More than remembering

A sermon preached on Maundy Thursday, April 17 at St. Augustine's Church, Wiesbaden

Exodus 12:1-14, 1 Corinthians 11:23-26, John 13:1-17, 31b-35, Psalm 116:1, 10-17

Why is Maundy Thursday called Maundy Thursday? Does anyone know? Well, the name comes from the Latin ‘Mandatum’ meaning command or commandment, we can still recognize this in words like mandatory or mandate. And as we heard, all three readings contained commands or commandments, in fact our last reading from the Gospel according to John ended with Jesus giving the disciples a new commandment as his farewell gift.

But let’s begin at the beginning: In the Exodus passage about the first Passover, that night when  God passes over the Israelites striking only the Egyptians with the 10^th, last and worst plague: the death of the firstborn, the Lord also commands the people of Israel to remember this event by celebrating Passover every year. It is to be a day of remembrance and a festival to the Lord. The Israelites are to commemorate this event not just with readings and prayers, but by eating the same food that the exiles ate in Egypt on that first Passover night, just before leaving: lamb, unleavened bread, and bitter herbs. This is how Jews still celebrate Passover today, with the so-called ritual Seder meal that includes retelling the story of the Exodus, eating matza – unleavened bread – and partaking of symbolic foods. I was able to take part in a Seder meal while at seminary, which has been very helpful in making me more aware of our common heritage.

Then in the reading from the 1^st Letter to the Corinthians Paul retells the story of the Last Supper, that last common meal before Jesus’ arrest and execution, and he reminds the Corinthians that Christ instituted the repetition of this meal as a perpetual remembrance – do this in remembrance of me he told the disciples when he broke and gave the bread and took and shared the cup. At this church we follow this command every week in the Eucharist, our ritual meal, which includes retelling the story of that first thanksgiving meal before the passion and partaking of bread and wine.

Finally in John’s Gospel we heard how Jesus washed the disciples’ feet during that Last Supper and that he commands them to wash one another’s feet following the example he has set. That is what we will do later in this service too when I wash your feet acting as the servant all Christian leaders are also supposed to be.

Tonight we have had a common and simple meal together, we have retold the stories of the Exodus and of the Last Supper, and later we will wash one another’s feet and share communion. So presumably we deserve a big pat on the back as we have we done everything the Lord has commanded us to do? I’m afraid not. There is of course more to these commands than just the active remembrance of a common meal, or a visible act of service, or the myriad rituals that have developed around these very simple acts. They stand for something much deeper, with much more commitment, and that is much more difficult to keep.

The Passover meal is not only a reminder of how God liberated the Israelites and it is not just a way of participating in that escape from Pharaoh’s dominion. It is also the command to be ready to depart at a moment’s notice, to be ready to leave your home and possessions behind, to be ready to change your life if that is what God commands you to do.  The Israelites were to eat the Passover meal with their loins girded, that is with their lower garments or robe pulled up and tied between their legs so as not to trip themselves up, and with their sandals on. This should have been easy for the Israelites to do, after all they were being oppressed and very unfairly treated in Egypt. But somehow they had learned to become comfortable even with a bad situation and the risk of change seemed greater. And of course their experiences in the wilderness were not just positive, their forty year trek was no comfortable package holiday, and they came close to dying of hunger and thirst at times. But in the end they reached the Promised Land.

The Eucharist is also much more than remembering and reenacting Christ’s last meal with his disciples. What we do, Paul tells us, is to proclaim the Lord’s death to the world and all that Jesus’ death stands for. We proclaim his death as a great saving act of love. We announce that through his death and through his sacrifice death and death’s allies in the world were, are, and will be defeated. And now comes the difficult bit - we promise that we will act in the same way, that we too are willing to sacrifice something for love - perhaps not always our whole lives, but certainly some part of them. In the verses immediately following this passage, Paul goes on to warn the Corinthians that if they “eat the bread or drink the cup of the Lord in an unworthy manner,” (1 Corinthians 11:27) that is without real love for one another, they are not celebrating the Eucharist Christ instituted and instead are eating and drinking judgment against themselves. (11:29)

The foot washing episode echoes the prologue of John’s Gospel. Jesus takes off his clothes to act as a servant or slave just as the Word laid aside clothes of glory to become human. Jesus washes the disciples’ feet not despite being God’s Son, but because he has come from God. His actions are a sign of that even greater sacrifice that will follow the next day. What the disciples and we are called to imitate is not just the example of washing feet or other menial acts of servitude. The example or pattern we are called to imitate is Jesus’ whole life, way, and manner: Love one another as I have loved you. And show this love, for example in acts of hospitality like foot washing. Be focused on the other, not yourself.

For me ritual reenactments on days like today are like training sessions. When we act out the sign or symbol and reenact the event, we make the event and what it stands for real and present in our lives and we practice what that sign stands for. And Passover and the Last Supper stand for being ready and willing to dedicate our lives to God and to serving and loving all of God’s children, just as God did and does and always will do.

Amen.

A Spirit of Hope

Sermon preached on Sunday, April 6th 2014 at St. Augustine's Church, Wiesbaden

Fifth Sunday in Lent: Ezekiel 37:1-14, Romans 8:6-11, John 11:1-45, Psalm 130

This week’s gospel reading completes our series of surprising encounters and is the last, and greatest sign, in the first section of John’s Gospel that most commentators call the Book of Signs. The raising of Lazarus is the Book’s climax for there can be no more powerful sign of Jesus’ power and authority than the power over life and death. Ironically it is Jesus’ gift of life to his friend, Lazarus that in John’s Gospel causes the Jewish authorities to decide to have Jesus killed: “So from that day on they planned to put him to death.” (John 11:53) What follows this encounter are the events leading up to the crucifixion, Jesus’ Passion, his Resurrection, and the post-Resurrection appearances: These are the events that will be the focus of our readings and services in Holy Week and Easter.

But coming back to today’s reading. We encounter another host of characters, both named and unnamed. First we meet Martha and Mary with all the characteristics we already know from the story in Luke’s Gospel: Martha is the busy one who rushes out to meet Jesus, who can’t wait to confront him. Mary on the other hand is more contemplative; she stays and waits in her sorrow until she is called. Of the disciples who accompany Jesus, only Thomas is named – loyal and trusting even in the face of danger: “let us also go, that we may die with him,” he says to his colleagues. We’ll hear more about too him in a few weeks’ time! At the end of the passage we get to meet Lazarus himself, briefly, when he answers Jesus’ call and staggers out of the tomb still wrapped in his burial garments. And let’s not forget the ‘Jews,’ those unnamed witnesses, the friends and acquaintances of Lazarus and his sisters who were mourning with them. Many of them will become followers of Jesus after witnessing God’s glory in action in him.

However different Mary and Martha may be in their character and reactions, they both have one thing in common. They are both very disappointed. Jesus had not acted as they expected and hoped, he had not arrived while Lazarus was still ill and been able to heal him. They knew that Jesus could heal the sick: he had done so often in the past. But Jesus’ arrival was delayed and their brother Lazarus had been dead for four days.  And now it’s too late. Oh if only you had been here, they both say. But now they have lost hope – they despair.

And they have this in common with the whole nation of Israel that Ezekiel is addressing with the vision we heard in the Old Testament reading. They felt that they were as good as dead. The kingdom of Judah was no more, Jerusalem and the Temple had been destroyed, and the survivors find themselves in exile in a strange land. It is not surprising then that they feel abandoned by a God who had not acted as they expected and hoped. He had not vanquished their enemies. And so they lack in faith and hope. “Our hope is lost; we are cut off completely” they say. In Ezekiel’s vision they are like unnumbered dry, dead bones scattered in a valley. But God has not left you, Ezekiel tells them. You are still God’s people and God will revive you. In his very vivid image the dry bones come together and gradually get re-covered with flesh and skin, they become people, a people, again and are revived by the very Spirit of God being breathed into them.

You know this is one day when I am glad that our readings are not illustrated: thousands of skeletons milling about, graves opening and people climbing out of them, Lazarus coming out of his tomb looking like a Mummy – it could also be a scene from a horror film!

Last week in our Lenten course LOVELife – living the Gospel of John we talked about God, which is always a good thing to do in church now and again. We discussed how it is easy to conceive of God as Father – though of course for those who have bad experiences with their fathers that concrete image may not always be a good one. We found it even easier to picture God’s Son – Jesus - because he was also fully human and therefore also just like us. But we admitted to finding the idea of God the Spirit abstract at times – what is the Spirit like, we asked, what does it do? We could of course ask our Pentecostal brothers and sisters – the Holy Spirit is anything but abstract for them! I won’t try and give you a complete theology and doctrine of the Holy Spirit today – that can wait for another sermon, perhaps when we have heard the passage from 1 Corinthians on the gifts of the Spirit – but there is one aspect I want to highlight from today’s readings – the Holy Spirit as the source of hope. In Ezekiel’s vision, God’s Spirit was the source of new life and new hope, this Spirit will sustain them in their exile and guide them on their return to the Promised Land.

Paul too writes about hope to the Romans. Setting the mind on the Spirit, means believing that God raised Jesus from the dead and trusting that the Spirit of the same God will raise us too. Not only that, but as God’s Spirit already dwells within us, that gift of new life is already ours while we are still in our mortal bodies. When Paul contrasts flesh and spirit, he is not rejecting this material world. It is after all God’s creation and therefore good. We are both physical and spiritual beings. Things go wrong however when we set our minds solely on the ‘flesh,’ when we get too concerned with and focus too much on all those very temporal and temporary things: material possessions, wealth, positions and power. That’s when we set ourselves up for disappointment. That’s when our lives get out of balance and we miss the full life and peace that setting the mind on God’s Spirit brings.

Martha and Mary do not need the Holy Spirit to restore their faith and hope and to give their lives meaning again. Jesus does that for them. It is only later that he promises the disciples the gift of the Spirit after his Resurrection: “But the Advocate, the Holy Spirit, whom the Father will send in my name, will teach you everything, and remind you of all that I have said to you.” (John 14.26)  When Martha first runs out to meet Jesus, she still does not know the extent of Jesus’ authority. She knew he was a healer, she knew he was in some way empowered by God, but not that he was God. Then in conversation with Jesus she learns that resurrection is not just something that will happen in the far future, that it is not just an abstract doctrine. Resurrection is a person and that person is standing before her. Jesus first invites her to look into the future and then brings that future forward by raising Lazarus from the dead as a concrete sign of the promise of new life. Both her and her sister’s encounter with Jesus do not just restore the hope they had lost, but gives them a new and much stronger hope than ever before. This is a hope sustained by faith in Jesus as Lord, Messiah, the Son of God as Martha confesses him to be, using almost the same words as Peter in his confession as recorded in Matthew’s Gospel (16:16): “Simon Peter answered, ‘You are the Messiah, the Son of the living God.’”

The actual miracle of bringing Lazarus back to life again is almost an afterthought in the story. The interpretation of the miracle and its meaning for us all is much more important. The raising of Lazarus is only a sign or foretaste of what awaits us beyond death. Lazarus is restored to mortal life, he will die again – that’s why he brings his burial garments with him: he will need them again. When Jesus is raised from the dead he leaves his garments behind, he will not need them again because he has already been raised to eternal life.

We can all lose hope at times. This church is still going through a period of uncertainty, an in-between time as I called it in my article for the newsletter and many of you are still afraid of loss. As individuals we also have times of hopelessness, particularly after a loss of some kind, and perhaps even the season of Lent and my call to self-examination and repentance has caused some of you to despair a little! To be dispirited means literally to have lost enthusiasm and hope; to be disheartened. As Christians we never need to be dispirited because as Paul promises, the Spirit of the one who raised Jesus dwells in us all. We have that Spirit to give us hope and strength. We have the knowledge of Christ’s resurrection as our hope for the future.  We can be sure that God has a great future in store for us. And as all the different encounters we have heard about over the last weeks tell us, that future will probably be both surprising and unexpected, but it will certainly bring good news, new life, and new possibilities.

Amen

Bearing the Light

A Sermon preached at St. Augustine's Church, Wiesbaden on Sunday 30th March, 2014

Fourth Sunday in Lent: 1 Samuel 16:1-13, Ephesians 5:8-14, John 9:1-41, Psalm 23

This week’s gospel reading continues our series of surprising encounters. After Nicodemus at night and the Woman at the Well at high noon we now meet the man born blind, a man who has known only darkness until he meets the Christ.

When John recounts events in Jesus’ life, we need to listen to and understand the stories and the speeches at more than one level. Firstly there is what we might call the literal level – what actually happens. In the stories we have been hearing something good happens to people, a deep and often unexpressed need they have is satisfied. Nicodemus, the seeker after the truth, finds a lot more truth than he had expected. The Samaritan woman, an outcast, finds new hope and new life, and is reintegrated into her society. A man born blind, with no hope of seeing again, is healed of his physical ailment and discovers a renewed faith and courage. If this Good News was all we took from the reading, then it would be enough. Jesus’ whole life, especially his acts of love and compassion as well as his words of teaching, are how the Good News of God’s love was and is proclaimed. But there is more!

Jesus often also makes a moral or ethical point. Here it is a very important point indeed – it was not as a result of sin, neither the man’s nor his parents’, that the man was born blind. Disabilities, illnesses, disasters, and tragedies are not divine punishments for sin. Bad things also happen to good people. Jesus makes a similar point in Luke’s gospel - the eighteen people who had been killed when a tower, the tower of Siloam, fell on them were no “worse offenders than all the others living in Jerusalem.” (Luke 13:4) That’s why I really have a problem with preachers who see a disease like AIDS as God’s punishment or a natural catastrophe such as Hurricane Katrina as divine retribution. They seem to be wilfully ignoring Jesus’ teaching. I would call that spiritual blindness and while physical blindness is never caused by sin, spiritual blindness is sinful. What Jesus does say however is that tragedies and suffering, while not caused by God, can still be an opportunity to reveal God’s works of love – as Jesus does in healing the man born blind, or as many good and faithful people do when they take care of the sick or help those severely affected by a natural or man-made disaster.

Each event is however also a sign of who Jesus is, a demonstration of his power and authority, and proof of where this power comes from. He is the Messiah, he is sent from God, and he has the power even to heal a man blind from birth. As the man born blind says: “If this man were not from God, he could do nothing.” According to the prophet Isaiah, the Messiah will be “given … as a light to the nations, to open the eyes that are blind.” (Isaiah 42:6-7) Jesus’ actions in this passage are the visible and tangible fulfillment of Isaiah’s prophecy – the proof that he is the light of the world.

Then finally, in the reactions of the people Jesus meets and talks to, we are taught something about faith. In today’s narrative John compares and contrasts the reactions of the man born blind with the reactions of the Pharisees. The man born blind just goes from strength to strength. He knows little yet learns much. With each questioning and hostile interrogation his faith and understanding deepen and grow: it is as if the light he has received is getting brighter and brighter. After his healing Jesus is first simply “the man called Jesus” who had healed him. When the Pharisees question him the first time he calls Jesus a prophet, so someone sent by God. Finally he acknowledges Jesus as the Son of Man, as his Lord, whom he worships.

The man born blind, previously a beggar and wholly dependent on others’ good will, finds new depths of courage. He stands up for Jesus although as a result he is disowned by his parents and rejected by the religious leaders. Thanks to the love he has received, he knows no fear. Reflecting Christ’s light, he has become a light himself, demonstrating faith, courage, love, and hope.

The Pharisees by contrast exhibit very different qualities: doubt, arrogance, rejection, and fear. They may have full physical sight, but in the course of the narrative they see less and less, they become blinder and blinder. They are learned, they have studied scripture intensely, and unfortunately feel therefore that they know everything, which makes them so unwilling to be taught anything new, especially by a formerly blind beggar. They are also fearful, they perceive – rightly - Jesus as a threat to the status quo and to their positions of power. So it is not so much that they cannot see, but that they simply will not see. They actively resist seeing God’s love in Jesus’ actions. The questions they ask both the man born blind and his parents are not questions aimed at understanding, because they know their answer before they ask their question. Instead their intention is to find a reason not to believe and not to learn from this experience.

You will be glad to hear that your vestry is not made up of Pharisees, whatever you may have thought, and that its members are not blind and that they are willing to learn from experience. Last Saturday we took some time out together. We spent time getting to know one another better, studying our role as church leaders, and also trying to learn from recent experience, both bad and good, and from our own mistakes and wrong behavior – because that is what we can change. One thing we worked on was a mutual agreement on how we want to work together and communicate with one another and the parish in the future. We hope this will enable us to be “an example … in speech, life, love, faith and purity,” (1 Timothy 4:12) and allow us to show better than in the past that we “love one another, as Jesus loves us.” (John 15:11) We will publish this once it has been finalized at the next vestry meeting.

We all have this choice. Do we behave like the man born blind or like the Pharisees? Are we willing to learn from experience, to correct our impressions and assumptions, to be willing to see God in others, to marvel at God’s actions, and to trust in God’s love and power even in difficult and dangerous situations?  Or do we think we already know all the answers, are determined not to change, and do not want to see what God is calling us to do and to be? Where do we stand? Do we stand with “the man born blind, in his new found faith and openness to God’s light” or “beside the Pharisees, certain of their own rightness but locked in a darkness of their own devising?”[1]

I am the light of the world, Jesus tells us. According to Genesis, creation, the first creation began with light: “Then God said, ‘Let there be light’; and there was light. And God saw that the light was good; and God separated the light from the darkness.” (Genesis 1:3-4) Jesus’ light is the beginning of the new or re-Creation of the world that we also call the kingdom of God or heaven. Its purpose is the transformation of this world into one of light, love, and wholeness. The man born blind was given new light by the light of the world and became himself a bearer of that light. Similarly in the letter to the Ephesians the author tells the Christians in Ephesus that “once you were in darkness, but now in the Lord you are light. Live as children of light.”

That is God’s call to us, to live as children of light, and to behave as bearers of Christ’s light. Like the man born blind we were all in darkness until we met Christ. The powers of evil tried to extinguish Christ’s light on the Cross, instead it came back stronger than before. The Pharisees also try and extinguish the light the man born blind bears for Christ; instead his witness and faith become stronger than before. As Christians we have seen the light. Many of us will have received a candle at our Baptism as a symbol of the light. Our calling is to allow Christ’s light to shine through us into the world, to shine in our faith, in our courage and hope, and in our acts of love and generosity for one another and for all the world.

Amen

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[1] Tom Wright, John for Everyone, Part 1, 146

Surprise, Surprise

A Sermon preached at St. Augustine's, Wiesbaden on Sunday March 23, 2014

Third Sunday in Lent: Exodus 17:1-7, Romans 5:1-11, John 4:5-42, Psalm 95

The lessons we have been, and will be, hearing from during Lent, from the Gospel according to John, are all about encounters and the subsequent conversations between Jesus and various people. And there is always something surprising about these encounters: the person, the circumstances, the result, and/or the timing. Take last week’s encounter with Nicodemus for example. He came to Jesus by night – perhaps because as a Pharisee and a leader of the Jews, a member of their ruling council, he didn’t want his colleagues to see him visiting Jesus. As a scholar and teacher he might also have been studying the Law late at night, and felt the need to find out more about this man who had so clearly come from God. We don’t know.

We do however have a good idea why the Samaritan woman came to the well at noon, when the sun was at its highest and hottest: she came at a time when she would not have to meet anyone else, especially not the other women of her city. With her personal history and reputation, she would not have been acceptable company and she will have wanted to avoid the dirty looks and muttered insults. So it is very surprising indeed that Jesus strikes up a conversation with her. Not only because of her ‘character,’ the fact that she was a woman and a Samaritan should have prevented any form of contact: “How is that you, a Jew, ask a drink of me, a woman of Samaria,” she asks. The Jews looked down on the Samaritans because they worshipped in the wrong place, on the wrong mountain, and because both they and their beliefs were supposedly tainted by pagan intermingling during the long period of occupation of Israel several hundred years earlier. And yet Samaritans often get to play a positive role in the gospels, not just the Good Samaritan, but also this unnamed woman who has a very good claim to the title of “First Missionary.”

But the surprises don’t end with Jesus asking her for a drink. The conversation itself takes some surprising twists and turns. Instead of Jesus receiving living, that is simply running water, from the deep well, he offers her a different kind of living water, the water of divine wisdom and teaching, the water of new life in Christ. Although she doesn’t understand him at first Jesus tells her, and through this story us too, that accepting him as Lord is like having a spring of water bubbling inside us constantly refreshing us with new life.

But first we must get rid of the stale, stagnant water we have been living off before this time, in the case of the Samaritan woman, as Jesus knows to her surprise, she needs to acknowledge and deal with her irregular married or unmarried life. Looking at how she is accepted by her people at the end of this passage, seeing how they willing they are to follow her lead, it looks to me as if Jesus’ intervention will help her heal her relationships. Within a few sentences she changes from being a social outcast, to an evangelist.

But Jesus has some more surprises in store. As I said earlier, the right place and building to worship in was one of the issues that divided the Jews and the Samaritans. Well, surprise, surprise: you can forget about the rivalry between Mount Gerizim and Mount Zion, Jesus tells her. The worship of God was never really tied to one single place, God is not a physical being in need of a house. Instead you will find God in unexpected places, not just in holy people or holy buildings: on a Cross for example, or in bread and wine. At their best, holy sites are simply signposts to the divine. One great human temptation seems to be to make these places, buildings, pictures, statues – whatever – into substitutes for the real thing and to turn them into the objects of worship. 

Probably the greatest surprise for the Samaritan woman, and the one that sets her off running back to her city, back to all those people who would not normally give her the time of day, is a very simple statement on Jesus’ part: “I am he, the one who is speaking to you.” By which he means I am the Messiah you have been waiting for, the one who will proclaim the truth, a prophet, your Lord, the savior of the whole world, God incarnate.

When the disciples return, and are themselves very surprised to see Jesus talking to this woman, Jesus no longer has any need for the food they have brought him, He is so excited by this encounter and by the spiritual hunger he has discovered, so exhilarated by the success of his first missionary, that his physical hunger has gone. The disciples fare no better than the woman at the well in following Jesus’ metaphorical use of the words ‘food’ and ‘harvest.’ It took her a moment to understand the new meaning of living water and it takes them a while to realize that the harvest Jesus is referring to is the harvest of a new crop of believers. This will be the disciples’ mission after the Passion and Resurrection as it is ours today.

The first half of John’s Gospel – after the prologue we all know so well – In the beginning was the word – is called the Book of Signs because it contains a series of signs or miracles that point to Jesus’ divinity and help explain something about his mission. At Cana water is turned to wine, in the course of his ministry several people are healed, five thousand hungry people are fed, Jesus walks on water, and Jesus brings Lazarus back to life. But in some ways the greatest signs are not the supernatural ones. Surprising encounters like the one we heard about today are the even greater miracles. Outcasts are welcomed in, relationships are healed, ordinary things like water, bread, wine take on new meaning as symbols of the divine, and very ordinary people become messengers of God. And that’s very good news for us too, because we are very ordinary people, we don’t have miraculous powers, but we can still be messengers of God and we can still encounter and reach out to the stranger and the outcast just as God, in Jesus, encountered them. 

I see three main lessons for us here in this passage. One is appropriate to this time of Lent and self-examination. What stale or stagnant water do we need to get rid of to make room for the living water that Jesus offers? What relationships do we need to heal? What hurt, whether inflicted or suffered, do we need to acknowledge? Whom do we need to forgive or ask for forgiveness?

The second lesson is the need to focus on mission, on being sent by God to reap what God has sown, to harvest the fields that are ripe for harvesting. I don’t want you all to put on pith helmets and head off for the tropics. But I do want you to remember that neither this building not the money we want you to pledge as part of our stewardship campaign are ends in themselves, they are the means by which we carry out God’s mission. Your pledge and your commitment are how we finance the resources we need so that our worship, community events, Christian formation of the young and not so young, as well as our mission and outreach activities can grow and flourish.

Finally - how can we do the unexpected, how can we surprise Wiesbaden? I’ve met a number of our ecumenical partners this week. One thing they’ve told me is how this church used to be well known for being open and inviting, with open doors and lit windows during the week, not just on a Sunday, and how sad they were that we recently turned in ourselves so much, that we became quite literally ‘introverted.’ Well, let’s surprise them by turning out again. The Kaffeeklatsch initiative that Roxanne Richards and others have started is such a good example. It’s wonderful that it is helping us raise money for our ministry and mission, but I think even more important is the opportunity it offers for encounters and conversation. Jesus discovered a spiritual hunger and thirst in Samaria, well there is a spiritual hunger and thirst today that we can help fill or quench. Let this church be our Well, and the coffee and cake we offer be an opening for a conversation about the Good News we believe in, just as water and food were for Jesus. Let us surprise Wiesbaden with the strength of our witness to the God of love as revealed in Jesus Christ.  

Amen