image we’re trying to project, then we’ve missed the point.

Second, the Cross is not a battle standard in some external war with unbelief or the unbelieving. Sure, there is a lot of martial imagery in the bible, but it’s used not as a mandate for militant evangelism but as an image of the internal struggle between our old selves and our regenerate, resurrected souls and bodies. When we start speaking about our own mission in terms of winning a battle for God instead of God winning for us, we’re getting into dangerous territory. I encourage you to think about our processions (whether just the weekly entry of the choir and ministers or the occasional trip we take around the block led by the cross) as a sort of liturgical irony. We look like the most pathetic of military processions. The general at the back of the line hasn’t even ever been in a fistfight. All we can do is love our enemies to death.

Finally, the Cross is not a totem. It’s not a symbol we ought to use to exalt our tribe by defining ourselves in opposition to another. It’s a fine line between boasting in the Cross of Christ alone, as St. Paul commends us to do, and using this holy symbol as a way to make ourselves look or feel superior. Here’s a good rule of thumb. It doesn’t always hold, but it does more than you might think. If it’s counter-cultural to the point of being uncomfortable, then you’re probably following the Gospel. Using a Christian symbol in the First Century Roman Empire marked its user as someone who ought to be avoided. Putting a big honking Cross in your front yard in Findlay, Ohio, whatever your intentions, does not mark you as somebody taking a courageous stand. Whether you mean it to or not, it probably sends the message that you think you’re pretty special and God might just love you a little bit more than your neighbor.

Now for the positive definition. First, the Cross is a symbol of defeat. Yes, Christ won salvation for us, taking death itself as a kind of prisoner of war. But he did it through surrender, by embracing defeat. We ought to do this a bit more ourselves, and I think the Cross is a good way for us to imagine it. For one thing, we’ll each of us have a better, holier death if we accept it when the time comes, just like our Lord did. One hopes that particular end doesn’t come untimely, but those failures we experience in the midst of life, too, will be easier for us to whether and recover from if we inspect them through cruciform lenses. When my life seems completely out of my control, I take comfort in knowing that even Jesus entered a period of passivity in order to effect the salvation he was sent to accomplish.

Second, the Cross is a symbol of self-sacrifice. Christ calls us to take up our own cross and follow him. How often we minimize this mandate! People sometimes talk about their irritable co-worker or their gouty toe as their “cross to bear,” but our Lord calls us to a greater sacrifice. Such sacrifice certainly takes many forms. Perhaps it’s giving up your free time to help others. Maybe it’s giving that Christmas bonus to the poor instead of buying an Xbox. Maybe it’s actually giving up a little bit of self-reliance and self-determination for the whole rest of your life by availing yourself of the sacrament of Marriage. Going back to what I said earlier, the Gospel can make us uncomfortable, and if we’re loving our brothers and sisters like Jesus told us, it’s not going to be rainbows and cotton candy and trips to the zoo every day.

Third, the Cross reminds us to be mindful of the violence done on our behalf. That’s the bit about the electric chairs and gas chambers I was on about a little while ago. You may or may not agree with me about the ethics of war and capital punishment. With regard to the former, I’m not an absolute pacifist, but sometimes I’m worried that Jesus was and that might put me on the wrong side of things. With regard to the latter, I think it’s wrong, plain and simple. I’m not asking you to agree with me on those issues. I am asking you to be concerned with the potential for communal sin in those cases and others. Jesus was killed by the state. It doesn’t matter whether it was the temple authorities or Pilate or somebody else who had the biggest part to play. Every tax paying person in the Roman Empire had at least an unwilling role in that sin’s commission. Culpability is even more of an issue in our context, since we’ve got a more-or-less democratic system of government. People are killed in wars waged on our behalf, whether or not the war is or can be justified. People are killed on our behalf in prisons in our state and others, whether or not an execution is or can be justified. Maybe some of these are no-win situations with regard to sin. Maybe we’re boxed in by the fallen state of our world, and we have to choose the least terrible of universally bad options. I don’t know. But I do believe that the instrument of Christ’s passion ought to give us pause before we let ourselves off the hook.

Finally, and perhaps most obviously, the Cross is the symbol of salvation. What that actually means, though, may not be as obvious as we think. For at least the last five centuries we’ve been obsessed with the mechanics of salvation. How is it effected? What is required of us? What’s the best metaphor? How dare you call it a metaphor? I think I’ve mentioned before that one of the ideas I’ve had for a monograph if I ever had the time to write one would be to argue that the Protestant Reformers and the Catholic Counterreformers were arguing with each other about what St. Augustine said rather than what’s actually in the bible. I think we’ve spent to much time and energy over the centuries obsessing about how the cross saved us and not enough time and energy meditating on what from and what for.

The answer most will give to this question is hell and heaven. That’s part of it, certainly, perhaps the most important part, but we can begin to experience salvation in this life, too. Life with God is a whole heck of a lot better than life without God. The Cross doesn’t just open the doors to everlasting life. Christ’s sacrifice gives us salvation in this life. I don’t mean better health or more money or teeth as straight and white as Joel Osteen’s. I mean the Cross opens to us a better way of life. I think life itself can be cruciform, and that’s what salvation in this life looks like. We are saved from self-obsession. We learn to love in tangible ways. We start to see that business of self-sacrifice as freeing us from burdens that some people think they want to carry (“Mo’ Money, Mo’ Problems,” as the Gospel according to the Notorious B.I.G. would have it). We learn to pray and we sometimes actually feel like someone is listening. We start to feel the love of God and each other in this place and outside it. We recognize that our homes, our families, can be contexts in which God’s Grace is visibly expressed. We no longer wallow in guilt and self-pity. Our horizons are expanded to include all to whom God’s care is extended. We realize that this, our lives conformed to a symbol we’d overlooked so many times, is enough for us for now and into eternity.

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