Creator, Wisdom, Shekinah (Trinity Sunday June 15 2014)

Homily:  Yr A Trinity, June 15 2014, St. Albans

Readings:  Gen 1.1-2.4a, Ps 8; 2 Cor 13.11-13; Mt 28.16-20

Have you ever looked at the stars?  I mean really looked at the stars, from a place free of light pollution, where you can see them in all their splendor.  About five years ago, I was in Peru, hiking the Inca trail on the way to Macchu Picchu, and on the way we were camping high in the Andes mountains, nearly 4000m above sea level where the air is thin.  One night I woke up in the middle of the night, got out of the tent and looked up.  And I was amazed by the array of stars overhead, filling my vision, impossible to count, breathtaking in their beauty.  It was an awesome sight.  And on that occasion my words could easily have been the words of the psalmist that we read in Psalm 8 this morning:

“When I consider your heavens, the work of your fingers, the moon and stars that you have set in their courses, O Lord, how exalted is your name in all the world.”

This is one of the ways that we as humans experience God.  We experience God as Creator, and we are filled with awe and wonder.  The knowledge that we’ve accumulated through modern science only accentuates these emotions.  We know that our galaxy the Milky Way is so big that it takes light over 100,000 years to cross it, and yet the Milky Way is only one of billions of galaxies in our universe.  The God that we experience through creation is the Big God, the God beyond heaven and earth, the one that transcends us, the one that fills us with awe, and maybe even a bit of fear and trembling.

And out of this experience of God come the images of the divine that are perhaps some of the most familiar.  We picture God, as does the psalmist, as a big, powerful figure, as a king who lives above the clouds, or perhaps as some sort of superhero gazing down on earth from the sky.  “O Lord our governor, how exalted is your name in all the world!”

But our experience of the vastness of the universe also raises questions for us doesn’t it?  The immensity of the heavens and the picture of the big God who created them can make us feel rather small and insignificant.  Why would such a God care for us?  Or again in the words of the psalmist, “What is man that you should be mindful of him?  What is the human that you should seek them out?”

But for some strange reason, we do experience God as caring for us.  We do experience God as seeking us out.   Despite the vastness of creation, we do experience ourselves as significant within it.  We seem to be the only creatures in whom consciousness and a quest for meaning have emerged.  Out of the immensity of the universe it is in humanity that the universe becomes aware of itself and seeks a relationship with its creator.  And out of our yearning for relationship with God, which some might call our spirituality, we do, at least from time to time, get the sense that we are indeed in relationship with the divine, that we are loved by a force which transcends us and yet is near to us and all around us.

And this sense of the nearness of God, and the love of God for us moves us to imagine God in new ways, because the image of God as the big God, as the superhero in the sky just doesn’t cut it for people who have moved into this closer relationship with the divine.

In the scriptures of the Old Testament, we see how this process of re-imagining God worked for the Hebrew people.  They had their image of God as Creator that we envisioned today in our first reading, the God who said “Let there be light” and there was light.  This is the Almighty God who rules over the heavens and the earth, God as the exalted governor that the psalmist refers to in today’s psalm.

But new images also emerged out of the Hebrew people’s experience of the divine in their midst, surrounding them and upholding them.  One of these new images is captured by the Hebrew word “Shekinah”.  Shekinah refers to the presence of God.   It is the “holy, holy, holy” that we will sing about during our offertory.  It is the divine presence which dwells among and within her people, a presence which surrounds us and at times overwhelms us.  When Moses goes up the mountain to receive the ten commandments and is covered by a cloud, it is the Shekinah of God that surrounds him.  When Isaiah enters the temple and has a vision of God, it is the Shekinah, God’s presence that overwhelms him. 

Another image of God that emerges for the Hebrew people, another way of picturing the intimate relationship the Creator has with creation and with humanity is the image of God as Wisdom which we find in the Proverbs and in the Wisdom of Solomon.  In these writings, God is pictured not so much as the sovereign who gazes from above, but as the feminine figure of Wisdom who comes to us, seeking us out along the road, waiting for us at the crossroads and the city gates, calling out to all of us, seeking to enter into relationship with us.  In Wisdom, God doesn’t wait for us to come to her, she comes to us.  She is God’s agent in creation, dancing, rejoicing and taking delight in the human race.  What a wonderful image this is of a God who comes to be with us, rejoices with us, dances with us, and takes delight in us.  What a delightful contrast to some of the images that we have grown up with, images of God as a stern task-master, waggling his finger at us, telling us to behave.  In Wisdom, we have the image of a God who not only loves us but who also loves being with us.

Like us, the Hebrew people experienced God in a variety of different ways.  They experienced the awesome God, the big God, in the immensity of creation and the transcendence of worship.  They experienced God as the one who comes calling, who seeks us out, who dances with us and delights in her relationship with us. And they experienced the divine as a presence who cares for them, who draws near and surrounds them, who dwells within them.  

God as Creator, God as Wisdom, God as Shekinah.

Today is Trinity Sunday.  Unlike most Sundays, when we remember and celebrate events which have happened, events like Christmas and Easter and Pentecost, on Trinity Sunday, we celebrate an idea.  An idea about God.  The idea that God is one God in three persons, Father, Son and Holy Spirit.  And to tell you the truth, when that idea is presented as the doctrine of the Trinity, there are many of us, myself included, who find that it is a bit complicated and perhaps a little obscure.

But I encourage you this morning to think of the Trinity in terms of your own experience of God.  Think of the times you have beheld the beauty of a sunset, or the peacefulness of a forest or the glory of worship, the times you have experienced the transcendence and wonder of the divine energy which is beyond our grasp and comprehension. This is your image of God the Father.

Remember the stories you’ve been told of the love and compassion and wisdom of Jesus of Nazareth, how he came to seek us out, how he sought out those who were rejected and marginalized by society, how he delighted in their presence, laughing and celebrating with them at table, and how his work and ministry continue in the people who carry on with his mission today.  This is your image of God the Son.

Notice the times that you’ve experienced the divine as a subtle presence, as comfort and inspiration and power from within, as one who comes alongside, as an invisible energy which surrounds you and upholds and strengthens you, as love which is poured into your heart and you in turn have to offer to others.  This is your image of God the Holy Spirit.

And become aware of the relationship between all three of these images or personas of God, of a lively relationship of love between equals which values and supports and upholds the other.  This is the essence of God the Trinity.

And if you’re sitting there saying to yourself that you have yet to experience or name or imagine God in these different ways, think of this as a wonderful opportunity that you have to take the relationship you do have with God and move and deepen it in new and exciting directions.

In the name of God, Creator, Wisdom and Shekinah; Father, Son and Holy Spirit,

Amen.

Swept Up by a Sudden Force (Pentecost, June 8 2014)

Homily:  Yr A Pentecost, June 8 2014, St Albans

Readings:  Acts 2:1-21; Ps 104:25-35,37; 1 Cor 12:3b-13; Jn 20:19-23

Have you ever been swept up by sudden force of great power?  A force so overwhelming it was like a roaring fire or the rush of a mighty wind?  Back in my university days, I used to work in the summer as a camp counsellor, at Camp Iawah near Westport, just south of here.  Some of you may know it.  One of the things I used to do at camp was teach canoeing, and because I was one of the older counsellors, I used to get the youngest campers in my canoe.  Well, one day I had three small children in my canoe for canoeing lessons, a four year old, a six year old and a seven year old.  There we were in the canoe, on the lake, and the children were trying to paddle.  As you can imagine, we weren’t going very fast, in fact I don’t think that we were really moving in any particular direction at all.  In fact, it was kind of relaxing, just floating there on the lake.

But all of a sudden, out of nowhere, a huge gust of wind came up behind us, and it took our canoe and hurled us forward across the water until we were going so fast it seemed like we were flying!  The kids started screaming, my heart started pumping, and it was all I could do to try to brace the canoe with my paddle to keep us from tipping over.

Now it seemed like that gust of wind lasted a long time, although it was probably only a few seconds.  Our boat travelled farther in those few seconds than it had by the power of our own paddling during the previous ten minutes!  And during those few exhilarating seconds, I had a taste of what it’s like to be swept up by a sudden force of great power.  In those few seconds I was transformed from a relaxed child care provider to someone who was given the urgent task of preventing those children from drowning.

Exhilarating as it was, that gust of wind created a big problem in my life.  When it stopped, I heaved a big sigh of relief, and I all I wanted to do was just go back to shore, and have everything return to normal.

In our first reading in Acts, the disciples who are gathered in the upper room are probably wondering when their lives will return to normal.  Many of them, people like Peter and James and John, were fishermen.  They’d spent their whole lives on boats, getting up early to cast their nets, doing their work and then returning home to their families before starting all over again the next morning.  Then one day they’d encountered Jesus, and he’d called them, and for some reason they probably didn’t even understand themselves they’d followed him.  And it had been an exhilarating and challenging time for them.  He’d taught them, and they’d witnessed his deeds of healing and power.  He’d taken them to Jerusalem and they’d been there for his confrontation with the authorities, the confrontation that had led to Jesus death.  They’d wept and mourned and then been totally surprised by his resurrection and his appearances in their midst.  But now a few weeks later, those appearances had ended.  And emotionally exhausted by all that had happened, these Galilean fisherfolk are probably ready for life to return to normal.  They’re ready to return home to their families, to get in their boats and go fishing.

Then, suddenly from heaven there comes a sound like the rush of a violent wind and it fills the entire house where they are sitting.  Divided tongues, like fire, appear among them and they are filled with the Holy Spirit and they’re swept out of the house and begin to speak in languages they don’t understand, proclaiming God’s deeds of power.  And all who heard them were amazed and perplexed.

Sometimes, returning to normal is not an option.

There are times in my life that I wish that the Spirit of God would come upon me as a gentle breeze, comforting me, helping me to return to normal, solving my problems.

Sometimes that happens.  But the story of Pentecost tells me that the Spirit of God is more likely to come upon us as the rush of a violent wind, propelling us forward at breakneck speed, calling and sending us into a new and perhaps unsettling reality.  The Holy Spirit doesn’t come to solve problems in our lives.  She creates problems.  She sends us out into a new reality.  And when that happens the return to normal just isn’t an option.

Just ask Peter.  That’s what Peter experienced on that first Pentecost.  He just wanted to go home to Galilee, but instead he found himself running out into the streets of Jerusalem and facing off against a perplexed and hostile crowd, defending himself against charges of drunkenness and proclaiming the same message of the kingdom of God that got Jesus nailed to a cross.  The coming of the Holy Spirit created a lot of problems in Peter’s life.  He found himself swept up by a sudden force of great power, and there was no going back.  He was no longer Peter, the fisherman from Galilee.  He was Peter, the apostle, the one sent by Jesus and empowered by the Spirit to proclaim God’s kingdom.

That does seem, at least on the surface, to be a bit of a foolish gamble on God’s part.  God gives the job of proclaiming and building up his kingdom to the disciples, to people like us. Zack talked about that last week.  “You will be my witnesses, not just to Israel, but to the ends of the earth,” Jesus told the disciples.  It seemed like an impossible, overwhelming challenge.  You can imagine Peter’s objections.  “To the ends of the earth?  I wouldn’t know where to go or how to get there.  And besides, I don’t even speak the language.”  But the Spirit has a way of sweeping aside our objections and obstacles.  On the day of Pentecost, Peter found himself doing just what he had thought impossible, proclaiming the good news of God’s kingdom to people from the ends of the earth, to each in their own language.

This is Peter’s story, and the story of the first apostles.  But it is also our story, a story that is unfolding in each one of our lives, because the coming of the Holy Spirit has been promised to each one of us.  Just as he asked the disciples, Jesus is asking each of us to pray for the Holy Spirit to come into our lives.  And when that happens we too may be swept up by a sudden force of overwhelming power.  It will be a turning point in our life journeys which will be just as profound, just as shocking as it was for the earliest followers of Jesus.  It may look different for each one of us.  It may be sudden or it may be gradual.  It may be obvious or it may be subtle.  It may be a rushing wind or a word of peace.  The Spirit moves in mysterious ways, in many different ways.  Not all of us are called to be apostles as Peter was.  Paul reminds us in our second reading that the gifts of the Spirit are given in wonderful variety.  But the promise of the Spirit has been made to all.

Are you ready to be swept up by a sudden force of overwhelming power?  May you have the courage to pray for the presence and the power of the Holy Spirit in your life.

Amen.

 

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.

"He breathed on them" (Second Sunday of Easter, Apr 27 2014)

Homily:  Yr A Easter 2, April 27 2014, St. Albans

Readings:  Acts 2:14a, 22-32; Ps 16; 1 Pet 1:3-9; Jn 20:19-31

Last week we celebrated the joy of Easter.  We journeyed with the disciples from the sorrow and fear of Good Friday, through the silence of Holy Saturday to the excitement and joy of meeting the risen Christ on Easter morning.  And it was a joyful occasion, wasn’t it?  Lots of people, lots of smiles, great music, great singing, awesome worship, wonderful family meals and gatherings, Easter egg hunts and all the rest of it.  It was a celebration of the resurrection, a celebration of the realization that in the resurrection we are given a tangible sign that life can overcome death, that love will prevail over hatred, that joy emerges out of fear and that the light that comes into our world cannot be put out by the darkness.  All of this is good news, all of it is worth celebrating.

And so this week we continue the celebration.  And we will continue to celebrate Easter in our liturgical calendar for a full 50 days, a week of weeks.

And as we celebrate, we will also seek to enter into a deeper understanding of what Easter is all about, not just by looking back at what happened, but also by looking forward.  What does Easter mean for you and me as individuals and for all of us as a community as we continue on our journey together?

Our gospel today is set on the evening of that first Easter Sunday.  The women who had seen Jesus early that morning have already found the rest of his disciples and told them what they had seen and heard.  Now, as evening falls, they are gathered together in a house in Jerusalem behind locked doors, still fearful, not knowing what to do, not knowing what would happen next.

And then out of nowhere Jesus comes and stands among them, and says to them “Peace be with you.”  He shows them his hands and sides so that they know it’s him.  Then, he commissions them saying “As the Father has sent me, so I send you.”  And then, John tells us that Jesus breathed on them.

  

That’s a strange detail.  Jesus breathed on his disciples.  It seems like a curious thing for John the gospel writer to record.  After all, we don’t normally make a point of entering a room and breathing on people!  But John mentions it here because he wants to remind us of two other texts in the Hebrew Scriptures where it talks about God breathing on people.  One is found in the creation story of the book of Genesis.  The other is found in the prophet Ezekiel’s vision of the valley of dry bones, which we heard as one of our Sunday readings several weeks ago.

Genesis tells us that in the beginning, there was darkness, and chaos.  And then, God’s breath swept over the face of the waters, and God said ‘Let there be light’ and there was light.  A little later on, we’re told that God formed the first human from the dust of the ground.  But it was not until God breathed into his nostrils the breath of life that the human became a living being.  The earth-creature went from being a mere physical thing, made of the dust of the earth, to a living being.  When God breathed into that collection of molecules and atoms, it became a living human, an animated being, capable of eating and drinking, of loving, of experiencing both sadness and joy.  That is an amazing thing, an amazing act of creation, something which too often we take for granted.

With his symbolism and phrasing, John is proclaiming in our gospel today that something equally amazing is happening.  John is proclaiming that the resurrection of Jesus is an act of new creation every bit as awesome as the original act of creation in Genesis.  Just as God breathed life into the first human, Jesus is breathing life, new life, life in the Spirit, into his disciples.  Just as the breath of God swept over the waters in the beginning, on the first day, Jesus’ breath on the disciples on this first day of the week, the first day of the resurrection, is the start of a renewed creation.  In the Genesis creation story, God creates natural life and natural light.  In the resurrection, God gives us life which is eternal life and the light which is the true light of the world.

  

If John had been making a movie instead of writing a text, I’m quite convinced that today’s gospel would have started in virtual darkness, just as Genesis tells us that darkness covered the earth at the dawn of creation.  We are told that it is evening, and that the disciples are huddled indoors with the doors locked and presumably the windows shuttered because of their fear.  The scene begins in darkness, the disciples are lifeless.  Then suddenly Jesus appears among them.  Let there be light. The scene brightens, the disciples come into focus.  Jesus speaks, then he breathes on them and they are brought to life. 

You see, the purpose of the resurrection is not so much to bring Jesus back to life as it is to bring his disciples to life.  It is an act of creation which bestows new life on those who were in many ways lifeless.

Peter certainly saw things that way.  When he looks back on his life in the letter which we read in our second reading, he looks back to the resurrection as the pivotal moment.  It is through the resurrection of Jesus Christ from the dead, says Peter, that God has given us new birth.

There’s another place in the Hebrew scriptures where God breathes on humanity.  It’s found in the book of Ezekiel, in chapter 37, in Ezekiel’s vision of the valley of dry bones.  In this text, the prophet tells of being brought out by the spirit of God to the middle of a valley which was full of bones, and the bones were very dry.  God asks Ezekiel “can these bones live?”  Ezekiel wisely replies that only you know, God.  God tells Ezekiel to speak to the bones, and he does, saying that the Lord God will cause breath to enter you and you shall live, and sinews will come upon the bones, and flesh and skin and they shall be brought back to life.  And so there is a mighty rattling sound and the bones start to come together and sinews grow upon them and flesh and skin, and there is a mighty wind, and God breathes life into the bones, and people stand up and live.

Now the Jewish people five centuries before Jesus understood this picture of God breathing life back into the dry bones as an image of the return from exile.  Of a homecoming.  The Jewish people had been taken into captivity and exile in Babylon.  They were downcast, hopeless, cut off from home and from God.  They weren’t physically dead, but they were the dry bones longing to be restored to life.

John’s gospel, by evoking this vision of Ezekiel, is telling us that we too are like dry bones that need to be breathed back to life.  How often do we feel like exiles, how often do we despair, how often do we feel cut off from others or from God?  We are the ones who need to be re-created, who need to have hope restored, who need to be brought home, who need to learn to live life abundantly.  The purpose of the resurrection is not so much to bring Jesus back to life as it is to bring us to life.

Why did Jesus come?  Why did God raise him?  Why do we still tell the story of the resurrection?  John sums it up in the last line of the gospel which we heard today:  we tell the story “so that you may believe that Jesus is the Messiah, the Son of God and through believing you may have life in his name.”

Did you notice in John’s final summation that belief itself is not the objective?  Often we put our emphasis on belief.  But belief is just a means to the end, and the objective of all of this, the final word in the gospel story, is that you and I may have life, life in all its fullness, life lived abundantly, the new life that comes through God’s act of new creation, a life that sends us out with meaning and purpose.

Those who were paralysed by fear and huddled in the darkness, those who were dry bones, have had new life breathed into them and they were sent to proclaim the good news.  Because just as God the Father sent Jesus to bring new life to us, we in turn are sent to bring new life to others.

May the God of all creation breathe new life into each one of us.

Amen.

How Dare We? (Easter 2014)

Homily:  Easter Sunday April 20 2014. St. Albans

Readings:  1 Cor 15.1-11; Ps 118.1-2,14-24; Acts 10.34-43; John 20.1-18

How dare we?

On Wednesday afternoon I watched the state funeral for the Honourable Jim Flaherty which took place at St. James, the Anglican Cathedral, in Toronto.  There were 700 people inside the Cathedral, and many more outside, all gathered to mark the death of this man.  The funeral began, as many do, with eulogies, and as these were spoken, there were visible signs of grief.  There were tears and there were shaky voices. 

And when the eulogies had finished, the whole assembly stood as one and sang “Praise My Soul the King of Heaven”.  And I thought to myself as I watched, “How is it that we dare to sing ‘Praise My Soul the King of Heaven’ when we gather to mark a death?”

The lower level of this church is the home of Centre 454, a day program for those who are homeless or live in poverty.  Centre 454 is one of five Community Ministries of our Diocese.  I don’t know if you know it, but the tag-line, or motto if you like, of our Community Ministries, including Centre 454, is “Choose Hope”.  Every day, there are men, women and children who walk through the doors of Centre 454 and Cornerstone and The Well, and often these are people who have been beaten up by life.  People who suffer from mental illness and addiction.  People who are trying to escape abusive relationships and violence.  People who have been worn down by poverty and have been told over and over again that they’re no good.  People who know grief and despair.  And when one of these people walks through our doors, with the deck of life stacked against them, how is it that we dare to tell them to choose hope?

Earlier this year, we worked our way through Jesus’ Sermon on the Mount, and we heard Jesus say that we should love our enemies and pray for those who hate us.  And we talked about that, and we acknowledged that it would be hard for us, and that we would probably never actually be able to do it.  But we took it seriously.  How is it that we dare to even take seriously let alone agree with someone who tells us to love those that hate us?

On another Sunday we heard about the time that Peter asks Jesus,” if a brother or sister sins against me, how often should I forgive?  Should I forgive as many as seven times?”  And Jesus responds, “Not seven times, but, I tell you, seventy times seven.”  And when we tell this story, how is it that we dare to think that Jesus is the one that’s making sense rather than Peter?

We dare to say and do these things because we are an Easter people.

We dare to say and do these things because we are a people that believe that life is stronger than death, that love will overcome hate, that hope is greater than fear, that forgiveness is better than judgment, and that the suffering and grief of this life is real but is not the ultimate reality.

We believe these things because we are an Easter people.  Easter changes everything.

It certainly did for Mary Magdalene.  As our gospel reading opens this morning, Mary is not yet an Easter person.  She is still living in the aftermath of Friday.  The events of the past week have unfolded for her with dizzying speed, the false hope of Palm Sunday and the triumphal entry into Jerusalem, the gathering storm as the enemies of Jesus plotted against him, the pain and grief of witnessing the gruesome death of the man she loved, the fear and uncertainty of what comes next.  It is still dark when Mary makes her way to Jesus’ tomb on that Sunday morning.  She goes to the tomb, I suppose, in an attempt to hang on to something of what she has lost.  But when she sees that the stone has been removed from the tomb, she’s confused, she panics, and she runs to get help.  The body has been stolen, it is perhaps the final indignity, that her enemies would even take away his dead body, the only reminder of him that she has left.  She runs, she gets help.  But when the Peter and the other disciple have come and gone, Mary is left alone once more, weeping.

Have we not, will we not all experience such things at some point in our lives?

And yet I believe that it is often in these moments that Jesus calls us and speaks our name. 

Calls us out of grief and fear and confusion and sadness.

Calls us into an encounter, into a relationship with the living God.

Mary hears that voice.  She hears her name, and that changes everything.

At the beginning of our liturgy this morning, we began by singing ‘Jesus Christ is risen today’, and in our opening words we proclaimed ‘Christ is risen, the Lord is risen indeed, alleluia!’ and I get why we as a community of faith we do that.

But Mary’s proclamation is much more personal.  “I have seen the Lord”.  She is proclaiming a personal encounter, a life-changing experience, a life-giving relationship.  She’s talking about something that matters for her in a very personal way. 

Sometimes we make the mistake of thinking that Easter is about something that happened to Jesus.  It’s not.  Easter is about something that happens to us, to you and to me.  Something that gives us the courage, the strength, the sheer audacity to declare that life is indeed stronger than death, that love will indeed overcome hate, that hope is indeed greater than fear, that forgiveness is indeed better than judgement, and that the suffering and grief that we experience are not the last word. 

None of this is self-evident nor obvious.  In fact, there are many who look at the evidence of history and of the world around us who think that we are fools for believing such things. There are those who think that only a fool would mark a death by singing hymns of praise to God.  That only one who is naïve would urge a broken person to choose hope.

But we are an Easter people.  We do these apparently foolish things because we are people of faith.  We believe in the power of life, love, hope and forgiveness because Christ was raised from the dead, and appeared to Mary, and then to Peter, and then to the twelve, and then to more than five hundred brothers and sisters.  We believe because these first witnesses risked their own lives to tell others about what they had experienced first-hand.  And we believe because we continue in a whole variety of surprising and exciting and confusing ways to experience Christ as real and alive in our own lives.  

I have seen the Lord. 

We are an Easter people.

Amen.