Sermon 6 in a Lenten Series on The Lord’s Prayer

The 5^th Sunday of Lent March 17, 2013

Text: Matthew 6:11

The Rev. Dr. Ross M. Wright

I have some good news and some bad news for you about the Lord’s Prayer. The good news is that may go to the Father every day for the forgiveness of our sins. Jesus invites us to pray: “Father, forgive us our debts.” The Presbyterians have got it right – “forgive us our debts” is a stronger translation than “forgive us our trespasses.” I doubt that many of you have been guilty of trespassing recently. But debt? – well, that’s a different matter. We know what it feels like to be in debt. Or to get slammed with a late payment fee because we forgot to make the monthly payment on the credit card; or because we overdrew our bank account. We know how it feels when we’ve borrowed the next door neighbor’s yard tool and forgotten to return it – or worse, lost the stupid thing – and suddenly run into the neighbor. Jesus calls our sins “debts” because we have incurred a penalty, an obligation, from which we may be released by the Father’s forgiveness.

May I remind you of the words of pardon that I declared to you in the Ash Wednesday service at the beginning of Lent:

Almighty God, the Father of our Lord Jesus Christ, who desires not the death of sinners, but rather that they may turn from their wickedness and life, has given power and commandment to his ministers to declare and pronounce to his people, being penitent, the absolution and remission of their sins. He pardons and absolves all those who truly repent, and with sincere hearts believe his holy Gospel.¹

“He pardons and absolves.” And he does so freely and generously, asking no payment from us. He made satisfaction for our debts through Christ, who offered himself once for all as a ransom for our sins.

Every day, we may come back to the Father and throw ourselves upon his mercy for the sins and offenses of the previous day. In the fourth petition of the Lord’s Prayer, we ask God for our daily bread. In the fifth, we ask for the forgiveness of our debts. The sequence of petitions is important: just as God invites us to pray for our daily bread, so he invites us to pray every day for forgiveness. Forgiveness is as important to life as food. Forgiveness is the oxygen that sustains our souls. Give us our daily bread. Forgive us our debts. These two simple requests, “Give” and “Forgive,” express our deepest needs: food for the body, forgiveness for our souls.² The Father delights to give them both. That’s the good news.

What about the bad news? The bad news is that the Father forgives us in the same measure that we forgive those who have sinned against us. God shows us mercy to the degree that we show mercy to others. A sobering thought, is it not? Think about what we are asking for here. When we pray, “Father, forgive our debts,” we are asking God not to be angry with us, not to hold against us all the stupid, hateful, selfish things we have done, said, or thought since the last time we prayed the Lord’s Prayer. When we pray, “as we forgive our debtors,” we are asking God to do all that in the same measure that we forgive others for all the stupid, hateful, and selfish things that have been done to us.

You have probably heard the old bromide, “Be careful what you pray for – you may get it.” I have always dismissed that as a silly platitude. But it takes on a new and sobering meaning in light of the fifth petition of the Lord’s Prayer. If we ask God to forgive us in same measure that we forgive others, he may answer the prayer. He may give us exactly what we ask. John Calvin, with characteristic soberness, puts it like this. For God to forgive is to cancel the guilt or the penalty for transgression. For us, forgiveness means “willingly to cast from the mind wrath, hatred, desire for revenge, and willingly to banish to oblivion the remembrance of injustice.”³ Then he adds: maybe we shouldn’t pray this prayer: “For this reason, we ought not to seek forgiveness of sins from God unless we ourselves also forgive the offenses against us of all those who do or have done to us.”

Does Jesus really mean that being forgiven by God is in direct proportion to our forgiving others? Apparently so. Remember the parable of the unmerciful servant.⁴ He was forgiven an astronomical debt – a Barney Madoff-size debt – more than he could pay off in a life time. But he turned around and grabbed a fellow servant by the throat and demanded that repay a small debt – a pittance – lunch money. When the master heard it, he had the first servant thrown into prison until he paid the last nickel. Jesus concludes the parable: “So my heavenly Father will also do to every one of you if you do not forgive your brother or sister from your heart.”

But wait a minute: Does God’s mercy to us wait upon our mercy to others? If the mercy of God is conditional on the basis of our forgiving others, then how can I stand here week after week and offer God’s pardon? How can we speak of God’ unconditional love for us sinners, including the fact that in certain cases, we are unable or unwilling to let go of the bitterness we feel toward those who have hurt us or those we love?

Listen: There is nothing we can do to earn God’s mercy. On the cross, Jesus made satisfaction for sins, once for all. There is nothing we can add to that. To try to add anything to the righteousness of God is to cheapen it. What is our righteousness compared God’s? Filthy rags, Isaiah says.⁵ The debt has been paid. The sentence has been served.

But forgiveness involves a lot more than payment of a debt or cancelling of punishment. Forgiveness means the restoration of a relationship. When the father forgives the prodigal son, he not only ignores the fact that the wastrel has gone through the family inheritance; he throws his arms around the boy.⁶ His love pours forth to his son and the son’s love pours forth to his father. The penalty has been remitted, and on that basis, the relationship between them is restored.

And this restoration happens when the son comes to his senses. He remembers the father’s house, he goes home, and he humbles himself before his father: “‘Father, I have sinned against heaven and before you; I am no longer worthy to be called your son’.”⁷ Repentance includes a deep sense of our unworthiness. It is the realization that before God, we have no ground to stand upon – except the mercy of God. Is it possible to be filled with contrition for our sins while we are fulminating about how we have been slighted by others? Is it possible to confess our unworthiness while we are lusting for revenge? Can we plead with God to do for us what we refuse to do for others? Certainly it is theoretically possible. There are reports from Roman Catholic priests in Bolivia of members of the Medellin drug cartel coming to the confessional booth to ask for forgiveness for the contract murder they just committed and to ask for protection as carry out the next job. But of coruse, that is not genuine confession.⁸

The grace and mercy of God are unconditional. And yet, the Father shows us mercy in the measure that we show mercy to others. If we admit that our forgiving is imperfect, then how are we to make sense of this apparent contradiction? The answer, I believe, is that forgiving someone who has hurt us and being forgiven by God for our bitterness are two sides of the same reality.

C. S. Lewis wrote a series of letters about prayer to a friend he calls “Malcolm.” Letters to Malcolm address a range of problems and questions that come up in the life of prayer. One of them begins:

I really must digress to tell you a bit of good news. Last week, while at prayer, I suddenly discovered – or felt as if I did – that I had really forgiven someone I have been trying to forgive for over thirty years. Trying, and praying that I might. When the thing actually happened – sudden as the long-for cessation of one’s neighbor’s radio – my feeling was: “But it’s so easy. Why didn’t you do it ages ago?”⁹

But of course, forgiving someone is not easy. As Lewis goes on to say, before it happens, it is one of the hardest things in the world – seemingly impossible. What I love about Lewis’ letter is the honesty. It may take decades to come to the place where we really forgive someone – it took him thirty years. And all that time, he was praying for the grace of God to forgive. We arrive at such a breakthrough by wrestling in prayer. We pray for ourselves, that we may be released from bitterness and the desire for vengeance. We pray that we not exaggerate the sins of others and minimize our own. And we pray for the person we need to forgive. Jesus has commanded us to pray for our enemies. If you have a weekly schedule of prayer, you might consider including some time each week to pray for your enemies and those you need help to forgive. “Through the medium of prayer,” John Stott writes, “we go to our enemy, stand by his side, and plead for him to God.”¹⁰ It is impossible to pray for our enemies over time and not feel differently about them.

“Forgive and you shall be forgiven” sounds like bargaining with God. But when the breakthrough comes, we discover that forgiving the person’s cruelty and being forgiven for our bitterness are the same thing. Forgiving and being forgiven are two names for the same reality.

“Father, Forgive our debts as we forgive our debtors.” I began by referring to the good news and the bad news about the Lord’s Prayer. But whenever a discord has been resolved, whenever forgiveness has been offered and received, it is the Father himself who has done it.¹¹ The Father draws alongside us and enables us to forgive at the same time that he forgives us. And that is nothing but good news.

Sermon 5 in a Lenten Series on The Lord’s Prayer

The Fourth Sunday in Lent March 10, 2013

Text: Matthew 6:11

The Rev. Dr. Ross M. Wright

This is the fifth in our Lenten series of sermons on the Lord’s Prayer. We are considering each of the seven petitions in the prayer, and asking: What does the Lord’s Prayer teach us about who God is? How is the Father there for us? We are also asking what the Lord’s Prayer teaches us about the language prayer. The Lord’s Prayer is much more than a formula which we rattle off or a rote prayer to use when praying with others. Rather, the Lord’s Prayer provides a framework for our prayers. Each of the seven petitions is like a door, which opens into a room in which we discover an infinite variety of situations and people to pray for. We should never say: “I can’t pray,” or “I don’t know how to pray.” We can pray. The Lord Jesus has given us these seven petitions by which we may address the Father, and he commands us to use them.

This morning, we come to the fourth petition, “Give us today our daily bread.” As I pointed out in an earlier sermon, the first three petitions of the Lord’s Prayer are called the “Thou petitions,” because they are about God: “Hallowed by thy name…. Thy kingdom come. Thy will be done.” The Lord’s Prayer is first and foremost about God’s honor, God’s concerns, God’s projects. But when we put God’s concerns first, we discover that the Father is concerned about us – about our needs, our concerns, and our projects. Our Father invites us to bring our cares to him the way a child instinctively turns his parents for help.

But what exactly does Jesus mean by the phrase: “daily bread”? What are we asking when we ask the Father to “Give us today our daily bread”? Jesus spoke the Aramaic language. The Aramaic word translated “daily” has several shades of meaning. It can mean “necessary,” as in: “Give us what is necessary to sustain our lives.” Or it can mean, “today’s bread,” or “bread for the coming day.” We could paraphrase it: “Father, grant that we may lie down to sleep, not with” a false sense of security, based on all that we have accumulated, but “free from anxiety or despair, knowing the coming day has been provided for.”¹

So when we ask our Father for our daily bread, we are asking God to take care of our most basic needs: food to sustain our lives and a roof over our heads. But note: Jesus invites us to pray for life’s “necessities, not luxuries.”² To pray for daily bread is to pray that we may be content with life’s necessities. According to John Calvin, Jesus invites us to pray for daily bread in order to “bridle the uncontrolled desire for fleeting things, with which we commonly burn without measure.”³ Jesus teaches us to ask “only as much as is sufficient for our need from day to day, with this assurance: that as our Heavenly Father nourishes us today, he will not fail us tomorrow.”

God’s provision is like the manna that the Lord’s provided for the Israelites when they truly did not know where their next meal was going to come from. The promise implicit in the fifth petition of the Lord’s Prayer is that we may go to God for our basic needs, confident that, as did for Israel, God will provide for us abundantly. But like the Israelites, if we try to hoard what God provides, it goes bad, like overripe fruit or vegetables that you forgot to take out of the frig. To pray for daily bread is to be content with life’s necessities, knowing that our Father is a generous God who delights to provide for us.

One way to understand what it means to be content with life’s necessities is to is to think about the opposite of contentment, namely, gluttony. Gluttony is one of the seven deadly sins in Catholic teaching. Unfortunately, the words “glutton,” and “gluttony” have taken on a rather narrow meaning. They conjure the image of the corpulent hedonist, elbows on the table, slobbering over a pile of a pile of picked over bones. But really, we’re talking about something more subtle. Gluttony is having an unhealthy relationship to food and drink, whatever form it takes. Gluttony is using food and drink to fill an ache, to find comfort, or to assert control.

In The Screwtape Letters, by C. S. Lewis, Screwtape, the senior devil, writes Wormwood, the junior devil, an entire letter on the subject of gluttony. The gist of the letter is that gluttony is not always about excess. There is such a thing as gluttony of Delicacy: not wanting too much, but wanting everything “just so.” For the benefit of anyone who hasn’t read the Screwtape Letters and to remind us all of the setting, Wormwood has been assigned the duty of luring away from God a young man who has just been converted to the Christian faith. Screwtape refers to the convert as “the patient” and to God as “the enemy.”

My dear Wormwood,

The contemptuous way in which you spoke of gluttony as a means of catching souls in your last letter, only shows your ignorance. One of the great achievements of the last hundred years has been to deaden the human conscience on that subject, so that by now you will hardly find a sermon preached or a conscience troubled about it in the whole length and breadth of Europe. This has largely been effected by concentrating all our efforts on gluttony of Delicacy, not gluttony of Excess.⁴

As an example of the gluttony of Delicacy, Screwtape directs Wormwood’s attention to “the patient’s” mother:

… her whole life is enslaved to this kind of sensuality, which is quite concealed from her by the fact that the quantities involved are small. But what do quantities matter, provided we can use a human belly and palate to produce querulousness, impatience, uncharitableness, and self-concern? Glubnose has this old woman well in hand. She is a positive terror to hostesses and servants. She is always turning from what has been offered her to say with a demure little sigh and a smile “Oh please, please … all I want is a cup of tea, weak but not too weak, and the teenisest weeniest bit of really crisp toast.” You see? Because what she wants is smaller and less costly than what has been set before her, she never recognizes as gluttony her determination to get what she wants, however troublesome it may be to others. At the very moment of indulging her appetite she believes that she is practicing temperance.⁵

Glubnose clearly has her, Screwtape continues, because “her belly now dominates her whole life.” She exists in what Screwtape calls “the ‘All-I-Want’ state of mind.” All she wants is the perfect egg, the perfect toast, and when she doesn’t get it, her disappoints and ill-temper wreck friendships and create hell on earth.

At bottom, gluttony is discontent. We feel that the good gifts that the Father gives us are not enough. Of course, this condition is not limited to food and drink. We can have an unhealthy relationship to clothes, or power, or knowledge. All of these are good gifts that God delights to give us. But unhealthy excess and unhealthy delicacy are danger signals. Something is wrong. What hurt or fear or angst has a grip on us when we are no longer content to receive what God freely gives, because we crave more?

Gluttony is a sign that we are crying out for the living God. Jesus Christ is real food. To be fed by him is to have all that we need. To receive the sacrament in faith is to be filled with his presence, so that “he may dwell in us and we in him.”⁶ To hear the word of God is to be fed, not with crumbs but with the best food from the buffet.

Every time we ask our Father for our daily bread, we acknowledge that he is the source of all life. He created us. He sustains us. The fact that we are breathing right now is because he is the author and giver of life. Asking our Father for daily food sets the relationship on the right footing. I think of the table blessing based on Psalm 104:

The eyes of all look to you, O Lord, to give them their food in due season

You open wide your hand and satisfy every living creature upon the earth.

To sum up, when our Lord invites us to pray, “Give us today our daily bread,” he invites us to call upon the Father for all of life’s necessities: food and shelter, protection from danger, and any harm to body or soul. With this fifth petition, we commend to God our nearest and dearest: house and property, wife and children. It is also an invitation to pray for all who lack life’s necessities: the poor, the hungry and thirsty, the naked, those imprisoned, the deranged and all who “work or watch or weep this night.”⁷ It is to pray for Jesus Christ, who is living bread, and for his word, which is real food.

Thy will be done on earth as it is in heaven

10 evlqe,tw h` basilei,a sou\

genhqh,tw to. qe,lhma, sou(

w`j evn ouvranw/| kai. evpi. gh/j

Let your kingdom come;

Let your will be done,

as in heave, also upon the earth.

v. 10b is the third “thou” petition. Can it be understood apart from 10a, or is it a gloss, an interpretation? For the kingdom to come, the will of God would need to be done here as there. If that is the case, what does b add to the petition? The kingdom of God in and of itself could be impersonal; a thing or concept. By linking kingdom with God’s will, we are in the realm of thought, pre-meditation; action. The wooden translation of the Greek is an attempt to suggest the emphasis on heaven – that is the primary direction, then from there to earth. The verse seems to assume that a heavenly realm exists parallel to this world order, and that things happen there.

Sermon notes

Brown, Colin E., editor. Dictionary of New Testament Theology, Volume 3. Grand Rapids: Zondervan, 1979, 1018 – 1023.

In NT, thelo and thelema, the latter is the more theologically significant term, referring generally to the will of God. thelo can describe general willing, desiring, finding pleasure, liking.

In Paul, both frequently refer to the will of God, and especially “the real source of the whole event of salvation in Christ. Christ’s act of self-sacrifice for the sake of our sins is necessarily kata to thelema tou thou, and is thus the act of God himself (Gasl. 1:4).” (1019). Eph. 1:5, 9, 10, where we are called to sonship “in accord with his comprehensive saving will” as part of the disclosure of the mystery of his saving will.

Romans 9:14ff. difficult: how are the will of God and of man related? It is not human volution that matters in the salvation plan but the will of God, who presses into service both the willing and the obdurate. By reference to the stumbling block, Paul makes sense of “the way of the Gospel in the present time.” Forbearance to those who oppose his will in view of his using this opposition to achieve his will. The goal of his will is that all come to be saved (1 Tim. 2:4).

Re 1 Cor. 15:38 (on resurrection body: God gives to each its own body according to his will). The Jew thinks he understands the will of God through the law. Paul: Christ is the daybreak of a new creation or new age, in which the will of God (WG) can be discerned only by the renewal of the mind; finding out what is well-pleasing to God. In Rom. 1:10 and similar passages, the will of God does not obliterate or invalidate human will but is validated by it. Paul makes plans according to his will, trusting that God’s will is able to place him in a different situation which will demand him to alter his own plans.

Romans 7: the fragmented human will, which deep down wants what is good but the result of actions is evil.

thelo/ema prominent in John: Jesus does the will of the Father; those appointed by the divine will are saved; the wind blows where it wills; salvation impossible as human possibility; but possible as divine possibility. Used rarely in Synoptics to refer to the will of God, except in Matthew; more often, refers to doing the will of God in the ethical sense. But there is only one all-embracing will of God. The LP and parallel/related passages not “acquiescent accommodation to some unalterable power, but as an active affirmation which helps to realize the divine willing (his saving plan) and to lead toward the goal.”

Barth, CD III/4, 102ff.

The God who wills “to work and create, to fight and win, to rule and triumph” does not will to do so alone… What He wills … is that His cause, which as such is prosecuted by him and is completely in His free and mighty hand, should not only be His but also ours. He does not will to be God without, or to exist as such. He calls us to his side. He summons us to make His purposes and aims the object of our own desires … drawing us first to His side and then when we are set there allowing us to identify our desires with His. (104)

 

We may pray, because we are commanded, because we must.

On Christ’s office as our Mediator and Intercessor, Barth refers to Calvin’s 1542 catechism.

Question:

comment et à quel titre nous pouvons avoir la hardiessse de nous présenter devant Dieu, veu que nous en sommes que par trop indignes? The decisive answer is that we have this command and this promise that we may and shall call upon God in the name of Jesus Christ. By placing ourselves behind and beside Him, the freedom to address God with our requests is given us at once: car nous prions comme par sa bouche d’autant qu’il nous donne entrée et audience et intercede pour nous. But this means that He, Jesus Christ, is properly the One who prays.

 

It is He – Jesus Christ through the Spirit, the Spirit as the Spirit of Jesus Christ – who makes good that which we of ourselves cannot make good, who brings our prayer before God and therefore makes it possible as prayer, and who in so doing makes it necessary for us. For Jesus Christ is in us through His Spirit, so that for His sake, praying after Him as the one who leads us in prayer, we for our part may and must pray, calling upon God as our Father. (94)

Schweizer: the petition is not meant fatalistically; God’s will is done as men carry it out; it will be fulfilled perfectly only on the day when every knee will bow; “but it is carried out all the time by the action of his people, even those who serve without knowing it.” The assumption is that “the universe as a whole it is taken for granted that everything follows its own proper course, under the control of an ordering power; this is allow to be realized among men, who violate this order. To be human means to accept responsibility under God’s mandate and according to his will (Gen. 1:26- 28); and we are praying here simply that man will beceoms human.” On the order: God’s concerns first, then ours: “precisely when we concern ourselves with God – his name, his Kingdom, but most of all his will – will our needs be met, and met better than by any amount of concern for ourselves.” (153).

Saturday morning – raw writing

Most unhappiness in life comes from clash of wills – or at least, must disrupted relationships. Whose will dominates? My way or the highway.

Calvin

God will be king in the world when all men submit to his will. Two wills of God: secret, by which he controls all things and directs to them to their end” He uses even our resistance; here, “that to which voluntary obedience corresponds” – so, doing on earth as do the angels in heaven. To do so means to renounce desires of flesh and deny ourselves b this prayer awe are formed to self denial so God may real uas according ot his decision. . . so he may create new minds and hearts in us.

The Fourth Sunday after the Epiphany

February 3, 2013

Text: 1 Corinthians 13:1-13

The Rev. Dr. Ross M. Wright

Let me begin by saying that it is a lot easier to preach a sermon about love than it is to love. I could preach an eloquent sermon from First Corinthians 13 then snap somebody’s head off or go home and check out emotionally for the rest of the day – close the door, read the New York Times, and withdraw from the family.

It is much easier to be an expert on Paul’s letters to the Corinthians, to be at home in the text of the Greek New Testament, than it is to love.

Being ordained does not make you a more loving person. Clergy are supposed to be loving people, right? – a professional nice guy. But ordination, like all religious activity, is just as subject to the corrosion of human stupidity, selfishness, self-aggrandizement as any other human activity.

All of us face a challenge when hearing a sermon from First Corinthians 13: We have heard it so many times at weddings, we think we already know what it says. Elena Vassallo, a chaplain at the University of Chicago, writes:

When 1 Corinthians 13 crosses my path, I don’t greet it with a great deal of enthusiasm. Beautiful, lyrical, significant though it may be, all I need to hear is: “If I speak in the tongues of men and of angels” and I’m gone. I am usually deep in the midst of my own thoughts by the time the speaker reaches “Love is patient and kind.” This passage is lost in the netherworld of those things we hear too much; for me it is clichéd, trifling and lifeless.¹

We may think we know what love is. We may think we already know what this passage is about. But I want to urge you not to check out. Don’t assume we know what Paul is saying or even what love is.

Because First Corinthians 13 is frequently read at weddings – especially at weddings at which the couple has a tenuous relationship with the church – there is a common perception that it is a nice text. But these words about love should make us deeply uneasy. They tell us that “the most important thing about being a Christian is also the hardest thing, and the most demanding.”² These words are not indented to soothe us – no, they are to jolt us into awareness that there is a power beyond us, a force that can transform everything. Love creates a new situation.

Listen again to vv. 3-4 from J. B. Philip’s paraphrase, The New Testament in Modern English:

This love of which I speak is slow to lose patience – it looks for a way of being constructive. It is not possessive: it is neither anxious to impress nor does it cherish inflated ideas of its own importance.

Love has good manners and does not purse selfish advantage. It is not touchy. It does not keep account of evil or gloat over the wickedness of other people. On the contrary, it is glad with all good men when truth prevails.³

Notice that Paul does not say: This is what it means to be loving; or: This is what a loving congregation looks like. That’s how I would have done it. No, Paul speaks of love as if it has a life of its own. It is a power, a force; it has a will. Love accomplishes things. He speaks of love almost as if it were a person. And of course, in the deepest sense, love is a person. One way to understand this passage is to substitute the name of Jesus for “love:” Jesus Christ is patient. God the Father is love. The Lord does not keep an account of wrongs.

Notice also that Paul describes love, not by saying what it is, but what it is not. Love is not impatient … It is not possessive… It is neither anxious to impress nor does it cherish inflated ideas of its own importance… It is not touchy… It does not keep account of evil or gloat over the wickedness of other people

Why describe love this way? Because there are the very qualities that we lack. We are often impatient – with ourselves, with our lot, with other people, and with God. There are plenty of occasions when we are unkind. We’re basically a pretty righteous lot, according to the world’s standards; and it is particularly the righteous who are tempted to be unkind, unsympathetic. It is possible to do the right thing the wrong way – or motivated by self-righteousness rather than by love. There are plenty of occasions when we are jealous – of other peoples’ success or of what they have. There are plenty of occasions when we insist on getting our own way. In fact, assertiveness is the new virtue. When it is said about someone: She knows what she wants and how to get – it is usually meant as a compliment.

The love Paul is talking about comes to us from beyond ourselves. It is not our possession. Love is the spiritual bond among believers in a congregation. And the congregation, is one place where we learn what it means to love and to be loved.

As we get older, there is a temptation to withdraw into ourselves and into our world. We talk about “‘our marriage, our children and grandchildren; our retirement accounts’.”⁴ We realize that it is not as easy to form lasting friendships as it was when we were young. And the friendships that nurtured us in the past are more difficult to sustain, because we have moved away or moved apart in our thinking. As we got older, we become more set in our ways. Because of the hurts we have sustained, we may find that we are less open, less willing to make ourselves vulnerable.

The love within the congregation acts as a counter force to this temptation to withdraw into ourselves and into our private world. Love brings us out of loneliness and into vital contact with new people.

We must learn to love this way. So we might as well settle in for the long haul. But here is one thing we can do every day. We can pray to be more loving. Love is a quality to seek, something we can pray for. So I leave you with two prayers for greater love, one by Martin Luther, the other by William Temple, former Archbishop of Canterbury:

Dear Father in heaven, for the sake of your dear Son Jesus Christ grant us your Holy Spirit, that we may be true learners of Christ, and therefore acquire a heart with a never-ceasing fountain of love.⁵

 

O God of love, we ask you to give us love: love in ouir thinking, love in our speaking, love in our doing, and love in the hidden places of our souls; love of our neighbors, near and far; love of our friends, old and new; love of those whom we find it hard to bear with us; love of those with whom we work, and love of those with whom we take our ease; love in joy, love in sorrow, love in life and love in death; that so at length we may be worthy to dwell with you, who are eternal Love. Amen.⁶

The Third Sunday after the Epiphany

January 27, 2013

Texts: Luke 4:14 – 21; 1 Corinthians 12:12-32a

The Rev. Dr. Ross M. Wright

Then Jesus, filled with the power of the Spirit, returned to Galilee.

And opening the scroll with the words of the prophet Isaiah, he said: “The Spirit of the Lord is upon me…”

Have you ever met a person who was filled with the power of the Spirit? How would you recognize such a person? And if you did, would you want to spend time with him or her? And what does it mean to be spiritual? Is the Dali Lama a spiritual person? Was Abraham Lincoln? What about John Paul II?

Spirituality is generally valued by people in the church and without. According to religious surveys, one of the fastest growing groups in our country today are those who identify themselves as “spiritual but not religious.” They are not members of any church. They shun “organized religion.” But they consider themselves spiritual or they would like to be. What exactly are we seeking in this age of spirituality?

One way to answer these questions is to look at Jesus. Our reading from the Gospel of Luke presents Jesus as the man of the Spirit. As he comes up from the waters of baptism, the Holy Spirit falls upon him, ordaining for his ministry. Following this experience, he returns to Galilee – and he is different. People notice that he is “filled with the power of the Spirit.” What is it about him that is different? Something has changed – his family and friends notice it. When invited to give the sermon in the synagogue where he grew up, the first words out of his mouth are: “‘The Spirit of the Lord is upon me…’.”

What does it mean for the Son of God to be filled with the Spirit of God? Saint Augustine offers an intriguing answer to that question by pointing to the relationships between God the Father, God the Son, and God the Holy Spirit. The Holy Spirit, Augustine observes, is “‘the love by which the Father loves the Son, and the Son loves the Father’.”¹ In other words, the Holy Spirit is the loving communion between Father and Son. “This relationship [of mutual self-giving between the Father and Son, is the power “that propels Jesus into action.”² This intimate relationship, established at Jesus’ baptism, sustains him in his three-year mission. The Son truly loves his Father and constantly seeks to do what pleases him. The Father adores the Son and is constantly there for him. The Sprit is the love of the Father for the Son and of the Son for the Father.

So the Holy Spirit is a loving spirit – love himself, we might say. And here we begin to see what true spirituality is. One indication of the Spirit filled life is love. True spirituality is about relationships among people; about loving action, in which people give themselves to another. To be filled with the Spirit is to find the resources and the courage to continue to love, against all odds and in the face of opposition, danger, and disappointments.

The 2010 movie, Of Gods and Men, is a testimony to true spirituality. The movie tells the story of a community of Trappist monks who lived and served in the little Algerian village of Tibhirine. In 1996, they found themselves “engulfed by the drama of the ongoing Algerian Civil War.”³ In an event that was highly publicized at the time, seven of them were assassinated by a militant Islamic group.

In the early part of the movie, we see how their life together is grounded in daily prayer, and particularly in the Eucharist. And we see how they have given themselves over to care for the people in the community. “One of their older members is a physician who operates a clinic and generously dispenses a meager supply of medications and provides wise counsel to the many who line his doorstep.”⁴ The monks truly become part of this mostly Muslim community. “[They]sell their honey at the street market, locals work alongside them on their farmland, they are invited to neighborhood family celebrations.”⁵ Because they are clear about their Christian faith, they are deeply respectful of Islam. One scene shows then attending service, led by the village Imam, who reads from the Koran.

But suddenly, the peace of the village is destroyed by fundamentalist Islamic militants who savagely murder a group of Croatian day laborers. “[The monks’] Muslim neighbors are terrorized by brutal and random killings. A villager’s niece is murdered for not wearing a headscarf.”⁶ The Algerian officials warn the brothers that they are in danger – they are likely the next targets – and urge them to leave. The tension mounts when members of the terrorist group show up one night and at gun point demand medicine for a wounded comrade. Should they move to another village in a safer area? Or should they stay, knowing that may very well not make it out of the village alive? After an intense period of prayer and discernment, they decide to a man to stay: these are the people they love; they have given themselves over to them. But they prepare for what they know may happen by writing letters ahead of time to their family members and friends.

The film ends with the reading of one of the letters, by Father Christian. In it, he begs all who read it not to impute “collective guilt on Muslims or Algerians.”⁷ He testifies to his love for people and the country where he died. He writes:

I have lived long enough to know that I, too, am an accomplice of the evil that seems to prevail in the world around, even that which might lash out blindly at me.  If the moment comes [for my life to be taken], I would hope to have the presence of mind, and the time, to ask for God’s pardon and for that of my fellowman, and, at the same time, to pardon in all sincerity him who would attack me.⁸

His letter ends with words addressed to his yet unknown attacker:

And to you, too, my friend of the last moment, who will not know what you are doing.  Yes, for you, too, I wish this thank-you, this “A-Dieu,” whose image is in you also, that we may meet in heaven, like happy thieves, if it pleases God, our common Father.⁹

I do not want to give the impression that they were heroes or to paint a rosy picture of the community. The film is clear that the monks come to their decision only after great struggle. They long for intimacy and relationships with their families, and at times, these longings seem to conflict with their vocation to serve the community of Tihbirine. Initially, they are not of a common mind about whether to stay or to leave. The stress of living in danger creates tensions in the community. Because the doctor treats several of the wounded militants, the Algerian army suspects them of sympathizing with the movement. But in the end, the monks in Tihbirine witness to the power of the Holy Spirit to enable us “to live deeply and courageously and lovingly in great adversity.”¹⁰ This is a mark of true spirituality. This is what happens when people are filled with the Holy Spirit.

The Spirit of God who empowered Jesus and the monks of Tibhirine to give themselves in sacrificial love is given to us through baptism.

For in the one Spirit we were all baptized into one body – Jews or Greeks, slaves or free – and we were all made to drink of one Spirit. (1 Cor. 12:13)

The same Spirit has been poured out on us. Baptism by with water the outward and visible sign of Baptism in the Spirit, which is how we are incorporated into Christ and into his church. What is a spiritual person? “Every true Christian is a ‘spiritual person’.”¹¹ We have our standards or expectations of what a spiritual person looks like or acts like. No one can say “Jesus is Lord,” except by the power of the Holy Spirit. Of course, anyone can say the words. But anyone who says sincerely, “Jesus is Lord” lives in the force field of the Holy Spirit.

When we think of spirituality, we tend to think of individuals who are filled with the Spirit. But in Paul’s letters, the emphasis is not on individuals, but on the congregation. True spirituality is not primarily an individual possession but a gift to the community as a whole. As a gathering of believers, we are “in Christ,” and Christ lives in us. We are the Body of Christ: Christ’s physical presence on earth. To each of us is given a measure of Christ’s gift: each member of the body is given gifts to be used in cooperation with others for the well-being of the body of Christ as a whole. The church is not “an elite of spiritual persons.”¹² It is a charismatic community: a Spirit-baptized community, in which each individual has distinctive gifts, but we are all one, because we are a body: the Body of Christ.

The distinctions which normally divide people “are swallowed up by the dynamic communion-in-love which we ‘drink’ in baptism.”¹³ May God help us to drink deeply of this Spirit so that we may love courageously and give ourselves to others, serving the world for the sake of Christ.

First Sunday after the Epiphany

January 13, 2013

Text: Acts 8:14-25

The Rev. Dr. Ross M. Wright

Prayer:

Come, Holy Spirit, come.

Fill the hearts of your faithful people.

Come like the wind and cleanse

Come as fire and burn.

Convict, convert, and consecrate us

For thy great glory and for our great good. Amen.

The unifying theme of this service baptism, and specifically, baptism in the Holy Spirit. When the Holy Spirit shows up, things change. People change. Congregations change. “The gift and presence of the Holy Spirit is the greatest and most wonderful thing which we can experience.” Why? Because the Spirit of God is “God himself, the creative and life giving, redeeming and saving God.”¹ Where the Holy Spirit is present, God is present. And where God is present, we become whole. We experience life in its fullness.

Jesus is baptized in the Jordan River as a grown man – Baptist style: John the Baptizer holds him as his entire body is submerged in the cold waters of the river. As he comes up, the Holy Spirit falls on him. It seems happen in a moment. And there is something physical about it – the Spirit comes upon him like a dove. What exactly that means is a mystery. But one thing is clear: the appearance of the dove is a sign that God the Father is pouring out his Spirit on his beloved Son.

Peter and John lay their hands on a group of believers in Samaria, and the Holy Spirit falls upon them, too. We don’t know exactly what happened when the Spirit came on these people, but whatever it was, it was visible, it was powerful, and it changed them. So powerful that a magician, Simon, asks if he can buy whatever Peter is dispensing.

Who is the Holy Spirit? What does it mean to pray for the coming of the Holy Spirit? as in the prayer I just offered? – “Come, Holy Spirit, come, and fill the hearts of your faithful people.” What happens when the Holy Spirit shows up? To answer these questions, I want to reflect with you for a few minutes from the epistle reading from the Acts of the Apostles:

And when the apostles who were in Jerusalem heard that Samaria had accepted openly the word of God, they sent Peter and John, who went down and prayed for them that they might receive the Holy Spirit; for [the Spirit] had not yet fallen on them; they had only been baptized in the name of the Lord Jesus. Then Peter and John laid their hands upon them and they received the Spirit.²

When we hear the word “Samaritan,” it conjures up a host of positive associations. We think of a Samaritan as someone who performs acts of kindness and mercy. Ministries that care for the down and out are happy to adopt the name, “Samaritan,” as in our own Samaritan House. But for Peter, John, and the first believers, there was no such thing as a good Samaritan. The Jews considered Samaritans ethnic half-breeds. You will remember that in the fourth chapter of John’s Gospel, the Samaritan woman at the well says to Jesus, “Jews and Samaritans have no dealings with each other.”³ If you were a Jew, you wouldn’t a Samaritan to show up at a party or, God forbid, a synagogue service.

Several years ago, I attended a wedding at which a Samaritan made an embarrassing entrance, in a manner of speaking. When Lynda’s cousin was married, one of the readings was from the First Epistle of John, chapter four: “Beloved, let us love one another, because love is form God … In this is love, not that we loved God but he loved us.”⁴ It is a lovely passage and entirely appropriate for a wedding. Unfortunately, the reader was a young man in his late teens or early twenties, and obviously an inexperienced lector. When he saw “John” and chapter 4, he figured he figured the reading was from the fourth chapter of John’s Gospel, where the Samaritan woman makes an appearance. So, he steps up to the lectern, and begins confidently: “A reading from John 4: ‘And Jesus said: “”Go find your husband; and she said: “I have no husband.” And Jesus said, “You are right to say: I have no husband, because you have had five husbands, and the one you have now is not your husband”’.” Awkward silence. The rector rushes over to the lectern – rustle of pages – the lector starts over: “A reading from First John, chapter four.”

When the Jerusalem apostles hear that “Samaria has received the word of the Lord,” they were likely skeptical. So they sent an official delegation, led by John and Peter, to check it out. It was a bold move. Sending an apostolic delegation from Jerusalem to meet a delegation in Samaria would have been on the order of the Knesset sending a delegation to meet with representatives of Hamas on the West Bank. It was an even bolder move for Peter and John to lay their hand on the Samaritans, because touching a Samaritan constituted ritual defilement. There is an element of irony that John was one of the two who prayed for the Samaritan believers. Previously, when a Samaritan village had refused to receive a visit from Jesus, John had asked: “‘Lord, do you want us to command fire to come down from heaven and consume them’?”⁵ Now, he is praying, not for fire to come down and consume them, but the Holy Spirit to come upon them.

At his ascension, Jesus said: “You will receive power when the Holy Spirit has come upon you; and you will be my witnesses in Jerusalem, in all Judea and Samaria, and to the ends of the earth.”⁶ The Samaritans’ openness to the word of God is the first instance of the gospel reaching non-Jews. The Jerusalem church needed assurance that the Samaritans’ faith was real. The Samaritans need assurance that the Jewish leaders would accept them, that the gospel would “close the chasm” between the two ethnic groups.⁷ One sign of the presence of the Spirit is openness to believers from other ethnic backgrounds and other Christian denominations. The church in China is a powerful witness to the power of the Spirit of God to create truly ecumenical fellowship of believers. After the Cultural Revolution, believers in China began to emerge from hiding into public life. When they did, there were no longer Methodists, Baptists, Episcopalians, and Presbyterians. No – there were only members of the one Church of Christ. And the church in China has grown rapidly. No one knows for sure how large it is, but somewhere between 40 and 60 million.⁸ The experiences of shared persecution served to break down the denominational barriers that so often divide us.

Now, there is an interpretive problem in this passage that has troubled Bible readers for eons. The existence of believers in Samaria was the fruit of a preaching mission by another of the apostles, Philip. As a result Philip’s preaching, accompanied by healings and exorcisms, a number of Samaritans confessed their faith in Christ and were baptized. Now, in nearly every other New Testament passage, baptism and the receiving of the Holy Spirit go together. For the early church, it would have been unthinkable for a person to be baptized in the name of Jesus but lack the Spirit; or to be “part of the community without having the Spirit which made community possible.”⁹ So, why did the baptism of Philip lack the gift of the Spirit?” Most mainstream interpreters believe that it has something to do with the advance of the Christian mission into gentile territory. More importantly, most argue that this passage provides no It was important to have the recognition of the apostles in Jerusalem. But there is no basis here for a two-step process of church membership: baptism, followed by confirmation. Will Willimon points to the “unified patterns of baptism and laying-on-of-hands … “baptism, the laying-on-of-hands, and the reception of the Spirit constituted a unified action by the church (2:38; 19:5-6).”¹⁰

Willimon makes a strong case. But, it is important to remember that nearly all of the descriptions of baptism in the New Testament are adult baptisms. Our baptismal practice is radically different, because in the Episcopal Church, along with Lutherans, Presbyterians, Romans Catholics, we baptize infants. Now obviously, an infant does not display signs of the Spirit’s activity. We baptize on the basis of promise: the promise that the Holy Spirit promised at baptism will bring the child to adult faith; the promise of the parents and sponsors to raise the child in the knowledge and love of the Lord.

So in a way, the Samaritan Pentecost, unusual as it was, it corresponds to our current baptismal practice, in which people are frequently baptized into the name of Jesus without any accompanying signs of the Spirit. It points to the need for something other than the rite of baptism itself. There is sign of baptism, and there is the thing signified: the manifestation and movement of the Spirit in a believer’s life.

At your baptism, you were sealed with the Holy Spirit. Now, as adults, we are to pray for the coming of the Holy Spirit. We pray that we may become alert the power and presence of the Spirit in our lives and in our congregation, as in the prayer written especially with baptism in mind:

Come, Holy Spirit, come.

Fill the hearts of your faithful people.

Come like the wind and cleanse

Come as fire and burn.

Convict, convert, and consecrate us

For thy great glory and for our great good. Amen.

At his baptism, Jesus received the Holy Spirit: the power of God that equipped him to do his mission; that Spirit which led him into unbroken fellowship with the Father; a Spirit of supplication and prayer; a Spirit of boldness and of compassion. All of the qualities that are the most striking about Jesus are manifestations of the Spirit of God in him. And now, the one who received the Spirit breathes out the Spirit on the church. Think of like the action of the risen Christ with the apostles on Easter Sunday night. He appears to his disciples, breathes on them, and says: “Receive the Holy Spirit.” And this Spirit a spirit of mission. He continues: “As the Father has sent me, I send you.”¹¹

The Spirit of God is at work among us. We have been baptized with the promise of the Spirit. In a moment, I pray for the Holy Spirit to descend upon the bread and wine, so that they may be for us the Body and Blood of Christ. Our role is to continue to pray for the coming of the Holy Spirit, afresh in ouir lives and in our congregation, every day.

Only God the Holy Spirit can bind us together in lasting and Christ-centered way [sic], and only God the Holy Spirit can give us the words we need to make Christ truly known in our world. So we must go on praying hard with our people that the Spirit will bring these possibilities to fruition as only he can.¹²

The Feast of the Epiphany

January 6, 2013

Text: Matthew 2: 1-12

The Rev. Dr. Ross M. Wright

The theologian Reinhold Niebuhr wrote in his memoirs that he didn’t like to go to church on Christmas and Epiphany because of the sermon. It’s not that I don’t like sermons, he acknowledges: I preach every Sunday except Christmas and Easter. No, the problem is that the events of Christmas defy explanation. At moments like, the preacher must become a poet.¹
Niebuhr’s observation is particularly appropriate this morning, as we consider the visit of the magi. Who are these mysterious astrologers from Persia (modern day Iran). What does their visit to the Christ child mean to us? To answer these questions, I have decided to enlist the help of a poet, T. S. Eliot. In Eliot’s poem, “Journey of the Magi,” one of the magi describes what it was like to make the journey to Bethlehem. Eliot invites us to see the event through the eyes of one of this man. Now, poetry is meant to be enjoyed – poems are not sermons. But, Eliot’s Christian faith is informs his poetry, and I believe that this poem offers a window into the biblical text and into the good news. Kathy Lehmann will read it for us. And then I will offer some comments, in the hopes that it will draws us into the mystery of the magi.

Journey of the Magi

 

‘A cold coming we had of it,

Just the worst time of the year

For a journey, and such a long journey:

The ways deep and the weather sharp,

The very dead of winter.’

And the camels galled, sore-footed, refractory,

Lying down in the melting snow.

There were times we regretted

The summer palaces on slopes, the terraces,

And the silken girls bringing sherbet.

Then the camel men cursing and grumbling

And running away, and wanting their liquor and women,

And the night-fires going out, and the lack of shelters,

And the cities hostile and the towns unfriendly

And the villages dirty and charging high prices:

A hard time we had of it.

At the end we preferred to travel all night,

Sleeping in snatches,

With the voices singing in our ears, saying

That this was all folly.

 

Then at dawn we came down to a temperate valley,

Wet, below the snow line, smelling of vegetation;

With a running stream and a water-mill beating the darkness,

And three trees on the low sky,

And an old white horse galloped away in the meadow.

Then we came to a tavern with vine-leaves over the lintel,

Six hands at an open door dicing for pieces of silver,

And feet kicking the empty wine-skins.

But there was no information, and so we continued

And arrived at evening, not a moment too soon

Finding the place; it was (you may say) satisfactory.

 

All this was a long time ago, I remember,

And I would do it again, but set down

This set down

This: were we led all that way for

Birth or Death? There was a Birth, certainly,

We had evidence and no doubt. I had seen birth and death,

But had thought they were different; this Birth was

Hard and bitter agony for us, like Death, our death.

We returned to our places, these Kingdoms,

But no longer at ease here, in the old dispensation,

With an alien people clutching their gods.

I should be glad of another death.²

Who are these mysterious visitors who suddenly appear in Jerusalem, asking: Where is the one who has been born king of the Jews? They are probably astrologers: they search the stars for omens, signs of the times. They do not know Yahweh, the Lord of Abraham, Isaac and Jacob. They do not read the Bible. They are from the East, that religious realm beyond Judaism and Christianity. They are the most unlikely people to come to Christ. Yet, there they are – drawn ineluctably by the star.
Eliot helps us see them as real guys, living in the real world. Unlike crèches, which romanticize the wise men on their camels, Eliot shows us that camels are difficult animals. Likewise the camel men: “cursing and grumbling, and running way, and wanting their liquor and women.” Through a series of brief images, the poem evokes an atmosphere of hardship. We see and feel and smell what it would have been like for the magi:

And the night-fires going out, and the lack of shelters,

And the cities hostile and the towns unfriendly

And the villages dirty and charging high prices

Eliot also draws on the common experience of stetting out on a trip or some adventure which sounded great when first thought of it, but when things turn out differently than we expected, we find ourselves thinking: Why in the world did I ever think that this was a good idea?

In the second section, the mood changes abruptly. This is signaled visually, by the dawn light – previously, they had been travelling at night, in the dark. After traveling in the mountains, they suddenly descend into a tropical valley, smelling of lush vegetation. There is a dreamlike quality to this scene: a water wheel beats the darkness; a white horse gallops in the meadow. It is as if we have suddenly entered an enchanted world.

But this world, too, has its hard edges. And here, Eliot does something really brilliant. Though a series of images, the narrative points forward to the crucifixion: the three trees on the sky; the men in the tavern throwing dice – and they are playing for 30 pieces of silver; the feet kicking against the empty wine skins. Within the narrative framework of the poem, this kicking refers to Herod’s murderous intentions. But it also brings to mind St. Paul, kicking against the pricks, and to Jesus, in the death throws on the cross. Thus, the passion is embedded in the Christmas story. Luke does something of the same thing when he describes the old man Simeon, holding Jesus in his arms and saying to Mary and Joseph: “and a sword will pierce through your own souls, too.”³ The hope of the world comes through sacrificial suffering.

The poem’s climax is in the last section. The speaker, now and old man, is remembering all that had happened so many years ago. “. . . were we led all that way for Birth or Death?” Here, Eliot explores the theme of life and death more explicitly. Humanly speaking, birth and death are opposites; they negate each other. But in this mysterious land of grace, birth is like a death, and death leads to our new birth. Eliot probes the meaning of crucifixion for the narrator and for us:

. . . this Birth was

Hard and bitter agony for us, like Death, our death.

Why “our Death?” Because, he says, once we witnessed this Birth, we realized that we could never again “feel at home in this old dispensation.” Once we have had a vision of the living Christ, life is never the same again. We have seen something that has changed us – or better, someone who has made an impression on us, left his imprint on us. We are being drawn by Christ, who is our life, our destination, the joy of the whole earth. That is why we are never really at home in “the old dispensation,” “For present form of this world is passing away,” as Paul says.⁴

I hope that Eliot’s poem has led you into the mystery of the magi, or at least, allowed you to catch a glimmer of the mysterious light that radiates from this event, down through the ages into our present. The magi are unlikely people to come to Christ. Perhaps there is someone here this morning who identifies with them: you feel that you do not know much about the Bible, or about the faith; the Lord remains a mystery to you. When you hear talk about a personal relationship with Jesus Christ, you feel like you are standing on the outside, peering in. To anyone here this morning who feels like you don’t know much, the Magi are your patron saints. Its okay to admit what we do not know. God may be leading you by a star – not literally, but by some experience or friendship or something you are reading that seems to be pointing you to Bethlehem. But remember: the star took the magi only so far. Eventually, they came to the place where they had to consult Scriptures, and that meant being introduced to the community of God’s people – the church.

“Many will come from East and west and sit with Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob in the kingdom of heaven.” (Matt. 8:11). It takes a lot of faith to believe in Jesus’ vision of the kingdom of heaven. It seems like Christianity and non-Christian traditions have never been farther apart. Even fellow Christian believers refuse to sit at table with each other, refuse to receive communion together. Here is a different vision: of people from non-Christian religions and no religions and philosophies of every time streaming into the banquet table of the kingdom of God with Jesus as host at the table, and a place at the table for all.

It is easy to become discouraged by people’s disregard for the Christian faith. Sometime you wonder: What it will take for my spouse or child or co-worker or neighbor or friend to become interested in Jesus Christ? There are so many barriers; so many distractions. Church attendance is trending down. People are suspicious of organized religious life and institutions generally. People don’t listen to sermons any more. All of these things are true. But there is another factor at work: the Church of Jesus Christ is Christ’s body, his presence in concrete. “Epiphany” means “manifestation” – revealing something that is currently hidden; opening eyes that are occluded. The church of Jesus Christ, the congregation is God’s chosen means for revealing or manifesting Jesus Christ. Where Christ is worshiped; an ineluctable light shines; his presence beckons.

Burial Office and Holy Eucharist

St. Paul’s Episcopal Church, Ivy, Virginia

The Rev. Dr. Ross M. Wright

December 28, 2012
We have just heard two touching, personal tributes to Charlie as father, grandfather, and husband. Many of you are far more qualified than I am to speak about his many accomplishments as a physician and teacher. I am here to talk about Charlie as a believer and a follower of the Lord Jesus Christ, because that is how I have come to know him.
Charlie showed up one Sunday morning in the summer of 2007. When he introduced himself and engaged me in conversation in the narthex, I confess that I found him intimidating. He was a big man, with big accomplishments, strong opinions, and lot of confidence. I remember thinking at the time: We’ll probably never see him again. Why would he want to come to little old Good Shepherd, a congregation that can offer him nothing in the way of cache or prestige? But he came back. Then he brought Lucy. He became a lector. Before long, Charlie and Lucy became beloved members of the Good Shepherd family.

It didn’t take long before I understood why Charlie came back. Charlie was a man of God. He was a man of prayer. He loved the word of God and the worship of The Episcopal Church. He had a rich spiritual life, nourished from his childhood by weekly attendance at the Lord’s Table. After his first surgery, over two years ago, Charlie invited me into this part of his life. While he was in the hospital, recovering, he revealed a different side of himself than he presented when we first met: not the teacher and confident care deliverer, but one receiving care and acutely aware of his vulnerability. I discovered his interest in contemplative prayer. Did you know that Charlie had a life-long interest in the Spiritual Exercises of Ignatius of Loyola? The Exercises are a series of meditations designed to help practicing Christians give themselves wholly to the service of God. In a four week cycle, they explore a) sin and its consequences; b) the Kingdom of Christ; c) Christ’s suffering and death; and d) the risen and glorified Lord. Not for the faint of heart! In fact, Exercises are part of the preparation for ordination in the Roman Catholic Church.

We have heard a lot about Charlie’s many accomplishments. What the Episcopal Burial Rite says very clearly is that the things which distinguish us from each other in life do not matter that much as we stand before our Maker. At death, all of us stand naked before God, stripped of our accomplishments. What matters is not our accomplishments but the mercy of God. Charlie believed this. Because he was so accomplished, it may not have been immediately apparent the extent to which he truly depended, not on what he accomplished, but on what God accomplished for him through the death and resurrection of Jesus Christ. Charlie was a witness to the resurrection. The sicker he became, the clearer his vision of the kingdom of God. In the end, his faith had a childlike quality – in the sense that the Lord means when he says that no one enters the kingdom of God unless he enters it with childlike trust. This quality of Christian faith is striking in anyone, but particularly in someone as accomplished as Charlie.

In just a moment, we will commend Charlie to the Lord, using these words:

Into thy hands, O merciful Savior, we commend thy servant Charles. Acknowledge, we humbly beseech thee, a sheep of thine own fold, a lamb of thine own flock, a sinner of thine own redeeming. Receive him into the arms of thy mercy, into the blessed rest of everlasting peace, and into the glorious company of the saints in light.

Charlie knew himself to be “a sheep of [God’s] own fold, a lamb of [his] own flock, a sinner of [God’s] own redeeming.” As far as I know, he always believed this. But it became increasingly important to him as he became aware of the gravity of his sickness. He learned with new depth what it means to live and to die “in the hope of the resurrection.” Hope in this sense is not weak resignation, as in the expression: “there’s nothing left but hope,” or “I hope so.” Christian hope is a strong thing – the strongest thing – because it is hope in God, who created us in the first place. It is the “sure and certain hope of the resurrection to eternal life through our Lord Jesus Christ.”

This hope sustained Charlie and Lucy during the long ordeal of the last two years. It enabled him to face into the wind, not flinching before the reality or the gravity of his illness. As he told me after receiving his diagnosis, “This is my terminal disease.” Not that he lost his zest for life or his interest in people or work. He spoke honestly about how difficult it was to retire at the point of his greatest productivity. He relished his time with his family and delighted in the gift of getting to know his grandchildren. But as his disease progressed, Charlie was being renewed, day by day, as St. Paul writes “Though outwardly we are wasting away, inwardly we are being renewed day by day. We live not for the things seen but things unseen … So we are always confident, knowing that while we are at home in the body we are absent from the Lord. For we walk by faith, not by sight. We are confident, yes, well pleased rather to be absent from the body and to be present with the Lord” (2 Corinthians 5:6-8). Thank God for “the sure and certain hope of the resurrection to eternal life through our Lord Jesus Christ.” Thank God, for his servant, Charlie Johnson, a witness to the resurrection.

Advent and Christmas Preaching 2012

• Barth, Karl. Fifty Prayers. Translated by David Carl Stassen from Fünfsig Gebete (Zurich: TVZ, 2005). Louisville: John Knox Press, 2008.
• Brown, Raymond E. An Adult Christ at Christmas: Essays on the Three Biblical Christmas Stories – Matthew 2 and Luke 2. Collegeville, MN: Liturgical Press, 1978.
• ________. A Coming Christ in Advent: Essays on the Gospel Narratives Preparing for the Birth of Jesus – Matthew 1 and Luke 1. Collegeville, MN: Liturgical Press, 1988.
• Bultmann, Rudolf. The Gospel of John: A Commentary. Translated from Das Evangelium des Johannes, 1964 by G. R. Beasley-Murray, R. W. N. Hoare, and J. K. Riches. Westminster: Philadelphia, 1971.
• DuBose, William Porcher. The Soteriology of the New Testament. New York: Longmans, Green: 1923.
• Ellis, E. Earle. The New Century Bible: The Gospel of Luke.1966. Revised Edition, Grand Rapids: Eerdmans, 1981.
• Lewis, C. S. Miracles. New York: Macmillan, 1947.
• Long, Thomas C. The Senses of Preaching. Atlanta: John Knox Press, 1988.
• Solomon, Andrew. “Anatomy of a Murder-Suicide.” In The New York Times, Sunday, December 23, 2012, Sunday Review, 1; 6-7.
• Smith, Margaret D. “Response.” In The Reformed Journal, December 1989, 10.
• Sunday’s Readings, The Living Church, Advent 4, December 23, 2012.
• http://www.heqigallery.com/about.html - Dr. He Qi, formerly a professor at the Nanjing Union Theological Seminary, was the first among Mainland Chinese to earn Ph.D. in Religious art after Cultural Revolution.

The light shines in the darkness, and the darkness did not overcome it.

Christmas Eve

December 24, 2012

Text: John 1:1-14

The Rev. Dr. Ross M. Wright

As I’m sure you’ve noticed by now, we are not reading St. Luke’s famous account of the shepherds keeping watch over their flock by night. The passage was read at the pageant last week, and by this point in the Christmas season, you’ve probably heard it countless times. I hope you’re not too disappointed. The story of Jesus’ birth is recorded only in the Gospels of Matthew and of Luke. St. Mark doesn’t describe the nativity at all – he plunges into the story of Jesus with the Lord’s baptism as an adult in the Jordan River. St. John tells the Christmas story, but in a very different idiom. In the Gospel of John, there is no manger, no shepherds, no wise men. John begins with story of Jesus, not at his birth in the manger, but at the creation of the world: “In the beginning was the word [the logos], and the logos was God, and the logos was God.”

Admittedly, John’s version is not as good a story. You can’t construct a nativity scene based on what we know from the Prologue to John’s Gospel. But the advantage of John’s approach is that it brings the reality of the Christmas story from the past to the present. John brings the story from the manger in Bethlehem to life in Richmond, to your life and mine. He presents the message of the nativity in the present tense. For example, instead of describing the heavenly light that shined round the shepherds (or “shone” as the English say), John speaks Christ as the light that shines here and now, the light which illumines our existence and shows us the way: “the true light that enlightens every man.”

… in him was life, and the life was the light of all people.The light shines in the darkness, and the darkness did not overcome it.

When John wrote those words, the news of the coming of the light was as real to him as any event you and I read about in The Richmond Times Dispatch. In John’s Gospel and his epistles, he is talking about a something that the he has seen and experienced. This is personal witness: it throbs and pulsates with a sense immediacy that comes from having encountered God first-hand. This sense of immediacy is particularly evident in his first epistle:

That which was from the beginning, which we have heard, which we have seen with our eyes, which we have looked upon and touched with our hands, concerning the word of life … we proclaim also to you … This is the message we have heard from him and proclaim to you, that God is light and in him is no darkness at all.¹

But here we face a problem. John’s message that Jesus is the light of life has been passed from one generation to the next so many times and for so many years that it may have lost its urgency and sense of immediacy for us. Can it become news for us again? The statement: “Jesus is the light of the world” sounds good; it looks good on Christmas cards. But what does it mean? It is just an abstract statement, just words – until he becomes our light – until we encounter the light as John and his community did.

When John says that “in Christ is life, and the life is the light of all people,” he is talking about power, energy – that creative power which brought the universe into being and which continues to sustain it. It is “the power that creates life.”² The “light of life” is what enables us to orient ourselves to the presence and life of God rather than to grope in the dark.

Some years ago, Bishop Alden Hathaway, former Bishop of Pittsburgh told Lynda and me about a mission project in Uganda in which his son was involved. Light Up Uganda is devoted to providing light for villages without electricity.³ The mission installs lighting devices that don’t require electricity, in some cases, using barefoot power. Alden said: “You can’t imagine how light has changed these people’s lives.” In the village where his son was working, there is a clinic, where a nurse visits periodically to provide basic medical care. Alden described what it was like for that community the first time nurse was able to deliver a baby at night. “The light shines in the darkness, and the darkness did not overcome it.”

Jesus Christ is more than a device that lights up objects so that we can see them better – as important as that is. The light of Christ is the brightness itself which illuminates and lights up our lives. The logos is God’s personal light, shining into our darkenss, so that we can find ourselves and our way in this world, especially when we have gone off track. To walk in the light of God is to know that there is a place for us in this world; and this knowledge, this confidence, is liberating, because it sets us free from the anxiety that saps our energy and takes the joy out of life.⁴

By coming here tonight, we are opening ourselves to that mysterious light that has come into our world. But we cannot grasp this mystery on our own. We need God’s help to see this light with our own eyes – so that it is not just a nice story about light coming to shepherds, but light coming to us, to our darkness. What good is the Christmas message unless its light breaks into our darkness and confusion?

Of course it’s not just about us. Christ is the light of the world. He is light for all people. His light illuminates every situation this night where there is darkness, confusion, and despair. Tonight, there are people all over the world in danger, like our men and women in the armed forces, far from home. All over the world, there are people who are grieving, like the families who lost loved ones in Newtown. The light of God is supporting them, too. This is the good news of Christmas.

The most edifying thing I have read this week about the massacre in Newtown is not from a preacher or a theologian, but from an investigative reporter, Andrew Solomon, in Sunday’s New York Times. Mr. Solomon spent eight years interviewing people in Columbine, Colorado, following the school shooting there in 1999. He spent a great deal of that time with the parents of Dylan Klebold, one of the two high school students who attacked the school:

I began convinced that if I dug deeply enough into their character, I would understand why Columbine happened – that I would recognize damage in their household that spilled over into catastrophe. Instead, I came to view the Klebolds not only as inculpable, but as admirable, moral, intelligent and kind people whom I would gladly have had as parents myself. Knowing Ron and Sue Klebold did not make it easier to understand what had happened. It made Columbine far more bewildering and forced me to acknowledge that people are unknowable.⁵

Solomon concluded that there are two fundamentally different responses by the people who are affected by such a tragedy. One group looks for an explanation in the killer (bad parenting, psychotic tendencies). The other group admits that we will never understand someone like Adam Lanza and understands that “the tragedy as embraces everyone, including the families of the killers.” It is this second group, he says, who in Colorado “were able to move toward healing, while those who fought grief with anger tended to be more haunted by the events in the years that followed.” Of course, anger is natural response, he quickly adds, “but trying to wreak vengeance by apportioning blame to others, including the killer’s family, is ultimately counterproductive.”

As an example of someone who understands that the tragedy embraces everyone, Solomon quotes Robbie Parker, the father of one of the victims. 24 hours after the shooting, Mr. Parker said this to Adam Lanza’s family: “I can’t imagine how hard this experience must be for you, and I want you to know that our family and our love and our support goes out to you as well.” Solomon concludes: “His spirit of building community instead of reciprocating hatred presents humbling evidence of a bright heart.”

“The light shines in the darkness, and the darkness did not overcome it.”

We need God’s help to be open to this light. We easily we cut ourselves off from it, because of “the sleep of indifference … and the nightmares of our passions and desires.”⁶ Things happen to us that cast shadows across our paths. We are like hikers, walking through the woods on a narrow path, constantly in danger of veering off course. This Christmas Eve celebration is an invitation to welcome the light into our lives again and to allow ourselves to be irradiated by this light. It is an invitation to look again to the guiding light of life, so that we are shown the way and given a deep conviction that the way of the Lord really leads somewhere. Whatever darkness we or anyone else may face tonight, we have the promise of God, the Christmas promise: we are surrounded by the mysterious light of God, and the darkness cannot overcome it.