Where would you point? (Lent 5 March 22 2015)

Homily Yr B Lent 5 March 22 2015 St. Albans Church

Readings:  Jer 31.31.34; Ps 51; Heb 5.5-10; Jn 12.20-33

If someone came up to you and said “I want to see Jesus”, what would you show them?  If they said, “I want to know Jesus, I want to have an experience of Jesus”, what would you point to?  What story would you tell, what scripture would you read, what experience would you share, what practice would you suggest?”

In our first reading today, set in the sixth century BC, Jeremiah prophesies the day when people will come to know God.  He calls it a new covenant, the beginning of new relationship between God and humanity.  The old covenant had been given by God to the people of Israel through Moses.  The law, the ten commandments, had been written on stone tablets for all to see, and by the time of Jeremiah it had all become a bit of a mess, broken.  The new covenant announced by Jeremiah would be different.  Rather than being something external, something written on stone, God would place his teaching within his people, as something internal.  Rather than write it on stone, God would write it on their hearts.  Rather than being something that had to be taught, it would be based on each person having their own direct experience of the divine.  The new covenant would be based on a relationship, based on knowing God.

So let me ask again, if someone came up to you and said “I want to know God”, how would you answer?

That’s the question in today’s gospel.  There were some Greeks who had come to Jerusalem for the Passover festival, and they came up to Philip and said to him, “Sir, we wish to see Jesus.”  In the gospel of John, the words “to see” mean more than just a physical sighting.  They mean to experience, to understand, to encounter, to believe, to trust in, to be in relationship with, to know, the kind of thing we’ve been talking about here the past few weeks, the kind of thing that Jeremiah is talking about when he looks forward to a new covenant. 

Philip finds Andrew, and then he and Andrew find Jesus and tell him about the Greeks’ request.  And Jesus recognizes the significance of what is being asked, a significance that goes beyond these particular individuals.  Jeremiah had prophesied that the days are surely coming when God would make a new covenant with the people.  Now, some six hundred years later, in today’s gospel, Jesus says, “the hour has come”.  It is time for people to see what God is truly like, now is the time for people to come to know God.

And so Jesus points, not to his birth, not to his teachings, not to the healings, not to his parables, not to his triumphal entry into Jerusalem, but to his death and resurrection.  If you want to know me, if you want to know God as I have come to reveal him, look at the cross.

Is that where you would have pointed?

The cross is not a pretty picture of God.  It’s not a pretty picture of humanity either.  But for some strange reason that we may never understand, it seems to be the place where we're supposed to get to know each other.

It’s something we have to wrestle with.  In today’s gospel, as Jesus stands in the Temple during the build-up to the Passover festival, following his Palm Sunday entry into Jerusalem where he was hailed as king and saviour, Jesus points himself, his disciples, and us towards the cross.  We’re getting ready for the cross.  Jesus is getting us ready for the cross.  And the cross is a crazy thing, “foolishness to the Greeks, and a stumbling block for the Jews,” as Paul later puts it.

As he stands there with his disciples, Jesus sees the cross in front of him.  Jesus knows that the path he is on will lead to his death on the cross.  After all, the Roman Empire did not take kindly to having one of its subjects hailed as king and acclaimed by great crowds as he entered the old Jewish capital of Jerusalem.  And those Jewish authorities who had decided that the best choice in a situation of oppression was to collaborate with the oppressors would be equally upset at having their equilibrium put at risk.  It is better for one man to die, they reasoned, than to have the whole nation destroyed.

And so Jesus, by carrying his mission to proclaim the good news of the kingdom of God  right to the capital of Jerusalem, will end up on the cross.  The cross was a public symbol of the might of the Roman Empire.  Those who threatened the Empire were tortured to death on the cross, in public, where they would send a message to all not to mess with Caesar, because Caesar was Lord.  The cross was a symbol of the victory of Caesar, a symbol of the Pax Romana, the peace established by Rome by crushing and violently oppressing all opposition.  And for Jews, to die on a cross was a symbol of shame, for the one who hung on a tree was under God’s curse, as the book of Deuteronomy puts it.

Would it have made sense for Jesus to avoid this fate?  To avoid ending his life in agony as a public display of Caesar’s victory?  Jesus wrestles with this question in our gospel.  “Now my soul is troubled.  What should I say – ‘Father, save me from this hour?”  Maybe it wouldn’t have been too late to leave Jerusalem under the cover of darkness and go into hiding somewhere in the desert.  But for Jesus to have saved his life in that way would have been to lose his life.  And so Jesus utters another of those paradoxical statements that kept confusing his disciples:

“Unless a grain of wheat falls into the earth and dies, it remains just a single grain; but if it dies, it bears much fruit.”

That’s a hard saying.  It might make sense for a grain of wheat, for a seed, but it doesn’t make a lot of sense for people.  Nor does it make much sense for God.

This is the paradox of the cross.  I’d like us to wrestle with this paradox this morning and in the 12 days to come as we move towards Good Friday.  Enter into it and wrestle with what it means for your life, and what it means for who we understand God to be.

Because if you struggle with what the cross means, with what the saying about the grain of wheat means for your life, you’re in good company.  Jesus struggled with it too.  I think it’s something that we’re meant to struggle with, and so you’re not really going to get any answers from me this morning, even if I had any to give.

But let me make a few observations about this paradox of life, the paradox of the cross.

First, the reason that Jesus was able to struggle through this, and to point to the cross and go to the cross, seems to have everything to do with his prayer life and his intimate relationship with the one he called Abba, Father.  In prayer we come to know God, but equally important, we are sustained by God and we come to know ourselves.

Secondly, I think this has something to do with vocation, with what God calls us to be and do, how that vocation is revealed to us through our relationship with God, and how the embrace of vocation means giving up other possibilities to follow a path that will, like the dying grain of wheat, be life-giving and bear fruit.

And finally, at least for today anyways, all this seems to have something to do with vulnerability, allowing ourselves to be vulnerable enough before God so that we too can be made part of the new covenant that Jeremiah prophesied, vulnerable enough that God can actually reach inside and touch our hearts.

Jeremiah points to a new covenant.  Jesus points to the cross.  When someone says to you, “I want to know Jesus”, where are you going to point?

Amen.

We Are Perishing (Lent 4, March 15 2015)

Homily:  Yr B Lent 4, March 15 2015, St. Albans Church

Readings:  Num 21.4-9; Ps 107.1-3, 17-22; Eph 2.1-10; Jn 3.14-21

We are perishing.

We are now deep into the season of Lent, the time of year when we slow down and take stock of our lives, the time of year when we seek to tell the truth about ourselves and our human condition.  And the truth about ourselves which is found in today’s readings is this:  we are perishing. 

We began our Lenten journey with the imposition of ashes on Ash Wednesday, and the words “remember that you are dust, and to dust you shall return.”  We are perishing.  We are beings who crave eternity, but in truth we are mortal.  But perishing is more than just biological death.  We are people who crave significance, but all we are is dust in the wind.  We crave meaning in our lives, but we are nothing but a drop of water in an endless sea.  We crave purpose.  But all we do crumbles to the ground.

The image of humanity that Jesus chooses into today’s gospel, in the midst of his encounter with Nicodemus, is that of a people who have been bitten by snakes:  the poison is already in our bodies, and we are dying.  There is a bleakness to the human condition, and a mismatch between what we yearn for and who we are.  Many times, for much of our lives, we fight against our perishing state by striving to create meaning and significance for ourselves.  We accumulate possessions and we strive for accomplishments.  But often it’s our poets who point out the futility of it all.  At the very moment that Macbeth achieves the goal he’s been working and scheming for all his life, the crown of Scotland, Shakespeare pens the following soliloquy for Macbeth to speak:

“To-morrow, and to-morrow, and to-morrow,
Creeps in this petty pace from day to day,
To the last syllable of recorded time;
And all our yesterdays have lighted fools
The way to dusty death. Out, out, brief candle!
Life's but a walking shadow, a poor player,
That struts and frets his hour upon the stage,
And then is heard no more. It is a tale
Told by an idiot, full of sound and fury,
Signifying nothing.”

The poet T.S. Eliot explored this same sense of perishing and desolation in his early works The Waste Land and The Hollow Men, savagely painting a picture of the bleakness of human life.  “April is the cruelest month” because roots which are apparently dead are given stirrings of life only to realize once more their perishing state, and that the only future that lies before them is a world which will end “not with a bang but with a whimper.”

Kansas captured this same sense of existential crisis with the song that we’ve been singing during Lent, Dust in the Wind:

I close my eyes only for a moment, and the moment's gone
All my dreams pass before my eyes, a curiosity

Dust in the wind, all they are is dust in the wind

Same old song, just a drop of water in an endless sea
All we do crumbles to the ground, though we refuse to see

Dust in the wind, all we are is dust in the wind

We are perishing.  “Dust to dust and ashes to ashes”, we cry out.  And to this and to all of our cries, God hears and responds:

“For God so loved the world, that he gave his only Son, so that everyone who believes in him may not perish but have eternal life.

Indeed, God did not send the Son into the world to condemn the world, but in order that the world might be saved through him.

Those who believe in him are not condemned, but those who do not believe are condemned already, because they have not believed in the name of the only Son of God.”

To a people who are perishing, God has offered the gift of life.  Significance, meaning, purpose, forgiveness, eternity and all that goes with it.  Everyone who believes in God’s only Son will not perish but have eternal life.

So what does it mean to believe in him?  That seems to be the crux of it, after all.  What does it mean to believe?

Does it simply mean that when we hear this, we say, yup, that’s true?  Most often these days, when we use the word believe, that’s what we mean, to give intellectual assent to the truth of a proposition.  But intellectual assent isn’t going to get us very far.  We may well give our assent to the fact that Jesus lived on this earth and that Jesus was indeed the Son of God.  We may assent to many other teachings or doctrines.  But that intellectual assent won’t do much for our existential crisis.

And that’s not what John means when he writes the word pisteuOn, the word we translate as believe, four times in the verses I just read.  pisteuOn is verb form of the word for faith.  It has much more of the sense of trust or to entrust.  It involves making a commitment.  Originally we translated this word as “believe” in English based on the old sense of the word “believe” which meant “to hold dear” or “to love”.

And so when God gives us his only Son so that we might believe in him, he is not looking for our assent to some religious doctrine or statement of fact about the universe.  He is rather offering us something.  He is offering you and me the gift of a relationship, a relationship with God through Jesus.  Because it is when we enter into relationship with the living God that our lives start to make sense, our perishing stops, and we begin to be transformed into the people we were created to be.

You might remember that we talked about this last week, about what a high risk strategy it was for Jesus to clear out the Temple, and that the reason he took such a risk was because something really important was at stake.  What was at stake was our relationship with God.  Today’s reading tries to give us a sense of just why our relationship with God is so important.  It’s important because it gives us life.

And just as Jesus chooses the image of the snake bitten people to illustrate what perishing looks like, he also chooses an image of what it looks like for us to enter into relationship with God.  And the image he gives us is the image of birth.  In his encounter with Nicodemus which comes just before the text that we read today, Jesus tells Nicodemus that he must be born again, born from above, born of the Spirit.  We are invited to enter into relationship with God, and entering into that relationship is like a birth.  It’s as easy as being born and it’s as hard as being born.

It’s easy, because it’s a gift.  Birth is not something we do for ourselves, not something that we achieve.  Our mothers did a lot more work than we did!

But for us, being born is hard, because at birth we come into this world with no possessions, no accomplishments, no control and no independence.  Entering into relationship with God is like that.  It’s not a relationship that I’m going to control.  Our possessions and our accomplishments, all the things that we are really attached to in this life don’t mean squat in our relationship with God, and we might even be called to give them up.  In relationship with God, we acknowledge our dependence, rather than rely on our own independence.  And to put our trust in God means that we just might have to give up our trust in a whole lot of other things.  No wonder Nicodemus walked away dazed and confused.

Now, none of this means that living life in relationship with God is passive, in fact it’s exactly the opposite, it allows us to live at our most active in response to the calling that God will give us.  Jesus, the one human who was most fully in relationship with God, was certainly active and dynamic and purposeful.  But he lived without possessions, and he had his Gethsemane moment, the moment when he prayed, “if it is possible, take this away from me; yet not what I want but what you want.”  You know how the story plays out.  This relationship with God stuff is serious stuff.

But it is so life giving.  In fact it is a matter of life and death.

For God so loved the world that he gave his only Son, so that everyone who believes in him may not perish but have eternal life.

Amen.

Knowing God (Lent 3, March 8 2015)

Homily:  Yr B Lent 3.  March 8 2015.  St. Albans Church

Readings:  Ex 20.1-17; Ps 19; 1 Cor 1.18-25; Jn 2.13-22

Knowing God

We tend to be a legalistic people.  Not just the lawyers in here, of which there are many, but all of us.  We like to pin things down, we like to have rules and procedures, we like stuff to be well-defined, and we’ll narrow in on things in order to help in that definition.  Case in point:  our first reading today from Exodus, probably one of the best known sections of the Bible, and what do we call it?  We call it the Ten Commandments.  We’ve made movies about the Ten Commandments, we print them on little cards, we’ve sometimes had them inscribed in our courthouses.

However perhaps it would surprise you to know that originally this section of the book of Exodus was known as the “Ten Words”, or from the Greek, the Decalogue.  Jewish people still refer to it as the Ten Words, which isn’t surprising, because that’s also the way Moses puts it:  “Then God spoke all these words”.  And even though in most Christian traditions, when we list the Ten Commandments, we start off with the first commandment as “You shall have no other gods than me,” in the Jewish tradition the first word is considered to be exactly as we find it written in the book Exodus:

“I am Yahweh, your God, who brought you out of the land of Egypt, out of the house of slavery.”

That’s not a commandment, is it?  It’s more of a statement of identity and the affirmation of a relationship.  And it responds to what I believe is one of the fundamental questions of our faith and indeed of all faiths:  How are we to know God?

The first word starts with relationship.  You know me, because I am the one who brought you out of slavery in the land of Egypt.  I am the one who spoke to Moses out of the burning bush and gave him my name, Yahweh.  We have a relationship, you and I.  I am your God and you are my people.  The rest of the nine words then go on to tell the Israelites how they are to live as the people of God.  They are to have no other Gods, and they are to keep Sabbath, and they are to treat each other in certain ways, without lying and without stealing and so on, because that’s what it means to live into their identity and vocation as God’s people.

But it all starts with the relationship.  Knowing God.  How are we to know God?

Psalm 19 addresses that very question.  How are we to know God?  The heavens declare the glory of God and the firmament shows his handiwork.  We can begin to know God through the beauty and majesty of God’s creation.  But we also know God through his word, the Torah, the instruction and the laws that were revealed to us through Moses and the prophets and have been written for us in scripture.  And the psalmist also affirms that we can know God in a more personal way, as our strength and our redeemer.

That’s how the psalmist answers the question of knowing God.  But every generation, and each one of us has to answer that question for ourselves.

How are we to know God?  It’s a big question, and any time we’re faced with a big question, we have a tendency to narrow the question, and to narrow the answers.

The people of Israel did just that.  As the generations passed, and as the memory of God’s action in bringing them out of Egypt faded, the big question of “how are we to know God?” tended to narrow into the question “What do we have to do to keep God happy?”  And this is where a legalistic approach started to take centre stage.  We must offer sacrifice.  We must keep the law.  These aren’t bad answers, but a focus on practices, on what we do, is a narrowing in our relationship with God.

There was another narrowing that took place.  Instead of the big question of “How are we to know God?”, people started focusing on the narrower question of “Where is God?”  In the days of Moses, God was known to be in the midst of the people, in the cloud that guided them by day and the pillar of fire that protected them at night.  As God later said through the prophet Nathan, “I moved about among all the people of Israel in a tent.”

But as the years passed, a tent wasn’t good enough. The people wanted to pin God down more than that.  They built altars on which to offer their sacrifices, and these turned into fixed places of worship.  Then, King Solomon decided that God should live in a Temple in Jerusalem, and he built a massive structure that came to be understood as the place both where sacrifices were to be offered and where God was present.  No longer was God understood as moving freely in the midst of the people – the people were instead to make pilgrimages to Jerusalem in order to be in the presence of God and to offer the sacrifices required by the law.

The kings of Israel were quite happy with the Temple and its sacrificial system.  Not only was it well-defined, but it also helped the kings to control the population and served as source of revenue.  The prophets however protested against this narrowing of the relationship with God.  “What to me is the multitude of your sacrifices?” says the Lord through the prophet Isaiah. “Your new moons and your appointed festivals my soul hates.  Wash yourselves, make yourselves clean.  Cease to do evil, learn to do good, seek justice, rescue the oppressed.”  Or as the prophet Micah puts it in his rant against the Temple system, “Shall I come before the Lord with burnt offerings?  No, what the Lord requires of you is to do justice, love kindness and to walk humbly with your God.”

The problem with the temple system is that when you get too focused on the “what” and the “where”, you lose your relationship with the “who”.

This is the context when Jesus enters Jerusalem in today’s gospel.  It is Passover, the greatest of the festivals.  A festival which used to be celebrated primarily in homes, but now requires a pilgrimage to the Temple in Jerusalem.  In the temple Jesus finds people selling animals for sacrifice, cattle and sheep and doves, and the moneychangers seated at their tables.  Making a whip of cords, he drives all of them out of the temple, both the sheep and the cattle.  He also pours out the coins of the money changers and overturns their tables.  “Take these things out of here!  Stop making my Father’s house a marketplace!”

But the temple system couldn’t function without being a marketplace.  How could people acquire animals for the necessary sacrifices if they weren’t for sale?  How could the temple be maintained and staff be paid without payment of the temple tax?  Jesus was not calling for an end to corruption.  He wasn’t just trying to reform the system.  He was calling for its complete destruction.

This was a high risk strategy.  Jesus’ action was pre-meditated.  He made himself a weapon, a whip of cords.  His actions were violent and destructive.  He deliberately put himself in conflict with those in power.  This was a high risk strategy.  It was clearly high risk for Jesus, he was ultimately put to death by those in authority.  But it was also risky in another way.  Jesus is for us our role model, our teacher.  How are we to interpret this?  Is anger justified?  Is violent action sometimes needed?  Is this the way we should act?  Jesus’ temple action leaves itself open to misinterpretation and abuse.

Why would Jesus take such a risk?  What was at stake that would justify such a risk?

I think that what was at stake is the most important thing of all.  Our relationship with God.

We are constantly at risk of turning our relationship with God into a narrow set of practices.  We are constantly at risk of confining God’s presence in our lives to a well-defined place.

Jesus with this temple action is telling us that it’s not about our religious or ethical practices and it’s not about a particular place where we’ve deemed God to be present.  It’s not about sacrifices and obeying the law, and it’s not about the temple.  It is about knowing God in the person of Jesus.  It’s about that relationship.

How are we to know God?  The Word who was God became flesh and lived among us.  No one has ever seen God.  It is God the only Son who has made him known.  That’s why Jesus replaced the temple.

Our faith is first and foremost about knowing God.  About being in relationship with God and in relationship with all of God’s children.  That’s big, and that’s hard, and like the people of Israel, we often try to narrow it down and get legalistic about it.

Instead of asking how can we know God, we narrow the question to what do we have to do.  There are so many people who think that Christianity is an ethical system, that it’s all basically about good values.  I often get this with parents who bring their children for baptism.  When I ask them why, they say it’s because they want their children to have good values, and the church can teach them that.  And sometimes I think to myself, “forget good values, I want your child to know God.  I want your child to have a life-giving relationship with the one who created this universe and made us in his image.”  I don’t usually say that, because having good values is a good thing, and if that’s the starting point for faith, than that’s ok.  But don’t think that’s the end point.

There are many others who think that Christianity is a religious system, that it’s all basically about good religious practices.  But our faith is not about good values, nor is it about good religious practices.  Our faith is much bigger than that.  It is about a relationship, knowing and being known by God.

There are people who think that Christianity is all about going to church, going to that particular place where we encounter God’s presence, where we meet God in the sacraments of the church.  Now I’m all in favour of going to church.  But the primary reason we come here is so that we can intentionally learn and experience what it means to be in relationship with God and with each other so that when we go out from here we can continue to experience that relationship in all the places and faces of our lives.

Our faith is not primarily about practices and places.  It is about relationship.  Knowing God and being known by God in the community of God’s people.  That’s what was worth the risk.

Amen.