Storied Grace

THE CONFESSION OF ST. PETER THE APOSTLE
January 18, 2018

Chapel of the Apostles
Sewanee, Tennessee
Readings: Acts 4.8-13, Psalm 23, I Peter 5.1-4, Matthew 18-19

For a video of the sermon, click here.

Tonight we hear two straightforward questions. First, Who do people say that the Son of Man is? Some say you’re John the Baptist. Others say you’re Elijah, or maybe Jeremiah or one of the prophets. But then Jesus ups the ante. But who do you say that I am? The theorizing is over. Jesus is staring into the eyes of these men, his friends and disciples, who had followed him around, heard him teach, seen him heal, been amazed and confused and bewildered. After all of this, who do you say that I am? Maybe it was like those moments in class, when the professor asks a question that seems so obvious on one level, almost rhetorical. Except it’s not a rhetorical question–they want a real answer, and they’re looking at you, but you can’t quite form the words, so you pretend to scribble something down in your notebook and hope they move on to the next person in the row? But who do you say that I am? St. Peter speaks up for the twelve, speaking those words that God had written on his heart, had placed on his lips: You are the Messiah, the Son of the living God.

It is a divine revelation. Jesus is not only a wisdom teacher or preacher of peace. He is not only a healer and worker of wonders. He is not only a teacher of the Law who proclaims the Kingdom of God. Beneath the teachings, the sayings, the signs, there is a deeper reality–a reality to which all of these things point. He is Messiah. He is the Son of God. He is Lord. Such a confession is a gift from God. It is the foundation of the Church, and it is our gift today.

Our modern ears can miss, however, the radical and inherently political nature of this confession. Messiah invokes a whole history of expectation, of hoping for deliverance from the violence of political oppression. Son of God is just as political. It was a title Caesar had taken for himself–Caesar, Son of God, Savior of the World. To say Jesus was Messiah and the Son of the living God set Jesus up against Rome. It set his followers up against Caesar. In a world dictated by the fist of Rome, where peace and order were brought and maintained by brutality, terror, fear and violence–in such a world, Peter is confessing a deeper reality. He is confessing the central reality of the cosmos: Jesus is Lord. And in so doing, he is rejecting the power of Empire, the power of Caesar, and casting them down as idols. He is rejecting this power, and confessing the power of God, the power of Love Divine, and, though he does not know it yet, the power of the cross.

Who do you say that I am? This is not a moot question today. On the contrary, it could not be more relevant. In the face of war, violence, oppression, fear, and evil, we are asked the same question: Who do you say that I am? What reality will we confess? Will Empire encroach on the Kingdom of God, Caesar on the sovereignty of Christ? Never.

Some friends and I once visited eastern France to see the battlefields of World War I. We stopped in a small village where a museum of the Great War was located, but it was lunch, so in typical French fashion, everything was closed for two hours. Knowing that we had limited time there, we set off to grab a panini and do a small walking tour of the village. When I bought the panini, I asked the vendor to point me to the church, an obvious first stop for me. He pointed me down a small, downhill road sandwiched between tiny shops. In no time we came to the edge of the village, and there was the small stone church, situated at the edge of town, which is unusual for any French town I have ever visited. The church was in a field, just beginning to sprout green with the Spring weather. But not the field next to it. Its soil had this chalky look. Nothing seemed to be growing. And I noticed that all the countryside was checkered with these chalky fields between green fields. Across the street from the church, there was a barbed wire fence, with the same chalky soil. Inside were small trees and bushes, each with thorns wrapped around them, choking them. And on the fence, a sign: “Do not enter. Danger of death.” On the other side of this fence among the thorns, I read, it was possible that there was still live ammunition on the ground, waiting to be disturbed, waiting to fulfill its evil purpose, live ammunition from the Great War 100 years ago.  

The small stone church had been destroyed during the Great War. It used to be in the middle of town, like in all small towns in France. But after the War, they decided to rebuild it here, where trenches had once snaked their way across the field; where the soil seemed useless, unable to recover; where live rounds of ammunition still lurked about; where Death and War seemed to reign. In the middle of all of this, a small stone church.

The small church pointed to something deep, something true. There was a deeper cosmological reality than Empire and War. Death and Evil, even at that darkest moment, did not reign. Jesus Christ reigns. God has the last word. And to that, the Church is a witness.

Who do you say that I am? We say that you are the Messiah, the Son of the living God, who dying and rising destroyed the power of sin and death, and led captivity away captive. But in the aftermath of the war, in the face of such destruction and death, surely such a confession was hard. Maybe it was only a whimper, a whisper of hope. So it seems with us sometimes. We confess that Jesus is Lord, but some days it is easier than others. And over our lifetimes, it is a confession we grow into, day by day, by the grace of God and the power of the Holy Spirit.

As I was walking out of the church, I ran into a woman. I asked her for directions, and she pointed us to our destination. My accent gave me away as a foreigner, though: “You’re Canadian, aren’t you?” She asked if I liked the church. Her grandfather had helped rebuild it after the War. He came back scarred, she said. He was a gueule cassée, one of those words you read in French literature or history books. Roughly translated, it means broken face, except gueule is only used for animals, like dogs. These were men who came back with unrecognizable faces, disfigured because of injuries in the war—some 15,000 Frenchmen in World War I alone. When he came back, all he wanted to do was rebuild the church, she said. He couldn’t let the war have the last word.

What a confession—a confession of the power of God, the power of Love Divine. Despite his brutal experience with war, his actions were a confession that Empire and Death were not Lord, but Jesus is Lord. Sin and Evil do not reign, but Christ reigns. Maybe it was a whimper at first, but I would like to think that with every stone his confession grew stronger and stronger, each stone squashing the power of Hell, a Hell already vanquished by the death and resurrection of Jesus Christ.

We do not approach life with a naivete that refuses to see the evil in the world or in our lives. We are not blind to sin and the effects of sin. Yes, we see–we experience sin and evil in a real, even personal, way. But we know that it does not have the last word. Our lives are a testimony that God has the last word. Our lives are a confession that Jesus is Lord. Like each stone of that small church in the battlefield, each day of our lives builds up and upon the witness of the Church, squashing the very power of Hell.

A sermon preached at Thankful Memorial Episcopal Church in Chattanooga, TN, for the first Sunday after the Epiphany, the Baptism of our Lord.
Readings: Genesis 1.1-5, Psalm 29, Acts 19.1-7, Mark 1.4-11.

Today is a day of beginnings. It’s the first Sunday of 2018. It’s the first Sunday after the Epiphany. It’s the first Sunday you get to deal with a new seminarian. But of course, we have been dealing with beginnings for a couple of weeks now. Two weeks ago today, we heard the story from Luke’s gospel of Jesus’ birth in Bethlehem. Last week in John’s gospel, we heard that Jesus is the incarnation of the Word of God, who has been with God forever, the Word that God spoke in creation, enfleshed for us, fully God yet fully human.

But Mark’s gospel begins differently. We do not begin in Bethlehem, as we do in Matthew or Luke, nor do we begin before time and creation, as in John. Instead, we begin with John the Baptizer and the baptism of Jesus in the Jordan River. We are barely a few verses into the gospel according to St. Mark. John proclaims a baptism of repentance,  promising that one who is more powerful is coming after him, a Messiah who will baptize with the Holy Spirit. And suddenly, almost nonchalantly, Jesus is there, in the water, being baptized. But as he is coming out of the water, something miraculous happens. Reality is ruptured, the normal order and pace of things are upended, and the Divine breaks into the world powerfully. The heavens are torn apart. The Holy Spirit alights on Jesus, as softly as a dove landing. And God the Father speaks, “You are my Son, the Beloved; with you I am well pleased.” And just like that, as quickly as a blink of the eyes, in the course of our routine lives, God reveals what has always been there, just beyond our understanding, just out of our sight. God reveals God’s Self to us: God the Father speaking, God the Son in our humanity, God the Holy Spirit descending.  

What an incredible thing. This is Jesus’ first act of public ministry in Mark: he steps into the muddy waters of the Jordan River and is baptized by John. And this is a symbol for all of Jesus’ ministry, from his birth until his death. Jesus chooses to get into the dirty water with us. Jesus chooses to be fully like us, to take on our human nature completely. God chooses to come to us, not to remain aloof from us, but to share in our life with us.

Many of us were baptized with beautiful fonts, by priests or bishops vested in fine clothes. Some of you may have the shell that might have been used to baptize you. There was likely beautiful music. Perhaps there were Easter lilies around the font. All very dignified and right and good. But let me tell you about a friend who had a different experience. Tessa did not grow up in the Episcopal Church. She grew up in a little country church with no more than 25 people on a given Sunday. There wasn’t a pipe organ; instead, there were tambourines, accordions, and enthusiastic singing. When she was baptized at 12 years old, there were no Easter lilies or flowers of any kind. They went out into a garage connected to the church. It was in the dead of winter, cold. And there was a horse trough. She was baptized in a horse trough.

Tessa was baptized there, in the Name of the Father, and of the Son, and of the Holy Spirit. And just like all of the baptisms I have witnessed in beautiful, warm Episcopal churches, her baptism was dignified and right and good. But I must confess, there is something in me that likes the humility of the horse trough setup. There’s no facade there. There’s nothing there to cover up who we are before God. There is something there very much like Jesus stepping into the muddy, unassuming waters of the Jordan River.

What makes a baptism a baptism is not the fancy clothes we wear, or the flowers, or the little shell, or even the horse trough or the accordion-tamborine duet in the background, it is the Spirit of God, descending on us like a dove, and the heavens being torn apart as God speaks, this is my daughter, this is my son. Reality is ruptured; the normal order and pace of life are upended; the Divine breaks through into our lives. And God reveals what has always been there: We are loved by God, not a remote, faroff God, but a God that is closer than our very breath, closer than our own heartbeat.

I met a man on an airplane once when I lived in northwest Arkansas. He was probably around 60 or so, and he was in charge of plants for Wal-Mart. All of the plants for all of the Wal-Marts in the United States. He would travel around, meet farmers, and decide which plants to sell where, which vendors to use, and negotiate prices. I have never met anyone more passionate about plants. He was headed out to some farm in Georgia to talk to someone about some new strand of zucchini. He asked me what I did, and I told him I was a student, and that I was heading to seminary the following semester. Surprisingly, his eyes lit up. “I was baptized two years ago,” he said. “I spent 50-some years never knowing God–or even myself.” “Oh,” I replied, “What do you mean?” He beamed. “I just never felt at home,” he said. “I never felt I was good enough or that I had done enough. Now, I know God loves me; I can feel it.”

He went on: “Growing up, I never knew why I liked plants. No one in my family even had a garden, but I had a green thumb. Now I know why. I helped my church start a community garden to help the poor last year. We gave vegetables to 500 families. I’m starting to help other churches do the same thing.”

That man’s baptism was the beginning of a new life. It was the beginning of his ministry, just like Jesus’ baptism. That man on the airplane had discovered that we cannot fully see ourselves until we see ourselves as God sees us–as beloved children baptized into the death and resurrection of Jesus Christ. And then it all clicked: he understood why he had always had such a passion and talent for gardening. It clicks for us, too. Like that man, in our baptisms, we throw ourselves on Jesus Christ, and to our surprise, we find he has always been there beside us, right there in the middle of the muddy water of our lives.

So, today, we celebrate Jesus’ baptism, and our own.  We celebrate endings and beginnings.  Because baptism is an ending. It is the ending of an old life. In baptism we die into Christ’s death; we are buried with him. We die to sin. We die to living to ourselves and for ourselves. We renounce the evil powers of the cosmos, the systemic powers of injustice and oppression, and our own personal sin. We acknowledge that we can’t do this on our own; we need help. We need God, and we need the Church.

But when we die, we are also raised. We are raised into the life of Christ, into the very life of God. We are invited to be living members of Christ’s body and heirs of God’s eternal kingdom. Our human nature, the human nature Jesus Christ took on, is healed and restored. We are adopted as beloved children of God. So baptism is a beginning, too. A glorious, miraculous beginning of the rest of our life with God.

The following is the English transcript of a sermon preached for Spanish Holy Eucharist on the feast of St. Ignatius of Antioch, October 17, 2017. It was preached at the Chapel of the Apostles in Sewanee, TN. 

For the video of the sermon, click here. 

Today we remember Ignatius of Antioch, bishop and martyr. Ignatius is best remembered for his letters to churches in Asia Minor and to a fellow bishop, Polycarp, on his way to his death in Rome, accompanied by ten Roman soldiers whom he called his leopards.

His letters reveal a person deeply committed to the proclamation of the Gospel and his vocation as bishop. Like St. Paul, he warns his flock against false teachings. He tells them to remember what he taught them, the apostolic heritage he passed on to them. For example, he warns against factions that disregard or deny Jesus’s humanity. Ignatius tells his people to be deaf to such talk. He exhorts them to remember that in the Incarnation, Jesus Christ, born of Mary, really ate, drank, breathed, and died. And he was truly raised from the dead by God the Father.

And although we do not know the details, this is the faith for which he would die, torn apart by the teeth of wild beasts in an arena.

“Very truly, I tell you, unless a grain of wheat falls into the earth and dies, it remains just a single grain; but if it dies, it bears much fruit,” says Jesus in today’s reading from St. John. But this saying makes us uncomfortable. We do not want to be martyrs or even think about our deaths. Instead we want to turn this into an easier metaphor about how we live with one another. We immediately want to tame this saying, to leash it, to cage it, to make it less demanding.

But this is not what Jesus means. Jesus has just entered Jerusalem to loud Hosannas. Jesus knows he is going to die. And here, in the middle of St. John’s gospel, Jesus is ending his public ministry and beginning his farewell discourse. Jesus, in this chapter, says his hour has come, and that his soul is troubled. This saying is about dying. Dying on the cross. Dying in the teeth of wild beasts.

Like Jesus, St. Ignatius can lay down his life. St. Ignatius can only die faithfully because he lived faithfully. He can meet his death, because day after day he died to sin, and he witnessed the love of God for us in Jesus Christ. In the face of such love, death is nothing and Christ is everything.

SERMON
THE FEAST OF THE HOLY TRINITY
St. Thomas’ Episcopal Church
Springdale, AR
Readings: Genesis 1.1-2.4a, Psalm 8, II Corinthians 13.11-13, Matthew 28.16-20

In the Name of God: Father, Son, and Holy Spirit. Amen.

Today is Trinity Sunday, the first Sunday after Pentecost. The Easter lilies, long out of bloom, are now a distant memory. Christ has died, been raised by God, and ascended into heaven to sit at the right hand of the Father. And as Jesus promised, the Comforter, the Holy Spirit, has indeed come among us, to guide and sustain us. We have entered the longest season of the Church year–the season after Pentecost–during which we will focus on the teachings of Jesus during his earthly ministry. And to kick things off, we have the Trinity, the cornerstone of the Christian faith and life, the mystery of one God in three persons: Father, Son, and Holy Spirit.

The Trinity is eternal, from everlasting, greater than and outside of time itself. In our reading from Genesis this morning, we see the Holy Trinity at work (Gen 1.1-2.4a). God the Father is at work in creation, guiding creation from nothingness to fullness, from a formless and dark void to light, to evenings and days, to seas and dry lands, to green vegetation and flowers and animals of all kinds, and finally to us, a people created in God’s very creative and life-giving and loving image. And we read that all of this is brought forth from the Word as creation is spoken into being. The opening to John’s Gospel reads, “In the beginning was the Word, and the Word was with God, and the Word was God” (Jn 1.1). And it is this very Word, eternally begotten of the Father, God from God, Light from Light, true God from true God–this Word will become incarnate from the Virgin Mary, to share our human nature, to live and die as one of us, and to reconcile us to God our Father. And we also see the Holy Spirit at work: A wind from God is sweeping over the face of the waters (Gen 1.2). This wind is the ruach, the breath, the spirit of God that was hovering, brooding over this creation-to-be. This is the wind we heard about last week, the Comforter Jesus had promised when he ascended to the Father: “When the day of Pentecost had come, the disciples were all together in one place. And suddenly from heaven there came a sound like the rush of a violent wind, and it filled the entire house where they were sitting” (Acts 2.1-2). This is the unpredictable fire of God that birthed the Church and catches us up in wonder still.

We see the Trinity at the baptism of Jesus in the Jordan. Jesus, the Son of God, the Word of God, comes to the Jordan to be baptized. And as he is, the heavens are torn open, God the Father speaks, “This is my Son,” and the Holy Spirit descends on him like a dove (Mk 1.9-11; Mt 3.16-17; Lk 3.21-22).

And it is this God in Trinity that Paul speaks of today as he blesses the people of Corinth: “The grace of the Lord Jesus Christ, the love of God, and the communion of the Holy Spirit be with all of you” (2Cor 13.13). This is the only instance where Paul blesses his readers with such an overt and clear trinitarian blessing, invoking all three persons of the Trinity.

Of course, the doctrine of the Holy Trinity as we understand it would come later, as faithful people wrestled with the testimony of the Scriptures and the Christian life, and as God revealed the mystery to them.

The word “revealed” seems to me to be of the utmost importance. The Trinity is not something clever that the Church came up with on its own. No, it is God’s revelation to us about who God is: One Being in three persons whom we have come to know and love and worship: Father, Son, and Holy Spirit. The One God testified to in the Scriptures, and the three persons also testified to in the Scriptures.

Long ago, our Church fathers and mothers wrestled with the question of the Holy Trinity. They structured our creeds around it. So everyday at the Daily Office when we say the Apostles’ Creed, we say, I believe in God, the Father…the Son…the Holy Spirit. And every Sunday at worship, we say the words of the Nicene Creed: We believe in one God, the Father… the Son… the Holy Spirit. And it is in these creeds and the Athanasian Creed that the Church has articulated what has been revealed to us about the Trinity by God.

What more shall we say? Truly, there is nothing left to say. Sometimes we have this urge to say something new, but there is nothing new under the sun–certainly nothing new about the Holy Trinity. And it is this impulse to say something new that can sometimes get us into trouble. Sometimes, even for the best reasons, we might say something outside the bounds of Christian doctrine–something other than what God has revealed to us.

Maybe you have seen that viral video on the Internet about St. Patrick and the Trinity? St. Patrick, the patron saint of Ireland, tries to explain the Trinity to a couple of seemingly backward Irishmen with crazy red hair. St. Patrick turns to metaphor: the Holy Trinity is like a clover with three branches but one stem, or like water that can be liquid, solid, or gas, and on and on. It’s so hard to explain a mystery of heavenly things with earthly things–you can’t explain it! So at each turn the Irishmen respond, no Patrick! Seemingly there is nothing Patrick can say except the words of the Athanasian Creed: “We worship one God in Trinity, and Trinity in Unity, neither confounding the Persons, nor dividing the Substance.” “Oh,” the Irishmen respond, “Why didn’t you say so, Patrick?”

What more shall we say, aside from the creeds, these gifts from God to Christ’s Church? Perhaps, as one English theologian wrote, silence is our safest eloquence for we mortals before the deep mystery of who the infinite God is (see Richard Hooker in Book I of Laws, cited in Rowan Williams, Anglican Identities (Lanham: Cowley Publications, 2003), 25-26).

So what more shall we say? Nothing new. But something true. Something ancient. Something divinely revealed to us that is so much greater than us.

We believe in one God: the Father, the Son, and the Holy Spirit.

And having confessed it by faith, we live it.

When we are baptized, we are adopted as children of God the Father and as brothers and sisters of Christ Jesus. We are invited to live in, to participate in the Life of the Trinity. And the Life of the Trinity is Love–boundless, endless, depthless, infinite Love of such generosity and vastness that it is constantly being poured out completely, yet it is never depleted by a single ounce. It is an unconstrained Love that breaks every barrier, that will never leave us, even as we pass from life to death. It is this Love that we receive, and it is only from this Love that we can love others. We can only love because God loves.

I was at a camp once talking to some young children, maybe around seven or eight years old, about the Trinity. There was one girl there who did not want to be there–or so it seemed. She sat there in some far-off la-la land, braiding her hair, fidgeting with her socks, untying and retying her shoes, messing with an ant that happened to be crossing the sidewalk. But then again, we were talking about the Trinity. Maybe she just wasn’t interested? She wouldn’t be the first child to find the subject confusing, or boring, or dull, or whatever. After we had all talked for awhile, I passed out some markers and paper, and we tried to draw a symbol for the Trinity. Some children drew venn diagrams of three overlapping circles; others drew triangles a lot like the triangle in the window above our altar here. The girl jotted something down, then turned the paper over and began to draw horses. Well, okay. You can’t win ‘em all. After a period of time we shared our drawings. I hesitated when I got to the little girl, not wanting to embarrass her. But she immediately stood up and brought her drawing over to me. She had drawn a big circle with four small, parallel lines in it. “Will you tell me about your drawing?” I asked. “Sure,” she replied. “The big circle is God, and inside it is the Father, the Son, the Holy Spirit, and me.”

The Father, the Son, the Holy Spirit, and me. I don’t know what Athanasius or Augustine or Aquinas would have said about her drawing. But in ten seconds of minimal effort she had got to a deep mystery. The infinite God invites us into God’s very Life of Love.

Our own image of the Trinity here at St. Thomas’ does this in a different way. In the window above the altar, you can see a triangle within a circle, with each corner of the triangle representing a person of the Godhead. But coming from the heart of that triangle, from the heart of God, is a cross reaching down to us, bringing us to God. And that’s fitting, for the way of living in the Life of the Trinity is the Way of the Cross.

In our baptisms we are buried into this Life of Love, and then each day we take up our cross to live into this Life of Love all the days of our lives. We live in a Love that is overflowing and abundant, sacrifices all and never asks for anything in return; a love that is unconditional, complete, brave and bold and sure and vulnerable and open and willing to take a risk on you.

We can get a glimpse of what it looks like to live into this Life of Love in the eyes of the old woman who lives alone on the corner now, a block over from the old courthouse–maybe you know someone like her. Her name is Lucille, and she’s well into her nineties. She couldn’t be taller than four foot eight. Her husband died several years ago now. She has lived in the same house for well over fifty years; it’s foundation could use some work, the gutters could be cleaned, the shutters repainted. When you pass by, you’ll see her gardening, watering her ferns, sometimes even mowing her yard, or just sitting on the porch with a cup of coffee or a glass of lemonade. Or maybe you’ll pass by late at night or early in the morning; she doesn’t sleep much anymore. She’ll be kneeling at her couch with her Bible open, praying to God her old friend, calling out the names of her loved ones. Or you might see her on the square downtown, holding a basket of peanut brittle that her church sells to raise money. “The peanut brittle lady is here,” the courthouse employees will tell one another. They’ll go find her, usually sitting on a bench in the shade. These strangers will go for a bag of homemade peanut brittle, a bargain at $3. But they’ll get the warmest smile; they’ll hear her quiet laugh; they will hear her say, “I just love God so much, I love my little church, and I love you”; they’ll get a weak and frail yet powerful hug full of love. They will feel as if they have known her forever, even though they have just met; she’ll remind them of their grandparents and parents. The strongest and most hardened people will melt. They get more than they bargained for. They get a dose of the love of God.

I go by and see her when I’m in town. I drive up and see her sitting on her porch. Whenever she sees me coming, the biggest smile spreads across her wrinkled face. “I just love you so much,” she will say with a little laugh. “You know, I’ve been praying for you.” And you know she has, because you can feel it deep within your soul.