Feast of the Transfiguration (and Holy Baptism)

“Moses and Elijah…appeared in glory and were speaking of his departure, which he was about to accomplish at Jerusalem.”

An explanation is in order. Going back to the 1st Millennium, the Feast of the Transfiguration has been celebrated on August 6th. And our Book of Common Prayer allows this, and a few other midweek feasts, to be transferred to the closest Sunday. It is fitting to celebrate the Transfiguration of our Lord on this special day for Parker and his family. Just as Jesus begins his "departure" to Jerusalem, so it is that today Parker begins a departure of his own.

Today, Mark and Melanie, Nicholas, Russ and Lili, are his companions on this journey. But today Parker picks up another companion, Jesus. And as these few years pass, there will be more and more days when Jesus is his only companion, as he considers the baptismal promises being made for him and whether to make this covenant more fully his own. Be assured that, as our Prayer Book states, the bond established between God and Parker is “indissoluble”: incapable of being dissolved. Trust that wherever Parker is, he will never be alone.

It's even more fitting to celebrate Baptism and Transfiguration together when we consider this "departure" that Moses and Elijah were discussing with Jesus. A journey? Yes, but much more than a journey. To use the Greek word translated as "departure," we can say that they discussing Jesus's exodus. When we think of the Exodus, we think of those marvelous events by which God liberated the people of Israel from their Egyptian oppressors. But that was only the beginning of their departure or Exodus. In our baptismal prayer, we are reminded that it was through the waters of the Red Sea that the children of Israel were delivered out of bondage in Egypt and set by God on a journey.

So it is with Parker, who will pass through his own little Red Sea, and will begin his departure, his Exodus to a land promised by God. That is God's final promise to his chosen people. The first promise is of God's presence. In the years to come, Parker will hopefully know that divine presence just as the prophet Elijah, when he was alone, heard the still small whisper in his heart. For now, we who receive Parker into the household of God must be that still small whisper. Through our love, Parker will hopefully come to know the love of God, without which none of us would have the strength to love at all. Eventually, we will have to let Parker hear that still small voice himself. But not yet.

What is the destination of this “departure” or exodus? Luke makes very clear where Jesus is departing to. Just a few verses later, he writes that Jesus "set his face toward Jerusalem." And a few chapters later in Luke's Gospel, Jesus will cry out, "I have a baptism to be baptized with, and how great is my distress until it is accomplished!" His baptism is his passion, which he will undergo in Jerusalem. All of us on this exodus are searching for passion, that mix of joy and pain that will seize our hearts and persuade us that this gift of life is truly worth living. Those who were saved on Pentecost heard the truth, of their sin and Jesus Christ as the sacrifice for that sin. But it wasn't just a truth that attracted them and led them to be baptized. It was also an experience of God, a passion for God that made sense of suffering and offered greater joys than they had ever known.

No human institution can program that kind of passion. All we can do is make sure that we open as many doors as we can for that passion to sweep in to the hearts of all God's children, 5 or 75. And if you haven't gotten the hint, passion is not the same thing as happy. And “Cowboy” churches wowing children with real horses and singing, "Happy trails to you," aren't the same thing as passion, or the Exodus. When Parker finds the thing for which he is willing to live and suffer, he will have found his passion, and his departure will be complete. Let all the household of God, by our love for him, open to Parker the door through which he will find the passion of the Risen Christ.

Friday, 13th Week of Ordinary Time

Acts 17:16-34

Morning Prayer

I suspect Paul was a little relieved that he got off of Mars Hill, where the Aeropagus was located, with nothing worse than being made fun of. Remember that when I started this series on Monday, I pointed out that by seeming to preach “foreign gods,” Paul was being accused of the same thing for which the Athenians had sentenced Socrates to death. Still, it is sad to see this city, so full of wisdom and cynicism, be so unresponsive to the Good News. Paul may have found a few believers. But clearly, he failed to build a church, a community that would have the power to change the culture of Athens.

But what about us? Where is our Mars Hill? Where do we need to look for the altars to unknown gods as a common base of agreement from which we can then tell the Good News of Resurrection? But most importantly, what barriers are we putting on ourselves and the story we have to tell? That really is the first question we need to ask ourselves before we try to persuade someone else that we actually have good news for them.

For some, there is the Mars Hill of science, where true beauty is found in this world, and the observations of that beauty. Far too many people have heard the message of Resurrection as a rejection of this world, or as a trump card against the death that pervades this world, so that Christians can ignore this world and focus on the next. Paul made it clear that this world is, indeed, beautiful, because God made it so. And the Resurrection of Jesus was not an escape from the physical world, but the beginning of this world’s redemption from death. The Resurrection is for all of us, and we need to look for the sprouts of resurrection all around us, in the beauty of this world, the wonder of life and the mystery of love.

For some, there is the Mars Hill of individual freedom against all the powers of the world that would control us in the pursuit of their agendas. We Americans are very jealous of our freedom, and suspicious of institutions claiming to look out for our good, so long as we accept their version of our well-being. We the Church are more than an institution. We are the Body of Christ, Jesus’s hands and feet, arms and legs, carrying Jesus’s love to those who need it. But we are also an institution, with bills to pay and goals to reach. And we still have a position of privilege in this society that can make us complacent. I remember being at the ecumenical Palm Sunday service this year, and hearing the Preacher complain about there not being enough people there, and all the people who weren’t coming to church, and therefore, weren’t being saved. Perhaps we should ask those people why they don’t come to church, and let their answers sink in, rather than complain about their absence.

Mars Hill is out there. And so is the Risen Jesus, with those who need to hear, not agendas or finger-wagging sermons, but Good News.

Thursday, 13th Week of Ordinary Time

Acts 17:22-34, Part 2
Morning Prayer

Well, it seems Paul had the Stoics and Epicureans with him (or at least not stoning him) for awhile. That is, until he comes to the heart of his message: “He has given proof of this to everyone by raising that man from death!” The response – ridicule: “When they heard Paul speak about a raising from death, some of them made fun of him.” But what exactly, was the source of the Athenians’ shock and extreme skepticism?

In our own time, I suspect that the main source of resistance is the assumption that such a thing is impossible. Our powers of observation have increased so much that it our view of “reality” is often limited by our senses. Only that which can be verified through the senses can be real. And resurrection seems to be unverifiable. Now, in fact, I believe that an objective investigation of the events surrounding Jesus’s death, the empty tomb, and the disciples’ outlandish claims, for which they were prepared to die, actually leads to Resurrection as the most likely cause of the Easter story.

But, this skepticism isn’t the source of the Stoics’ and Epicureans’ scoffing. Remember that the Epicureans believed that the gods, if they existed, had no involvement with this world. So, happiness in this world was the most you could hope for. Stoics believed that divine reason was in all things, and they sought to free themselves of emotion and be in harmony with this divine reason permeating all things. Either way, they believed that this life was it. The Epicureans’ motto was: Live today for you shall be dead tomorrow. For the Stoics, it was: Don’t be seduced by your emotions, or else you will blow your opportunity to find peace and harmony with the divine in this world; then you’ll be dead and far away from this world.

Either way, their only hope for happiness or peace was to be found now. Paul’s suggestion that life continued after physical death, and that happiness was possible after physical death, was the most outrageous thing he could have said. Does that mean that happiness in this world doesn’t matter at all? Does that mean that this life is unimportant? Sadly, I suspect that the answer which too many in the Church have given is, Yes. This body becomes a prison, for which death becomes a release into “heaven,” where we are finally happy. That isn’t what the first Christians meant by Resurrection. More on that tomorrow.

Wednesday, 13th Week of Ordinary Time

Acts 17:22-34, Part 1
Morning Prayer

Today, and tomorrow, we read Paul’s speech to the Athenians. Today, the focus is on the ways in which Paul, and we, can listen to worldviews that sound strange to us, and yet find in them a hint of the God who first revealed himself to Israel, and then through his Son Jesus Christ.

Let’s remind ourselves of Paul’s audience. Yesterday, we read of two schools of philosophy, whose supporters Paul got into an argument with. Boiled down, the Epicureans and Stoics had two fundamentally different understandings of God’s relation to the world. For the Epicureans, if God even existed, he certainly wasn’t involved in any way shape or form with the created world. For the Stoics, God was a force of reason that was in all created things. In short: For the Epicureans God was nowhere; for the Stoics God was everywhere.

What Paul says, basically, is, you’re both right and you’re both wrong. First, he agrees with the Epicureans who found all the shrines in Athens to be a waste of time. The only one that comes anywhere near the truth is the altar “To an Unknown God.” For many people, God is found in mystery. It is easier to say what God is not, than to say what God is. And with the Epicureans, Paul agrees that God cannot be contained within “temples made by human hands.”

But Paul then agrees with the Stoics that the God who made the world is not distant from it. Indeed, God is as close to us as the breath he gave us. "We too are his children,” Paul quotes a Greek poet. And for Paul, that means “all races of people” have the breath of God within them.

Today, too many people assume that science and faith are incompatible, indeed, are mortal enemies. But in fact, it was the Jewish and Christian belief in one God, separate from creation, which made science possible. Why study the cosmos, or the seasonal crops, if they were governed by the will of gods. If the world around us was subject to the arbitrary will of divine beings, then what consistent principles could we deduce from observing the world? Once it was understood that God was separate from the world, then it became possible to observe the world around us, and see consistency, to understand the rules by which physical things exist.

Back to Paul’s speech: he began, not by challenging the Athenians’ errors, but by looking for a common base of agreement. Yes, he will jump off that base in ways that shock his listeners. But before you tell anybody why they’re wrong, it helps that medicine go down easier if you first listen to them, and affirm where they’re right. That was Paul’s “evangelistic” strategy in Athens, and it should be ours today.

Tuesday, 13th Week of Ordinary Time

Acts 17:16-21, Part 2

Morning Prayer

Yes, I know this was the reading yesterday. But Paul’s encounter with the Athenians has much to say to us, and requires a lot of unpacking. Yesterday, I gave some historical background. Before we get to what Paul said in the Aeropagus, we need to understand the thread he needed to run between the two philosophies mentioned in the reading.

You could say that many atheists who believe – wrongly – that modern science has ruled out God’s existence are successors to the Epicureans. Basically, the Epicureans believed that our physical senses were the only source of knowledge and the sole criteria by which we could judge what was “true.” Epicurus himself didn’t go to the trouble of denying the existence of gods, but he adamantly rejected the notion that they had anything to do with the world we live in. He also rejected the concept of immortality. In such a world, pleasure and freedom from fear were the most we could hope for.

Stoics were a little bit like the “New Agers” of today, though probably not as emotional. Unlike the Epicureans, they believed that the divine was the force of reason, which was present in all things. Thus there was a divine law of nature, and of conscience or duty. And the duty of all people was to live in harmony with nature, which as I just said, contained the divine.

When we read Paul’s speech for the first time tomorrow, we’ll see how he tries to draw on each tradition, take what he can affirm from both, while also challenging both with the Good News of the Risen Jesus. Tune in tomorrow. This time, I promise we’ll get to it.

Monday. 13th Week of Ordinary Time

Acts 17:16-21
Morning Prayer

In the Daily office Lectionary, ch. 17 of Acts was read over the weekend. But Paul’s confrontation in Athens is too important, and too deep, to ignore. So, we’ll be spending at least a couple of days on this passage.

Athens. If you have any sense of history, the mere mention of that city should make you pause. Rome may have had the Empire. But their culture – even their gods – were basically borrowed from the Greeks. Greece’s Zeus was Rome’s Jupiter; Greece’s Aphrodite, Rome’s Venus; Greece’s Odysseus, Rome’s Ulysses; and so on. Athens: the birthplace of drama, democracy, philosophy. No city had a prouder intellectual heritage than Athens. So, on the one hand, many “foreigners,” hungry for the food of wisdom, made their way to Athens, and no doubt, brought many different “idols,” and “new” ideas. A very cosmopolitan place, Athens was, always open to the “latest novelty” (v. 21, Rev. Eng. Bible).

On the other hand, Athens was already an old, old city, with the cynicism that can come with old age, and very protective of its heritage. Athens was the city of philosophers that had condemned the father of philosophy to death. And for what crime had Socrates been condemned? Infecting the minds of Athenian youth with “foreign divinities.” So when the Athenians said of Paul, “He would appear to be a propagandist for foreign deities” (v.18, REB), that was no innocent comment, but an accusation. And the Aeropagus was a court. For all the Athenians’ love of new ideas, the cynicism of their old age also made them very resistant to new ideas that hadn’t been vetted through the old wisdom. And in one of the plays written by Aeschylus, the god Apollo had himself dedicated the Aeropagus, telling human beings that when they died, and their blood was spilled, there was no resurrection.

This is Paul’s challenge as he begins to address the Athenians: to present this new idea of resurrection, clearly a challenge to the wisdom of Athens, but in a way that builds on the wisdom that Athens has received, so that Paul will not share the fate of Socrates. Tune in for tomorrow’s episode.

Sermon for the 13th Sunday of Ordinary Time

Ephesians 4:1-16

It was only this week that I realized I had started a sermon series, and didn’t know it. I spent most of last week reading through our three readings from Holy Scripture, trying to decide which one to focus on. It was only on Friday that I bothered to look back at my last few sermons, and realized that I’d been preaching on Ephesians ever since we started reading it four weeks ago. Truly, the Word of God speaks through me, even when I don’t know how fully that is happening. It’s even more important that we continue the journey we’re on with Paul and the Ephesians, because today marks a major transition, a shift in Paul’s dialogue with the Church in Ephesus. In the past 3 weeks, we have soared through the universe with Paul. We’ve heard about our destiny. We’ve heard about reconciliation, and we’ve prayed to know the love of Christ which is itself beyond knowledge.

But the true subject of Ephesians, which we finally get to today, is the Church: what makes the Church “Christian” in any recognizable sense, and how the Church is to continue being the “Body of Christ,” when its members are so diverse and of different viewpoints. In the first three chapters, Paul has been reminding his fellow believers, Jew and Gentile, of what it is that makes them one church, one body united in love. In a sense, Paul has been reminding the Ephesians of first principles. Now, he begins to take these principles and apply them to their everyday practical life as a community as they – and we – continue on that journey.

Three Sundays ago, we heard that God knew us and loved us long, long before we were born, or even imagined by any human being. We also heard that our destiny is in God’s hand, wherever we wander. Yes, we all have wandered away from God’s destiny. But two Sundays ago, we heard that God-in-Jesus will go with us wherever we wander. He is with us, calling us to accept our responsibility for the wrong choices we have made, and also to accept that by his death, he has reconciled us to God and to each other, and has set us back on the right road together. Last Sunday, we heard that all our supposed “knowledge” is like a blindfold leading us off the path again if it is not based on the love of Christ for all. So: all that said, what does all this mean for the Church in Ephesus, or for us? Having laid out the principles, Paul now begins to tell his Ephesian readers what to do with this knowledge.

First: maintain unity while respecting diversity. Note how many times Paul uses the word, “one,” in this one sentence: one body, one Spirit, one hope of our calling, one Lord, one faith, one baptism, one God and Father of all. If we are not one in the Church, how can we claim to have been reconciled to God and each other. And yet, it is also true that God destined all of us for adoption as his children. So, each one of us has a destiny, chosen by God, not human beings. That is part of what Paul means when he says that some in the church have been gifted as apostles, some prophets, some evangelists, some pastors and teachers. Now most of those “job descriptions” seems to fall into the exclusive purview of the ordained ministers of the Church. But all can teach. All can lay hands on the sick for healing. All can spend some time with a lonely person confined to a nursing home, or shut inside their own home. Ministry in the church is shared, not hoarded by the insecure and power-hungry. Particularly as the needs of our elderly parishioners increase, we all will need to make sure that they do not become isolated.

Second: speak the truth, not for the sake of having the "right" answer and proving your neighbor "wrong," but so that in love you both may find the right answer. Now, to be fair, Paul is clear that there is truth and untruth, “trickery, craftiness, deceitful scheming.” Love is not the opposite of truth, but in truth, the two complement each other. For the last three Wednesdays, I’ve been leading a summer bible study playfully called, “The Bible, not a straitjacket.” The serious point I’ve tried to make is that the Bible is not a record of God’s dictation, on which we are to be tested. The Bible is that medium through which God has been engaging us in a conversation for thousands of years. God has spoken. We have responded the best that we could hear in our particular culture and circumstances, to which God has responded again and again.

This Wednesday, we’ll be talking about how that conversation has continued since the Gospels; and how, sometimes, what we thought we had heard God say turned out to be wrong. How do we hold to the truth when our understanding of the truth can be so subject to our presumptions and rationalizations? If you remember nothing else today, please remember this. If you think your neighbor is wrong, make sure you know why your neighbor is wrong before you tell them. And always remember that any “truth,” which is not spoken in love is untrue.

Well, it seems that rather than clearing things up, Paul has just given us more paradox. Maintain unity and diversity. Speak truth in love. But Paul has already put us on notice. We are in the business of reconciliation. When the world creates “wedge issues” to divide us, we the Church must reject crafty schemes designed to divide. When the world tells us that Truth is hard-hearted and Love soft-headed, we the Church must point to our Lord, whose most courageous stand for truth was to go to his death for love of his people. We are not a social club, a business, a political party. We are the Church, the Body of Christ, given for a broken world.