One Who Comes Alongside (May 25 2014)

Homily:  Yr A Easter 6, May 25 2014, St. Albans

Readings:  Acts 17.22-31; Ps 66.7-18; 1 Pet 3.13-22; Jn 14.15-21

One who comes alongside

One of the most wonderful and the most difficult parts of my job is ministry at the time of death.  It is sad and difficult for obvious reasons.  But it can also be a wonderful time.  It is a privilege to be present with those who are dying and with their family and friends who gather when that’s possible.  Because in those final gatherings, words are said and gestures exchanged in a way that just doesn’t always happen in our day to day lives.  Death, or impending death, has a way of stripping away the superficialities, a way of allowing us to set aside our masks and concerns and to really be with each other, whispering words of love and gratitude, exchanging small gestures of warmth and compassion.  It is of course a time of sorrow, a time when tears are shed.  But often, it is also a time of reconciliation, a time when relationships are deepened among both the living and the dying, a time of closure, a time of faith, a time when questions are asked, a time of grappling with the deepest mysteries of life.

The gospel that we just heard takes place at one of these times. It is the continuation of the gospel text that we heard last Sunday, Jesus is still talking. He and his closest friends, men and women, have gathered together in the upper room knowing that Jesus will be put to death the following morning.  He’s told them plainly that he is to be arrested and put to death.  Judas has already scurried out into the night to betray Jesus, and Peter has been told that over the course of that night he will deny Jesus three times.  Their last meal together has ended. This is their final gathering.

Those of you who have experienced gatherings at the time of death of a loved one can imagine what the atmosphere was like in that room.  I’m sure there were tears, I’m sure there were expressions of love.  And there were questions, we talked about those questions and about how Jesus responded last Sunday.

But underlying those questions there was also something else, something that was probably the reason the disciples had a such hard time understanding what Jesus was saying.  And that something else was fear.  Fear of abandonment.

Psychologists will tell us that the fear of abandonment is one of our greatest fears.  And in this moment when Jesus tells his friends that he is leaving, that fear must have been particularly acute.  Jesus was the one who had come alongside the disciples and had walked with them on the dusty roads of Galilee for three years.  He had taught them and encouraged them, he shared their joys and their sorrows.  One of the things that I like about the musical Godspell is that it captures really well the way in which this rag-tag group of fishers, tax collectors and a carpenter develops into a loving and caring community.  Which only accentuates the sense of loss when it finally sinks in that Jesus is leaving.

And knowing this, in response, Jesus makes them a promise:

“I will not leave you orphaned.  I will ask the Father, and he will give you another Advocate, to be with you forever.”

An advocate.  In greek a “paraclete”.  The word literally means “one who comes alongside another.”  Sometimes we translate it as “Comforter”, one who comforts, who encourages, who helps, who is there for us.  Sometimes we translate it as advocate, the one who stands by our side and makes our case for us.

Have you ever experienced this?  What are your memories of a time that someone came alongside you, literally or figuratively, to comfort you or to be your advocate? For some of us that might take us all the way back to our childhoods, or it may be a more recent experience. I’d like you to take a moment to think about it and to enter into that experience once again, because those memories and those experiences can then be a gateway for us into understanding and experiencing the Holy Spirit.

(pause)

It is to me a remarkable thing to notice that in the Gospel of John, the whole movement of the narrative is towards the gift of the Holy Spirit.  If I was to ask you what was the purpose of Jesus death and resurrection, I expect that many of you would answer based on the writings of Paul and the synoptic gospels that the purpose of Jesus death and resurrection was forgiveness of sin or reconciliation with God.  But based on a reading of John’s gospel, you might well conclude that the reason that Jesus died and was raised and ascended to the Father was so that the Father could give us the Holy Spirit.  The resurrection is not the end of the story but rather just the beginning of life with the Spirit alongside us.

Jesus came alongside humanity in the Incarnation.  But that had its limitations.  As a human walking this earth, Jesus could only literally come alongside a limited number of people, limited as all of us are by space and time.  But the Holy Spirit has no such limitations.  She can be with us, each one of us, wherever we are, forever, comforting, advocating, teaching, encouraging, inspiring, guiding, coming alongside us, sharing in our joys and sorrows, in and through us, in and through others.

One of the challenges for us I suppose is recognition.  We talked about the “Recognition Problem” a few weeks ago.  There are some clues in what we heard today about how to recognize the Spirit in our lives.  The Spirit is described as “another” Advocate.  “Another Advocate.”  Who was the first advocate?  Jesus.  So the Spirit comes alongside us much in the same way that Jesus did.  Knowing Jesus, his words and his actions, is a good start to being able to see the Spirit in our lives.

But are we even looking for the Spirit?  I have often heard the Holy Spirit referred to as the “forgotten person of the Trinity”.  Don’t believe me?  Have a look in your booklets at the Apostles Creed that we will be saying together as a baptismal covenant in a few minutes as we move into the baptism of Elise.

What does our creed say about the Holy Spirit?  “I trust in the Holy Spirit.”  That’s it, that’s all.  It’s an important statement, but it’s not fleshed very much.  And yet the Holy Spirit is the key to the Christian life.  Life abundant, life in its fullest is lived with the Holy Spirit alongside us, within us, in relationship with us, advocating for us, guiding us, bringing us into relationship with the Father and the Son, comforting, inspiring, encouraging, laughing with us and crying with us and never, ever, leaving us as orphans.

In a few minutes we will baptize Elise.  And we will anoint her with oil as a sign that she has received the gift of the Holy Spirit and we will pray that she will be sustained in the Holy Spirit, that the Spirit will come alongside her and be her advocate and her comfort forever.  She is a child of God and she will never be abandoned or left orphaned.  That is God’s promise to us, through Jesus and through the Holy Spirit.  What could be better than that?

Amen.

"No one comes to the Father except through me" - Time to Put It Back in Context (May 18 2014)

Homily.  Yr A Easter 5 May 18 2014 St. Albans

Readings:  Acts 7.55-60; Ps 31.1-5,15-16; 1 Pet 2.2-10; Jn 14.1-14

“No one comes to the Father except through me”

-  Time to Put It Back in Context.

Have you ever had anything you said taken out of context?  It can be a frustrating, and sometimes even a damaging experience.  It happens all the time.  We see it in political ads.  We see it in movie reviews.   Some of you might remember the film Norbit, with Eddie Murphy, not one of the all-time classics.  When it came out, Michael Wilmington of the Chicago Tribune wrote,

“Eddie Murphy's comic skills are immense, and Dreamgirls shows he's a fine straight dramatic actor too. So why does he want to make these huge, belching spectaculars, movies as swollen, monstrous and full of hot air as Rasputia herself — here misdirected by Brian Robbins of Good Burger, Varsity Blues and that lousy Shaggy Dog remake?"

Sounds like a total diss, right?  But the promoters of the Norbit chose to use Wilmington’s review anyways, and the advertising for the movie included his words:  “Eddie Murphy’s comic skills are immense.”

In today’s gospel, Jesus is quoted as saying, “No one comes to the Father except through me.”  Now if you consider that phrase on its own, taking it out of its context, and many people do just that, what does it sound like?  Well, it can sound like a threat.  It sounds like Jesus is setting himself up as a gatekeeper, determining who gets to come to God the Father, and who doesn’t.   It sounds exclusive, like there are insiders and outsiders (which is so not Jesus!).   And to raise the stakes even higher, we hear the words at the start of today’s gospel text, “In my Father’s house, there are many dwelling places,” and those are the same words that we hear so often at funerals, and that makes it easy to jump to the conclusion that all this is about whether you get to go to heaven or not.   All of a sudden we’ve created a test for whether a person is going to heaven or hell based on Jesus as the gatekeeper, and we’ve just condemned all those who are Pagan or Muslim or Buddhist or Hindu to hell - unless, unless they come to Jesus, and so what are we going to do about that?

Well, historically speaking, what we as the church have done about that includes the following:  We’ve done the Crusades, and we’ve done the Inquisition, and here in Canada we’ve conquered and colonized our first nations people, and put them in residential schools where they would be forced to abandon their own religion and spirituality and adopt ours so that they could get that ticket to heaven, because “no one comes to the Father except through Jesus.”  These words of Jesus, taken out of context, have been used to justify some of the worst atrocities in the history of Christianity, and continue to taint our relationship with peoples of other faiths today.

I think that it’s time we put Jesus’ words back into context.

Our gospel reading today takes us back to the last supper, the final meal that Jesus shared with his disciples on the night before he died.  It is a troubling time, a time of great fear and uncertainty.  Jesus has washed their feet.  Judas has just left, intent on betraying Jesus.  And Jesus tells his closest friends, the ones who have trusted and followed him for the last three years, “I am only with you a little while longer.  You will look for me, and as I said to the Jews so I now say to you, where I am going you cannot come.”

Peter speaks up.  “Lord, where are you going?  Why can I not follow you now?”

But Jesus tells Peter, “Very truly I tell you, before the cock crows, you will have denied me three times.”

Now, what Jesus has just told Peter turns out to be true, but it certainly does nothing to relieve the anxiety, doubts and fears of the disciples.  And Jesus knows this.  And he cares.  And so he speaks to them words of comfort, words of compassion:

“Do not let your hearts be troubled.  Trust in God, trust also in me.  In my Father’s house there are many dwelling places. If it were not so, would I have told you that I go to prepare a place for you. . . .  And you know the way to the place where I am going.”

What does Jesus mean when he says “In my Father’s house”?  We often make the association with “heaven”.  But what does Jesus mean?  Well, he’s used the phrase before.  Remember when Jesus goes into the Temple with a whip and cries out “Stop making my Father’s house a marketplace”.  In that phrase, “my Father’s house” is the Temple, the very centre of the universe in the religious thinking of the Jews, the place where God is present, God is with us, and where we are forgiven and reconciled with God and brought into right relationship with him.  But there’s more, because Jesus, in that very temple action is challenging the status quo thinking.  Do you remember when he tells the Samaritan woman at the well that “the hour is coming when you will no longer worship God on the Temple Mount in Jerusalem”?  Do you remember when he says “Destroy this Temple and in three days I will raise it up”?  Jesus is not going to “his Father’s house”.  He is “my Father’s house”, the place where God dwells, God with us, the place of forgiveness and reconciliation.  This is much more about relationship than it is about either heaven or geography.

The relational aspect becomes even clearer when we think about another way that the phrase “my Father’s house” was used in Jesus’ day.  Do you remember the Christmas story, where we are told that Mary and Joseph went to Bethlehem because they were of the “house of David”?  This way of speaking means that they were descended from David, they are part of David’s family, David’s offspring and descendants.  It’s an expression of kinship, of family and of identity.  And so when Jesus tells his disciples “in my Father’s house there are many dwelling places” and “I go to prepare a place for you” he is also telling them that they are to become members of God’s family.  In this moment when the disciples feel that they are losing their identity as followers of Jesus, Jesus is reassuring them that they will have a new identity as children of God, their Father.  And surely this is an echo of the prologue in the first chapter of the gospel of John where we are told that to all who received him, he gave power to become the children of God.

“Where I am, you will be also,” Jesus tells his worried friends, “And you know the way to the place where I am going.”  Jesus is talking relationship.  But Thomas is still thinking more in terms of geography.

“Lord we don’t know where you are going.  How can we know the way?”

Thomas is looking for an alternative route since Jesus is leaving and can no longer be followed.  Thomas is looking for an address that he can plug into his GPS that will show him the way.  Should he find another rabbi to follow in Jesus’ absence?  And here Jesus looks at Thomas and his other close friends with compassion, wanting to reassure them that they don’t need anything new, they don’t need an alternative, they don’t need another way.

“I am the way, and the truth and the life.  No one comes to the Father except through me.”

These are words spoken to Jesus closest friends.  They are spoken as words of comfort and reassurance.  They are spoken to people who share Jesus’ Jewish faith, not to adherents of Greek and Roman religions, not to those who have never heard of Jesus.  They are spoken with compassion, not as a test.  They are spoken as a direct response to the concern that Jesus is leaving and the disciples don’t know what to do next.  They are not meant to teach about how to get to heaven, they are an invitation and an assurance of a relationship.  These are words of promise, not threat.

As some of you have heard me say many times, “it’s all about relationship”.  Our relationship with God the Father.  And Philip kind of starts to get it, but he has one more request:

“Lord, show us the Father, and we will be satisfied.”

And here I think we get to the dynamic core of this dialogue.  Jesus says to Philip,

“Philip, have I been with you all this time, and you still do not know me?  Whoever has seen me has seen the Father. . . .  I am in the Father and the Father is in me.”

Whoever has seen me has seen the Father.  Again an echo of John’s prologue in Chapter one:

“No one has seen God.  It is God the only Son, who is close to the Father’s bosom, who has made him known.”

Do we have something to say to people of other faiths and religions?  Absolutely we do!  But what we have to say is not a threat.  It is not a ticket to heaven nor a get out of jail free pass for hell. 

It is instead a gift, something of amazing value that we can offer.  All you who seek God, who want to know God, who want a relationship with God, we have something we want to tell you.  We believe that the almighty God who created the heavens and the earth became flesh and dwelt among us as a human being named Jesus.  And it is as a human being who talked our talk and walked our walk and lived among us and died among us that Jesus has made God known to us.  And the God that has been revealed to us in Jesus is a God who loves us, all of us, and wants to be in relationship with us, all of us, who wants us as his children and as members of his family.  Come and see.  No one has ever seen God, but God the Son, who is at the very bosom of the Father, has made him known.  Come and see.

Amen.

Dagobah, Emmaus and the Recognition Problem (May the Fourth, 2014, Easter 3)

Homily:  Yr A Easter 3, May 4 2014, St. Albans

Readings:  Acts 2.14a, 36-41; Ps 19; 1 Peter 1.17-23; Lk 24.13-35

Dagobah, Emmaus and the Recognition Problem

There is a problem that I’ve noticed as I’ve listened to our Easter readings these past three Sundays.   A recurring problem which runs through the texts.   That problem is the recognition problem. 

We saw it first with Mary at the tomb on Easter morning, when she turns around and Jesus is standing there, but she thinks that he must be the gardener.  We saw it in our reading last week, when Jesus appears in the locked room with the disciples, but they don’t recognize him until he shows them his hands and sides.  We see it in our reading today, when Jesus joins Cleopas and his companion on the road to Emmaus, but they don’t recognize him.

And if recognition is a problem for these first witnesses to whom Jesus appears in bodily form, how much greater a problem is it for those of us who come later!  We don’t get to see Jesus’ resurrection appearances.  We don’t get to hear him call our names the way that Mary does, we don’t get to see the wounds on his body the way that Thomas does.  And that is a problem.

Do we recognize the risen Christ in our lives?  Is God with us?  How do we recognize God’s presence?  Can we in our own time see and experience the divine in the events and activities of our lives?  Because let’s be honest.  When we proclaim “Alleluia Christ is risen, the Lord is risen indeed” during this Easter season, there are a lot of people who don’t see it.  There are many people, within the church and outside the church, who have a hard time recognizing God as alive and active and present in their day to day lives.  In fact, I would go so far as to say that the Recognition Problem is the biggest challenge facing most Christians.  We don’t want to just tell stories about the past.  We want to experience something that is alive and real and makes a difference in our lives today.

The Recognition Problem is so important that for centuries it has been and continues to be a common thread weaving its way through our stories and our mythologies.  One of the reasons that I am a big fan of Star Wars is that I love how the movies reveal in a new way the classic themes of the human story.  In the clip I’m about to show you, our hero Luke Skywalker has been sent to the planet Dagobah by his mentor Obi-Wan Kenobi to become a Jedi Knight.  Luke is on a quest.  He must learn the ways of the Force, and to do so he will have to become a disciple of Yoda.   So with his droid R2D2 he sets off in his space ship, but when he gets to Dagobah, his ship crashes into a swamp, and there is a recognition problem.

Video clip:  https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=p44pcTXpPOs

So why doesn’t Luke recognize Yoda?  Well, Luke is looking for something, but he doesn’t really know what he’s looking for.  He thinks he’s looking for a great warrior, a Jedi Master, and he has certain expectations of what that should look like.  And it certainly doesn’t look like a short ugly creature hobbling around in a swamp with a cane.  Luke is too proud to accept help when it is offered, and suffers from his own biases and preconceived notions.

It’s easy to laugh at Luke Skywalker, and perhaps there are a few lessons we can learn from his failure to recognize Yoda.  But I also want to acknowledge the very real pain that occurs when people aren’t able see or experience God in their lives.  When your life crash lands and you are alone in the swamp and God is not there, this is a real problem.   That is where the two disciples on the road to Emmaus are as our gospel story begins this morning.  “We had hoped that Jesus was the one to redeem Israel.  But they crucified him.”  Our gospel begins as a story of crushed dreams, lost hope and broken hearts.  Perhaps the only thing worse than having no hope, is to have once hoped but then to hope no more.   “We had hoped . . .”  said the two on the road to Emmaus.

Some of you might remember that Jonathan preached on this very theme on Palm Sunday, and reminded us that throughout the ages, men and women have experienced the absence of God as a painful moment in their lives.  St. John of the Cross called it the “dark night of the soul”.  C.S. Lewis and Mother Teresa both write about their ‘dark nights’.  It is an agony which I expect is made even more acute in this Easter Season, as we listen to the shouts of “I have seen the Lord” all around us.

So why does Saint Luke tell us this particular Easter story?  After all, he had a few to choose from.  As Luke mentions at the end of the text, there was another resurrection appearance to Simon Peter that happened just down the road in Jerusalem on this same day, but Luke chose not to write about that one, and instead gives us this one the one that happened on the road to Emmaus.

Why does Luke tell us this particular story?  I think it’s because Luke recognizes the importance of the recognition problem and because he wants to make us a promise.

I’d like you to do something.   Take a look at the service booklets that we have been following this morning, and tell me this.  What are the four main section headings for our worship time together?  Have a look, they’re printed in the booklet.  The four section headings are:

·        We Gather as a Community

·        We Proclaim the Word

·        We Celebrate the Eucharist

·        We Are Sent.

That is the basic four part structure of our liturgy that we celebrate together every Sunday morning.  Now, think back to what you just heard about the disciples on the road to Emmaus.  It begins with Jesus joining the two disciples and going with them.  They gather as a community.  Then, after the disciples have told Jesus what has happened, Jesus interprets the scriptures for them, beginning with Moses and all the prophets.  He proclaims the word to them.  When that is done, and the day is nearly over, the disciples urge Jesus to stay with them and they share a meal together.  And Jesus takes the bread, blesses it, breaks it and gives it to them.  Or as we might say, they celebrate the eucharist.  And it is in the breaking of the bread that they recognize Jesus, and they realize how they’re hearts were burning within them even before that moment of conscious recognition when he was opening the scriptures to them.  And then, they get up and race back to Jerusalem to find the others and tell them what had happened.  They are sent.

·        We Gather as a Community

·        We Proclaim the Word

·        We Celebrate the Eucharist

·        We Are Sent.

It is no coincidence that the four movements of Luke’s story and the four movements of our worship here this morning are the same.  Luke’s story was shaped by the worship of the early Christian community, and our worship has been shaped for centuries by Luke’s gospel. 

So this is no coincidence.  What it is, is a promise.  The promise Luke is making to those of us who experience the recognition problem, the promise Luke is making to those of us who are broken-hearted, the promise that Luke is making to those of us who are experiencing the dark night of the soul is this:  in Christian worship you will encounter the risen Christ.  In the gathering of the community, in the proclaiming of the word, in the breaking of the bread, Christ is present.

Christian worship is a solution to the recognition problem.  It’s not the only solution, we can experience and recognize God in all sorts of ways in our lives.  And it’s not a magical solution, it’s not going to give you a guaranteed experience of what you expect to see every time.  But our worship together each Sunday morning is an opportunity to recognize the presence of God in our midst, and that’s something that we learn to do together.  It is in this gathering that broken hearts can become hearts that burn with joy within us, and that we can dare to say together, “We have seen the Lord.”

Amen.