Sunday, April 27, 2014

Faith and Promise



A sermon preached on Sunday, April 27 (Easter II) at St. Augustine's, Wiesbaden
Acts 2:14a, 22-32, 1 Peter 1:3-9, John 20:19 – 31, Psalm 16

Today we celebrate a Baptism, our first one this year at this church. Through Baptism by water and the Holy Spirit Carla June Cross will become a member of Christ’s body the Church and we will welcome her into our even larger family, one that stretches way beyond these walls! And the themes I picked up from today’s readings, especially from the Gospel, seem very appropriate for this occasion: they are the themes of promise, gift, mission, and faith.

One thing happening when Jesus appears to the disciples in the locked room is that he is fulfilling a number of promises he had made to them before his death. He brings peace: “Peace be with you” are his first words to the disciples, recalling his earlier promise. “Peace I leave with you; my peace I give to you.” (John 14:27) This word peace or in Hebrew shalom means more than the absence of conflict. It stands for God’s blessing, for the promise of wholeness, for the peace of reconciliation, and for the absence of fear. The promise of Baptism is similar. It is a blessing from God and it imparts forgiveness and new life in God. For all we really have to fear is God’s absence.

Jesus promised the disciples joy: “I will see you again, and your hearts will rejoice, and no one will take your joy from you,” (John 16:22) and they are filled with joy at the sight of him. This is the joy of Jesus’ presence and in Baptism we promise that the candidate will be Christ’s own for ever. This is as much an occasion for  joy, as the fact that we celebrate a new member and a new witness and I will pray later that Carla receives the gift of joy and wonder in all God’s works.

We find the biggest promise of all in the First Letter of Peter, it is the promise of an “inheritance that is imperishable, undefiled, and unfading,” so nothing material like land or buildings, but God’s kingdom. Holy Baptism is, to quote from the Catechism, “the sacrament by which God adopts us as his children and makes us members of Christ’s body, the Church, and inheritors of the kingdom of God.”[1]

But in Baptism the promises are not one way, we also make promises, or for most of us today, we repeat and reaffirm promises we have made before: to renounce evil, to turn to Christ, to follow and obey him, to proclaim God’s word, and to serve Christ. We do this knowing that these are promises we cannot keep on our own, but only with God’s help, in particular with the help of God’s Spirit.

The Holy Spirit is one of the two gifts Jesus gives the disciples in that locked room on that first Resurrection Day. He breathes it on or into them, recalling God’s gift of life to humankind in the second Creation story: “then the Lord God … breathed into his nostrils the breath of life; and the man became a living being.” (Genesis 2:7)  They have been given Jesus’ own life by the Spirit, for without it we would not be capable of manifesting God's presence and doing God's will as Jesus did. The second gift is forgiveness, both the power and the responsibility to forgive. Forgiveness is part of our calling as Christians, not just the formal forgiveness of sins that I can grant in the absolution, but the everyday forgiveness of the other – the forgiveness without which reconciliation, between God and humanity and between one another is not possible. Carla will be baptized by water and the Holy Spirit. She will receive the forgiveness of sin – which is for her as for us both a gift and a mandate.

Jesus commissions the disciples, they are sent into the world just as the Father has sent him – they have a mission, from the Latin missio, meaning I sent. The disciples are sent to bear witness to Jesus and to be the presence of Jesus in the world and to be God’s agents of change of the world. Their mission is to carry on Christ's work, not to begin a new one. This is the same mission we accepted at our Baptism, as we will affirm later in the Baptismal Covenant. We promise to continue in the apostles’ footsteps to proclaim God’s Good News, not our own, and to serve Christ, not the church, not ourselves, not our own group or party. How we live and act is itself a major part of our witness to the world, especially how we live and act with one another – in unity with God and with one another.

Faith, and Thomas’ supposed lack of it, are of course at the centre of the Gospel story. I’ve always found it a bit unfair to call Thomas ‘doubting Thomas.’ For one thing, the other disciples clearly also had their doubts too. As we heard last week, Mary Magdalene was sent by Jesus to tell them: ‘I have seen the Lord.’ (20:18) But as the disciples have locked themselves in a room out of fear, they clearly were not convinced until they saw him and the marks in his hands and side. Which is all that Thomas really wanted: just to see the same evidence his friends had seen. I also think that Thomas was more disappointed and sad than in doubt. He wanted to be able to share in the same joy and see his risen Master in person. He had that chance, we don’t of course, but that does not make our faith in Christ any less important.
Last week I went to see the film/movie Philomena, which I really recommend it’s a very moving story. The cynical journalist, played by Steve Coogan, is very critical about the line from our Gospel, “Blessed are those who have not seen and yet have come to believe.” He wants evidence, he wants proof and he does not want to be told what to think. But that is not really what this line means. It is the confirmation that the faith of those who come after the disciples, who see Christ ‘only’ in their hearts or who ‘only’ experience him in the Eucharist, that their faith is as blessed and as valid as the faith of the first witnesses.

In the end Thomas gets to say one of the most important lines in the Gospel when he acclaims Jesus as “My Lord and my God.” This is what all the signs and events and the long, long discourses in John’s Gospel have been leading up to – to the realization that Jesus is the Messiah and the Son of God.
A very similar confession is part of the Rite of Baptism when, in Carla’s case her parents and godparents on her behalf, will promise to accept Jesus Christ as their savior and follow and obey him as Lord. There are a number of reasons why we retain infant Baptism in the Anglican tradition. For one thing, why should children be excluded from membership in Christ’s body? I seem to recall Christ having specifically commanded, “Let the little children come to me, and do not stop them; for it is to such as these that the kingdom of heaven belongs.” (Mathew 19:4) And I also think that it helps remind us of how children believe. As those of us who have read bedtime stories to our children know very well, children have no problem at all in believing things based on words, on what someone they trust tells them.

And that is the faith we need to recall from time to time. A faith built on relationship and on trust, based on the promises that were fulfilled in Jesus, as witnessed by the disciples and passed on to us in Scripture. It is a faith sustained by the gift of the Holy Spirit that was not just given to the disciples two thousand years ago, but to us all. So with no more delay let us baptize Carla into her new life in Christ by water and the Holy Spirit.
Amen.


[1] BCP, 858

Sunday, April 20, 2014

A New Story Begins



A Sermon preached on Easter Day 2014 at St. Augustine's, Wiesbaden
Acts 10:34-43, Colossians 3:1-4, John 20:1-18, Psalm 118:1-2, 14-24

In an article I recently read online, on an Episcopal Church website, today, Easter Day, was described as “the triumphant ending to the Greatest Story Ever Told.” Well I disagree entirely ….. I bet that’s got your attention!

And why do I disagree? Well to start I find the descriptions of the Resurrection in the gospels anything but triumphant. The Resurrection itself is not described at all- no Hollywood effects like a mysterious glow from the tomb or the stone covering the entrance exploding into myriad pieces. What we have instead is surprisingly restrained and low key. We just read about an empty tomb, left over linen, mystified friends and disciples, fear, sadness, and uncertainty. All that the ‘other disciple’ and Peter get to see when they reach the tomb and look inside are linen wrappings and a rolled up cloth. So it would seem that the body has not been stolen – who would go to the bother of unwrapping it? But where is it then?

Mary’s encounter with Jesus is also unspectacular. OK, she does see two angels in white, that is not an everyday experience, at least nor for me, but it doesn’t seem to worry her. And when she does meet Jesus she mistakes him for a gardener. This all makes the Resurrection something very intimate and personal. As Peter says in the sermon recorded in the Acts of the Apostles: “God allowed him to appear, not to all the people, but to us who were chosen by God as witnesses, and who ate and drank with him after he rose from the dead.”

This is a Resurrection experience that is available to us too. We can experience it through faith and in our hearts and as those chosen by God as witnesses we will also eat and drink with our Lord and Savior at his table later in the service. Yes, the Resurrection is the triumph of life over death and of love over hate. But it is not triumphant – and in the history of the Christian church we have been furthest from Jesus’ teaching and from God’s will when we have acted triumphantly!

To quote Winston Churchill: “This is not the end. It is not even the beginning of the end. But it is, perhaps, the end of the beginning.” Easter really is not the ending, it is a new beginning. As John makes clear, Jesus‘ own ministry in the world is not complete at this point, he still has to return to his and our Father, and he still has to give us all the gift of the Holy Spirit. There is meaning in the Resurrection happening on what we now call Sunday, and not on Saturday, the Sabbath, the day of rest after God had finished Creation. Jesus rises on the first day of the week, which Sunday still is in some calendars, because his Resurrection is the beginning of a new creation, a new life, and a new world.

Look at the encounter between Mary Magdalene and Jesus. He is both the same as before and changed. And when he tells her not to hold on to me, not to cling to him he is warning her that a new relationship has begun that will not be like the old one. In this new relationship she, and the disciples now described as Jesus’ brothers, and we as their successors on faith, can be as intimate with God as Jesus is. Soon it will be time for Jesus to leave and return to the Father. So he sends her, as the first Apostle, the Apostle to the Apostles. This is another important, primary role for women in this Gospel – after the Woman at the Well who was the first missionary. She is sent to tell the others all that Jesus had told her and to get them ready for their new beginning and for the beginning of their mission to preach and to testify as Peter puts it in his sermon in Acts.

So Easter is not triumphant, and not the ending – but why isn’t it the Greatest Story Ever Told? Of course it is a great story and a great message. Just look at what Peter squeezes into a few lines of his sermon when he summarizes all of Jesus life and works and the meaning of his death: God is the God of every nation and Jesus is the Lord of all. But calling this the Greatest Story Ever Told makes it sound as if it is finished. We’ve reached the end, we know ‘whodunnit,’ we can close the book and put it back on the shelf and look for a new one. And many people do. They look for an exciting new story in the secular myth of progress and personal striving or in some new form of spirituality. That’s not their fault, it’s our fault, because we have not made clear enough that our story is still in the process of being told. We are both the storytellers and part of the story. Like Peter we are called to tell people what happened, how God became human and dwelt with us, what the incarnate Son taught and did and how he lived as an example, how he died for us and for our sins, how he rose again and what the Kingdom of God that he inaugurated looks like, what our renewed lives and a renewed world can be like, and how we can help bring that about.

I understand why Christians, together with Jews and Moslems, are sometimes called a People of the Book – and it is important to emphasize what we have in common with those two other religions. But we are not a People of the Book; we are a People of a Life. Jesus Christ is what was revealed to us, not the books that humans wrote to record his life

I am going to finish with a poem from a collection called “Annunciations: Poems out of Scripture.” It too describes a beginning that is anything but triumphant and a new story that has only just begun and is still to be told. It is the great story, that greatest story that begins at Easter and can save us all:
Going and Telling[1]
Go. Tell my friends. I am giving you the word. Tell them.
It is finished, and the new story has begun.
The body that holds you now
Alive and warm, is as real
As the body you saw mutilated,
Mocked, betrayed, brutalized.

Even though jeers drowned out the message
Of justice for the poor,
Release for the oppressed,
Unimagined forbearance,
Even though
It seems as though the promise I brought
Was pounded down
With the nails
They drove into these hands
Go and tell them:
They cannot kill it.

Step back. Take these wounded hands.
Clasp them in your own.
Gaze back at me, and see
The dancing in my eyes.
Now go.
Go and tell them
This life you are holding
Nothing can kill it.
Go. Go and tell them
You will see me
Again.
Amen


[1] Kathleen Staudt, Annunciations: Poems out of Scripture, Mellen Poetry Press 2003, 69

Friday, April 18, 2014

The Power of Death



A Sermon preached on Good Friday, April 18, 2014
Isaiah 52:13 – 53:12, Hebrews 4:14-16, 5:7-9, John 18:1 – 19:42, Psalm 22

Episcopalians are on the whole a lot more comfortable with the Incarnation and the Resurrection, than with Jesus’ Passion – his painful death on the Cross. This is understandable, the other two events are much more appealing: a baby, albeit one born in a shed, God sharing our lives with us, the glory of new life and of Jesus’ triumph over death. And then even though we proclaim the Resurrection and echo Paul’s words that death has lost its sting, we are still a bit reluctant to talk about death, especially long drawn out and painful ones. We are also not happy with some of the more common interpretations of what Jesus’ death on the cross really means, especially not those that describe as it in some way willed by God as a punishment for our sins with Jesus taking that punishment on our behalf. But if we skip over Good Friday we leave its interpretation to others. Death is part of life, and Jesus’ death was an important part of his life and witness – we cannot leave out that part of the story. We are saved by Jesus’ life and witness, and by his death, as well as by his resurrection.

One early Christian heresy, Docetism, simply claimed that Jesus only seemed to suffer and die. It was not real and it was only “zum Schein.” Surely God cannot die. And even though for Muslims Jesus is ‘only’ a human messenger from God, the Qur’an too cannot imagine God letting Jesus die such a shameful death: “They neither killed nor crucified him; but it was made to appear unto them.” (Surah 4:157) But God’s Son did suffer and die that day, today. Jesus went through the same pains as the two men crucified with him. When Jesus’ side was pierced by the spear water and blood flowed out. Joseph and Nicodemus laid a dead body in the tomb.   

Who killed him? God? No, we did, humanity did. The forces of evil in the world, the powers and dominions as Paul calls them, believed that in killing the messenger, the message too would die. After all, how can a message of hope, life, and love survive death? And out of fear, out of denial, and out of our own ambivalence we, the rest of humanity let it happen. On the one hand we desire God and rejoice in God’s presence among us, with all the blessing and new life that brings. But we also resist God, because following God in Jesus can be very costly indeed. God wants our total commitment – and where would that leave our desire for self-satisfaction and independence? And so in the words of one of our hymns, though not one we are singing today (Hymnal 158): “’Twas, I Lord Jesus, I it was denied thee: I crucified thee.” At least in this sense Jesus did die for our sins – for the sins that had him killed. The sin of denial, the sin of wanting to do without God, the sin of putting own interests above all others, the sin of desire for power and control.

Later in the service I will bring up a wooden cross for veneration with the words: Behold the wood of the Cross, on which was hung the world’s salvation. So just what has Jesus’ death to do with our salvation?

Jesus lived, died, and was resurrected both as man and God. He did not stop being human after his death. That is part of the promise of salvation. God the Son became human to know our lives and loves and hurts, God the Son became human to know our suffering, God the Son knew death as a human, and God the Son was resurrected with all of his nature, both human and divine. God has shared the human experience and through Jesus we as humanity already share in the divine. I don’t think Pontius Pilate realized how right he was when he brought Jesus out with a crown of thorns and robed in purple with the words: “Here is the man.” For the author of the Letter to the Hebrews Jesus’ humanity was essential because in him we have a high priest who can sympathize with our weaknesses and “who in every respect has been tested as we are.”

In his life and teaching Jesus showed us what God’s kingdom is like and he embodied its values. He took these values with him to the Cross, the same values that Isaiah describes in his portrayal of the suffering servant: radical and unconditional love, the willingness to lay down his life for others, calm, nonresistant endurance, total devotion to God and to God’s purposes. Two weeks ago, when preaching on the story of Lazarus, I said that resurrection is not just an abstract doctrine, but a person. Unconditional love, grace, undeserved forgiveness are also not abstract concepts, they are an event, and they are what Jesus shows on the Cross.

Like Isaiah’s suffering servant Jesus really does bear our infirmities, transgressions, and iniquities. Our sense of sinfulness and inadequacy is what alienates us from God. God does not reject us, but we fear God and fear the punishment we think we deserve. Well we don’t have to any more. Jesus has set us right with God by his death on the Cross. Not even the sin of killing the Son of God has the consequences we fear – it leads not to punishment but to salvation. Even in his death Jesus offers us a sign of this salvation: water and blood flow from his side, the symbols of the Sacraments of Baptism and Communion, of forgiveness and reconciliation.

It turns out that the message of hope, life, and love can not only survive death, but actually needed this death, Christ’s death. Death has proven to be impotent against the power of God’s love. Hope was not in vain and new life beckons for all who want and ask for it.
Amen