Rector’s Rambling March 2010
A good snow storm is a great time for dreaming. Surrounded by the warm glow of finished pine and hickory, I sit at the study end of the chapel with a size 16 Mustad fine wire hook in the vise, trying to decide whether to reach for the hare’s mask, the turkey bots, or the back feathers of a ring necked pheasant. I don’t know that it will make much difference to the fish I hope to catch this spring, but right now, here in the grips of winter, it seems an interesting, if unimportant question. I daresay that most of the things we think about fall into the same category as my dilemma over which dressing to use for the body of a trout fly. They are interests of the moment which may have some utility, but hardly classify as significant in the grand scheme of things. And yet how often do we imagine them to be of supreme importance? How often have we all been so attached to our own ideas or opinions on any given question that our defense of them has led to interrupted friendships, regularized bickering, or generalized dissatisfaction with life? Lent calls me to think about such things, because it is a time when I am called by our Holy Mother the Church to examine my own motives and to confess my own sins. It is a time for honesty with God and with myself. It is a time for transformation from what I have been into what God calls me to be.
At its best, a parish is like a family. We live together well much of the time, but our necessary vocations demand so much of our time that we fail to know each other as well as we should. We make assumptions about each other, and about each other’s motives on a regular basis. We do care for each other after a fashion, but often take one another for granted. Our interests and concerns develop and wander with predictable irregularity. As a result, we often neglect those opportunities afforded us to know one another more completely, to understand one another, and to truly appreciate the pressures and issues that so often dominate our lives. We are committed to each other and to this place, but often we are strangers- strangers who assume so very much about each other without adequate data- strangers who attempt to protect ourselves from each other by erecting walls of control or by blaming others for our own attitudes and negative responses. Since we fail to take the time to know each other, we miss out on the opportunity God gives us to bear one another’s burdens, and to create a place where any one of us can feel safe and secure in the worst of times. Every parish, and every family, struggles with these issues to a greater or lesser degree because we are so very, very human.
As we continue through this holy season, we have a wonderful opportunity to address those patterns of human behaviour which are outlined above. Our Evangelism and Renewal Committee has worked very hard to afford us all several opportunities to eat and fellowship together, to worship together, and to consider the implications of that worship as it relates to us being the family of God. I hope you will be sure to attend the Lenten programs if you are in town. Be sure to sit at table with someone you don’t know, and even better, if there is someone that you don’t particularly like, strike up a conversation with them about something that is important to them, their children, their work, or their hobbies. We have been blessed with a wonderful parish family here at St. John’s, but like every family, there is always work to be done as we learn to love and respect each other to the glory of God, and to the edification of our souls.
At the beginning of this ramble, I wrote that days like this are good for dreaming, and so I think I’ll tie three flies instead of one, but I promise before God that I will never let these gentle reveries of rushing water and flashing fish obscure my true calling to love those around me more perfectly. I hope you will join me in this determination.
Pax Vobiscum,
Bill+
Saturday, February 6, 2010
Friday, February 5, 2010
Sermon Preached at St. John's V Epiphany
Fifth Sunday after Epiphany (Sexagesima) year C
Psalm 138
Isaiah 6:1-13
I Corinthians 15:1-11
Luke 5:1-11
Today’s propers are obviously about conversion. I find it singularly instructive that all of the objects of today’s Scripture lessons are people who had been initiated into the people of God by appropriate sacramental observances carried out at the appropriate times of their lives. Isaiah was a good and observant Jew. Certainly he was circumcised on the eighth day and participated regularly in the Passover and the other feasts of God’s people. At Corinth, Paul was addressing Christians who had been baptized and were presumably regular in their attendance upon the sacrament of the body and blood of our Lord and Saviour Jesus Christ. Luke spoke of Jesus coming to Peter, James, and John, all good and observant Jews, like Isaiah. Even King David in today’s Psalm speaks of experiential meetings with God subsequent to his Circumcision as a child.
So, what do today’s lessons say about the sacraments of the Church? Are they of no use? Are they merely forms that we go through in order to mark the turning points of our lives in the hope that there is a God who cares for us? Heaven forbid and perish such thoughts from our minds! The sacramental ceremonies of Circumcision and Passover, which are fulfilled prophetically in the Christian Gospel Sacraments of Baptism and Holy Communion, are means of imputed grace instituted of God and commanded us as outward signs of that inward and spiritual grace given us by a loving heavenly father. When you receive a sacrament, it is as if God plunges a syringe filled with grace into your arm, and you are given a bracing dose of that spiritually enabling favor which only comes from Him who has made you and named you as His own. If you receive it well, in obedience and with love towards God and man, your soul is refreshed and strengthened. If however you receive it poorly, without thought or consideration and with no intention of living a well examined and obedient Christian life, you receive the life giving sacrament to your damnation. So saith the Apostle.
To us Christians, Baptism and Holy Communion are life giving sureties of our membership in Christ, and of God’s favour usward. And so what is this “conversion” demanded of and experienced by the players in today’s Scripture lessons? It is in short a turning, a going the other way, a transformation so radical that we can never again be the same. I find it interesting that those whose transformations are chronicled in the lessons all came face to face with the living God in a way which revealed His glory and underlined their own inadequacy. Isaiah’s vision of the very throne of God, David’s realization of God’s mighty deliverance, Paul’s recounting of the power of the eyewitness accounts to the resurrection of the Christ, and the Apostles’ personal experience of what they knew to be an absolutely inexplicable miracle- all of these events led to an humble acknowledgement of the individual’s need for God in the immediate present.
There is a pattern here which is replicated so many times in the Bible:
1. God reveals himself to a human being.
2. That human being recognized that he, or she, has come into the presence of God.
3. The mystery of God’s holiness overwhelms the vision’s or experience’s recipient and leads to an immediate acknowledgement of personal human insufficiency, or what we generally name humility.
4. The recipient gains an immediately increased appreciation of their need to be closer to God, of His overall plan for human history, and of their own place in it.
5. The recipient is changed forever, as are their habits and their passions, and they come to see themselves as the very ministers of God on Earth.
And now we come to the question. Everyone here has been baptized. Everyone here is at least moderately regular in attendance upon the holy Sacrament of Christ’s body and blood. But, have you come face to face with the living God? Have you met Him in a way which is unmistakable and life altering? Granted, not everyone is called to be an Isaiah or a Peter, but there is ample evidence in the Bible, and in the history of our Holy Mother the Church that God calls all who will receive Him to a life of continual conversion, transformation, and setting apart for His particular use. It should be the desire of us all to seek such an experience of the living God that the comfort which leads to complacency shall never be known among us who bear the sign of the cross. The evidence of the Scriptures tells us that God chooses the time and place and manner of his appearance to each of us. It also teaches us that like Hannah, who went every year before the shrine of God to seek His face, we are called to yearn for this transforming experience, this overwhelming revelation of His glory.
And so this day, as you come faithfully to receive that sacrament which gives us strength and assurance that we are God’s own, I bid you to pray that the heavens might be opened, and that God would grant you such an experience as Isaiah had that day; an experience which will change your life forever and send you forth to do the work of the kingdom with a fervor and an intensity that you have not known. Pray that he will allow you to see your own needs, your own sins, and that He will forgive you, wash your conscience, and give you the grace to walk in obedience to His commands. Pray that he will imbue you with a sense of gratitude which will make humility and godly sobriety the characteristics of your life. Pray that he will grant you a glimpse of His purpose being fulfilled in human history, in the events all around us, and that He would help you to see your purpose and mission in the same. Today, as you come in faithfulness to receive the blessed sacrament which is His gift to all Christians, God calls you to be so much more. Seek Him now, while he may be found, and claim the inheritance and the mission prepared for you before the foundations of the world were laid. AMEN.
Psalm 138
Isaiah 6:1-13
I Corinthians 15:1-11
Luke 5:1-11
Today’s propers are obviously about conversion. I find it singularly instructive that all of the objects of today’s Scripture lessons are people who had been initiated into the people of God by appropriate sacramental observances carried out at the appropriate times of their lives. Isaiah was a good and observant Jew. Certainly he was circumcised on the eighth day and participated regularly in the Passover and the other feasts of God’s people. At Corinth, Paul was addressing Christians who had been baptized and were presumably regular in their attendance upon the sacrament of the body and blood of our Lord and Saviour Jesus Christ. Luke spoke of Jesus coming to Peter, James, and John, all good and observant Jews, like Isaiah. Even King David in today’s Psalm speaks of experiential meetings with God subsequent to his Circumcision as a child.
So, what do today’s lessons say about the sacraments of the Church? Are they of no use? Are they merely forms that we go through in order to mark the turning points of our lives in the hope that there is a God who cares for us? Heaven forbid and perish such thoughts from our minds! The sacramental ceremonies of Circumcision and Passover, which are fulfilled prophetically in the Christian Gospel Sacraments of Baptism and Holy Communion, are means of imputed grace instituted of God and commanded us as outward signs of that inward and spiritual grace given us by a loving heavenly father. When you receive a sacrament, it is as if God plunges a syringe filled with grace into your arm, and you are given a bracing dose of that spiritually enabling favor which only comes from Him who has made you and named you as His own. If you receive it well, in obedience and with love towards God and man, your soul is refreshed and strengthened. If however you receive it poorly, without thought or consideration and with no intention of living a well examined and obedient Christian life, you receive the life giving sacrament to your damnation. So saith the Apostle.
To us Christians, Baptism and Holy Communion are life giving sureties of our membership in Christ, and of God’s favour usward. And so what is this “conversion” demanded of and experienced by the players in today’s Scripture lessons? It is in short a turning, a going the other way, a transformation so radical that we can never again be the same. I find it interesting that those whose transformations are chronicled in the lessons all came face to face with the living God in a way which revealed His glory and underlined their own inadequacy. Isaiah’s vision of the very throne of God, David’s realization of God’s mighty deliverance, Paul’s recounting of the power of the eyewitness accounts to the resurrection of the Christ, and the Apostles’ personal experience of what they knew to be an absolutely inexplicable miracle- all of these events led to an humble acknowledgement of the individual’s need for God in the immediate present.
There is a pattern here which is replicated so many times in the Bible:
1. God reveals himself to a human being.
2. That human being recognized that he, or she, has come into the presence of God.
3. The mystery of God’s holiness overwhelms the vision’s or experience’s recipient and leads to an immediate acknowledgement of personal human insufficiency, or what we generally name humility.
4. The recipient gains an immediately increased appreciation of their need to be closer to God, of His overall plan for human history, and of their own place in it.
5. The recipient is changed forever, as are their habits and their passions, and they come to see themselves as the very ministers of God on Earth.
And now we come to the question. Everyone here has been baptized. Everyone here is at least moderately regular in attendance upon the holy Sacrament of Christ’s body and blood. But, have you come face to face with the living God? Have you met Him in a way which is unmistakable and life altering? Granted, not everyone is called to be an Isaiah or a Peter, but there is ample evidence in the Bible, and in the history of our Holy Mother the Church that God calls all who will receive Him to a life of continual conversion, transformation, and setting apart for His particular use. It should be the desire of us all to seek such an experience of the living God that the comfort which leads to complacency shall never be known among us who bear the sign of the cross. The evidence of the Scriptures tells us that God chooses the time and place and manner of his appearance to each of us. It also teaches us that like Hannah, who went every year before the shrine of God to seek His face, we are called to yearn for this transforming experience, this overwhelming revelation of His glory.
And so this day, as you come faithfully to receive that sacrament which gives us strength and assurance that we are God’s own, I bid you to pray that the heavens might be opened, and that God would grant you such an experience as Isaiah had that day; an experience which will change your life forever and send you forth to do the work of the kingdom with a fervor and an intensity that you have not known. Pray that he will allow you to see your own needs, your own sins, and that He will forgive you, wash your conscience, and give you the grace to walk in obedience to His commands. Pray that he will imbue you with a sense of gratitude which will make humility and godly sobriety the characteristics of your life. Pray that he will grant you a glimpse of His purpose being fulfilled in human history, in the events all around us, and that He would help you to see your purpose and mission in the same. Today, as you come in faithfulness to receive the blessed sacrament which is His gift to all Christians, God calls you to be so much more. Seek Him now, while he may be found, and claim the inheritance and the mission prepared for you before the foundations of the world were laid. AMEN.
Sermon preached at St. John's IV Epiphany
Sermon: Fourth Sunday after Epiphany, 2010
Luke 4 : 21-30
Jean Jacques Rosseau was no friend of the church. As a young man, he was disgusted by the actions of some members of the clergy incumbent in cures around his family estates. By his account, they cast aside their vows of poverty and chastity and invoked the ancient feudal rite of “prima nocte,” by which the Lord of a manor was entitled to any woman who lived on his lands on her honeymoon night. These early memories helped to form his famed cynicism toward the Christian Religion. In his comments on the idea that man is made in the image of God, he is reputed to have said that “men love God so much that they regularly insist on remaking him in their own image.” In short, that is a major theme of today’s Gospel lesson.
Jesus had returned to his home synagogue. With good reason, many of the people there were excited and looked expectantly forward to what the hometown rabbi might say or do. His words were not what they had hoped to hear. He castigated them bluntly, and indicated that he would not do great miracles there. Many in the crowd were outraged, and sought to do him harm. I would suggest to you today that Jesus was addressing the same human propensity that day in Nazareth that Rosseau would address so many hundreds of years later. The people in Nazareth were more than willing to acknowledge God, as long as he turned out to be the god they wished to acknowledge. Like those early enlightenment French clerics who so disgusted young Rosseau, they reserved the right to design their own god, according to their own wants. It is so easy for us to do the same thing today. I am always ready to quote God and the Bible when I perceive them to support my particular political or personal ideal. Let me give you an example. The Bible says, and we believe the Bible to be the word of God written, that we are to respect all human life. As a matter of fact, it says clearly that if we even think ill of our neighbors and call them fools, much less kill them, we are in danger of hell fire. I am glad to run out all of the verses about the sanctity of life in my opposition to abortion, but when someone points out to me that these same verses have something to say about the relatively indiscriminate use of high explosive munitions in the global war on terror, or that they also would seem to apply to the debate over the death penalty in Ohio, I am not so willing to submit to the clear teaching of Scripture. You see, I am much more ready to apply the Scriptures logically to what I perceive to be shortcomings in others, than I am to apply them to what they perceive to be shortcomings in me. In effect, I redefine who God is to satisfy my own druthers. And generally speaking in modern American political debate, folks on the other side of any given issue do the same. But we have all missed the point. God says that all life is sacred because all people are created in the Image of the one true and living God. There may be a time in this sinful world when a soldier or a government is forced to take life in war, and some of that life may be collateral damage, or innocent life. There may be times when the state must use the death penalty as a punishment or deterrent in this fallen world. And there may be a time in this fallen world when parents and their medical team must choose between the life of a child and the life of a mother. But even in this fallen world, where choices are sometimes between the lesser of evils rather than between good and bad, God’s clear admonition is that we respect every human life. True Christianity does not give us the option of defining his will in any other way.
Let me give you another example. Have you ever prayed for something good and true with all of your heart, only to have your heart’s desire crushed? Perhaps you prayed for the healing of a loved one, and they died. Or perhaps you prayed for a job that you did not get. The possibilities of such negative answers to prayer are endless. Did you become angry and walk away from God, saying to yourself, “If there is a god and he would allow that, he is no god of mine!” By imagining your situation to be the most important thing in the world, and by placing yourself at the center of the universe, you have just refused to accept God’s self revelation, and demanded a God of your own making. The Israelites did such a thing in the wilderness when Moses did not immediately come down from the mountain, and it led to a total breakdown of lawful moral authority in the camp, and ultimately to the deaths of thousands.
And this brings us back to the example of today’s Gospel. People were glad to have Jesus back home, if he would do the kinds of miracles he did elsewhere in Israel. But they were unwilling to acknowledge him as anything but the carpenter’s boy. That he would see himself as the fulfillment of the prophesies was unthinkable to them. They were willing to accept him on their own terms, but not on his. It is not uncommon for us to do so. It is a human propensity. We demand that God fit within our box, and we are willing to accept only those parts of his self-revelation which fit with our presuppositions. The problem is that when we do this, we break the first two commandments as we create a false god, one that has the ability to make us feel good for a little while, but one which effectively separates and isolates us from the true God, the God of Abraham, and Isaac, and Jacob; the creator of heaven and earth, who sent his only begotten Son to die for our sins and to prove the power of his love by taking up his life again on the third day; the one who will come to be our judge, and our vindicator.
It is so easy to design our own God to meet our own perceived needs. But to do so is to make ourselves into false gods. It is to imagine that we stand at the very center of the universe, that we are the single most significant being in the entire cosmos. We have all done it from time to time, regardless of whether we are on the right or the left, whether we are formally educated or educated in the school of hard knocks, and whatever groups we may identify ourselves as being a part of, or not being a part of. You see, whatever else he may have been, Rosseau was a keen judge of human nature.
And now the question remains: to what God do I give my allegiance today? Is it to a god of my own making, one who justifies my attitudes, positions, and actions? Or is it to the living and true God who reveals himself in Jesus Christ, fully God and fully man, to whose nature the Holy Bible, inspired and preserved by the agency of the Holy Ghost, bears witness? For us Christians, God calls us to accept and acknowledge his character, his love, and his person even if it does not make sense to us, and even if we wish it were different. He allows us to ask questions, and I dare say even encourages us to the same, but at the end of the day, the people of God are those who submit to him as he is, casting ourselves on his mercy and receiving his grace. In just a few moments, we will say together the Nicene Creed, the great Eucharistic confession of the Church. In it we find the true Scriptural definition of who God is, and of what his character means for each of us. Let it never be said that we crossed our fingers as we affirmed our faith. Rather let it be said that we came to the foot of the cross, with our questions and our issues, but that at the end of the struggle, we accepted by faith the living and true God, who is our judge and our saviour, our brother and our friend. AMEN!
Luke 4 : 21-30
Jean Jacques Rosseau was no friend of the church. As a young man, he was disgusted by the actions of some members of the clergy incumbent in cures around his family estates. By his account, they cast aside their vows of poverty and chastity and invoked the ancient feudal rite of “prima nocte,” by which the Lord of a manor was entitled to any woman who lived on his lands on her honeymoon night. These early memories helped to form his famed cynicism toward the Christian Religion. In his comments on the idea that man is made in the image of God, he is reputed to have said that “men love God so much that they regularly insist on remaking him in their own image.” In short, that is a major theme of today’s Gospel lesson.
Jesus had returned to his home synagogue. With good reason, many of the people there were excited and looked expectantly forward to what the hometown rabbi might say or do. His words were not what they had hoped to hear. He castigated them bluntly, and indicated that he would not do great miracles there. Many in the crowd were outraged, and sought to do him harm. I would suggest to you today that Jesus was addressing the same human propensity that day in Nazareth that Rosseau would address so many hundreds of years later. The people in Nazareth were more than willing to acknowledge God, as long as he turned out to be the god they wished to acknowledge. Like those early enlightenment French clerics who so disgusted young Rosseau, they reserved the right to design their own god, according to their own wants. It is so easy for us to do the same thing today. I am always ready to quote God and the Bible when I perceive them to support my particular political or personal ideal. Let me give you an example. The Bible says, and we believe the Bible to be the word of God written, that we are to respect all human life. As a matter of fact, it says clearly that if we even think ill of our neighbors and call them fools, much less kill them, we are in danger of hell fire. I am glad to run out all of the verses about the sanctity of life in my opposition to abortion, but when someone points out to me that these same verses have something to say about the relatively indiscriminate use of high explosive munitions in the global war on terror, or that they also would seem to apply to the debate over the death penalty in Ohio, I am not so willing to submit to the clear teaching of Scripture. You see, I am much more ready to apply the Scriptures logically to what I perceive to be shortcomings in others, than I am to apply them to what they perceive to be shortcomings in me. In effect, I redefine who God is to satisfy my own druthers. And generally speaking in modern American political debate, folks on the other side of any given issue do the same. But we have all missed the point. God says that all life is sacred because all people are created in the Image of the one true and living God. There may be a time in this sinful world when a soldier or a government is forced to take life in war, and some of that life may be collateral damage, or innocent life. There may be times when the state must use the death penalty as a punishment or deterrent in this fallen world. And there may be a time in this fallen world when parents and their medical team must choose between the life of a child and the life of a mother. But even in this fallen world, where choices are sometimes between the lesser of evils rather than between good and bad, God’s clear admonition is that we respect every human life. True Christianity does not give us the option of defining his will in any other way.
Let me give you another example. Have you ever prayed for something good and true with all of your heart, only to have your heart’s desire crushed? Perhaps you prayed for the healing of a loved one, and they died. Or perhaps you prayed for a job that you did not get. The possibilities of such negative answers to prayer are endless. Did you become angry and walk away from God, saying to yourself, “If there is a god and he would allow that, he is no god of mine!” By imagining your situation to be the most important thing in the world, and by placing yourself at the center of the universe, you have just refused to accept God’s self revelation, and demanded a God of your own making. The Israelites did such a thing in the wilderness when Moses did not immediately come down from the mountain, and it led to a total breakdown of lawful moral authority in the camp, and ultimately to the deaths of thousands.
And this brings us back to the example of today’s Gospel. People were glad to have Jesus back home, if he would do the kinds of miracles he did elsewhere in Israel. But they were unwilling to acknowledge him as anything but the carpenter’s boy. That he would see himself as the fulfillment of the prophesies was unthinkable to them. They were willing to accept him on their own terms, but not on his. It is not uncommon for us to do so. It is a human propensity. We demand that God fit within our box, and we are willing to accept only those parts of his self-revelation which fit with our presuppositions. The problem is that when we do this, we break the first two commandments as we create a false god, one that has the ability to make us feel good for a little while, but one which effectively separates and isolates us from the true God, the God of Abraham, and Isaac, and Jacob; the creator of heaven and earth, who sent his only begotten Son to die for our sins and to prove the power of his love by taking up his life again on the third day; the one who will come to be our judge, and our vindicator.
It is so easy to design our own God to meet our own perceived needs. But to do so is to make ourselves into false gods. It is to imagine that we stand at the very center of the universe, that we are the single most significant being in the entire cosmos. We have all done it from time to time, regardless of whether we are on the right or the left, whether we are formally educated or educated in the school of hard knocks, and whatever groups we may identify ourselves as being a part of, or not being a part of. You see, whatever else he may have been, Rosseau was a keen judge of human nature.
And now the question remains: to what God do I give my allegiance today? Is it to a god of my own making, one who justifies my attitudes, positions, and actions? Or is it to the living and true God who reveals himself in Jesus Christ, fully God and fully man, to whose nature the Holy Bible, inspired and preserved by the agency of the Holy Ghost, bears witness? For us Christians, God calls us to accept and acknowledge his character, his love, and his person even if it does not make sense to us, and even if we wish it were different. He allows us to ask questions, and I dare say even encourages us to the same, but at the end of the day, the people of God are those who submit to him as he is, casting ourselves on his mercy and receiving his grace. In just a few moments, we will say together the Nicene Creed, the great Eucharistic confession of the Church. In it we find the true Scriptural definition of who God is, and of what his character means for each of us. Let it never be said that we crossed our fingers as we affirmed our faith. Rather let it be said that we came to the foot of the cross, with our questions and our issues, but that at the end of the struggle, we accepted by faith the living and true God, who is our judge and our saviour, our brother and our friend. AMEN!
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