Saint of the Week: Basil the Great

Luke 10:21-24

It was June 14, 370 AD, that Basil was consecrated Bishop of Caesarea, in the central part of present-day Turkey. In the Eastern half of the Roman Empire, it was Basil who first formed communities of monks, and got them out of their desert solitude. His "Rules" remain the basis for all monastic orders in the Orthodox Christian churches of the East.

It was that desire for community that led him to an understanding of the Trinity that we still use today. It was Basil who first used the statement, "One Being, three Persons" to describe how you could have three persons – Father, Son and Holy Spirit – who also constituted one "Being," that is, one God. Most of the analogies we use in describing the Trinity are practical variations of that theological proposition. Perhaps you remember a children's sermon in which I showed how water might have distinct forms such as steam, ice and liquid, but they're all still water.

In truth, of course, none of our analogies are fully adequate to explain how three people can be one thing. That might make the Gospel reading appointed for Basil's feast really strange. "I praise you, Father, LORD of heaven and earth, because you have hidden these things from the wise and learned, and revealed them to little children" (Luke 10:21). Really Jesus, what's child-like and simple about the Christian doctrine of the Trinity? But you don't need a philosophy degree to know how much richer your life is when you have friends. The Trinitarian God is a friendship so close that the three friends always act as One.

Each one of us is, at the end of the day, alone. Our heart is ours alone. Our mind is ours alone. Our decisions are ours alone. And yet, we know deep in our hearts, that we were not made to be alone. Why else do we get up on Sunday morning and come to church, but that God made us not to be alone but to be in community. God made us for friendship because God made us in his image. And from Andrei Rublev's 14th-century icon of the Trinity that image is one of friendship.

Community and friendship aren't easy for us. The very command to love our neighbors as ourselves, likewise commands us to love ourselves as we love our neighbors. Sometimes in this world of sin, we may have to choose between ourselves and an unloving neighbor. But if we must occasionally raise our self-defenses, we must also be prepared to lower them, as Father Son and Holy Spirit have no defenses against the other. For sharing the life of the Trinity is what we were created for, and it is our destiny.

Almighty God, you have revealed to your Church your eternal Being of glorious majesty and perfect love as one God in Trinity of Persons: Give us grace that, like your bishop Basil of Caesarea, we may continue steadfast in the confession of this faith, and constant in our worship of you, Father, Son, and Holy Spirit; for you live and reign for ever and ever. Amen.

Proper 6, Ordinary Time, Year C

Fraternities have secret handshakes and code words to tell true "brothers" from false brothers. That I know from firsthand experience. The Jews of Paul's time had certain rules that distinguished them from the "nations." Some of them were as esoteric as secret handshakes. Others were very serious and touched on sensitive moral issues of human behavior. In Paul's passionate letter to the Galatians, he argues against using esoteric rules as barriers and badges of superiority. In today's Gospel reading from Luke, we learn that even the more serious rules are not what divide the holy from the unholy. After all, none of us have ever kept them. The only rules that matter are our confession, our acceptance of forgiveness and our welcome of the forgiven.

If Paul sounds a little worked up in the letter to the Galatians, he has reason to be. He had brought the Good News to Galatia, established the Church there, and then moved on. But now word has come to him that some Jewish Christians have come to Galatia, and convinced the Galatians that they need to be circumcised, and observe the Jewish food laws, in order to fully be a disciple of Jesus Christ. Jesus himself was a faithful Jew, and there's no evidence that he ever disobeyed those rules of membership in the people of Israel.

Just before today's reading, Paul recalls an earlier dispute over the same issue in another city. And this one involved Peter, chief among the Twelve Apostles. When Paul and Peter were together in Antioch, they shared food and fellowship with Gentile Christians. But then, according to Paul, men came from the Church in Jerusalem, to see if the "rules" were being kept: certain foods being off-limits to Jews, limits on how much Jews could interact with Gentiles. And when these Jewish Christians arrived, Peter "drew back and separated himself" for fear of offending them.

So, when Paul writes of what it means to be "justified," he isn't just referring to how God deals with us in the court of divine judgment. He is trying to explain to the Galatians; again, what constitutes "membership" in God's family. To be "justified by faith in Jesus Christ" is to be a member of God's family, regardless of who gave birth to us, the marks on our body, the food we eat.

Paul anticipates the counter-argument. "But if, in our effort to be justified in Christ, we ourselves have been found to be sinners, is Christ then a servant of sin?" In other words, if all one has to do to be saved is to say, "I believe in Jesus Christ," then does it not matter what we actually do? Of course not, Paul replies. "I have been crucified with Christ…Through the law I died to the law." Paul knew the followers of Christ he had killed, for the sake of maintaining the rules of membership. He knew how he had helped to crucify Christ in those whom he had killed. He knew his need of forgiveness. He accepted that forgiveness, and he would let no manmade rules of membership keep anybody out of the family of the forgiven.

Jesus had already dealt with the same attitude. Right in front of Simon the Pharisee is a woman "of the city," a woman of the street, who has clearly been moved by Jesus's preaching and mighty works of love. We are not told what her "sin" was because that doesn't matter. What does matter are her tears. She knows her sin all too well. But she has heard Jesus's message of forgiveness, and accepted it. But Simon the religious official can only see who she was, the "sinner," not the forgiven woman right in front of him.

So, when Jesus tells this woman of the city, "Go in peace," where can she go? The synagogue where this Pharisee holds the power? How welcome will she be in the "religious" place, with its rules and codes and customs? Where else can she go in peace but back to the streets of the city? But now, she won't be lost and alone in her shame. Waiting for her will be all those who have heard the Good News, those "sinners," whom Jesus befriended and the Pharisees criticized. But then and now, it is the "sinners;" who have confessed how they have crucified Christ, who have accepted his forgiveness, and are ready to welcome anyone who comes to them; they are members of the family of God.

To be "justified" is to stand in the courts of our God. It is to face the ways in which we have crucified Christ, and to see that by his taking up the cross in love, justice has been satisfied. Our punishment has already been suffered, and is not ours to bear. But "justification" is much more than walking out of the court, scot-free. Being a Christian is about more than setting up a new club with new rules and new codes. Justification is not just about our "getting right with God." Membership in this club is defined by confession, forgiveness and welcome. Everything else is negotiable.

God made the Cross into a sign of salvation. Out of what has died here has risen the greatest opportunity for evangelism we may ever have. We have the opportunity to show people what the church really is, not a building but a people. And as we discern what our new worship space will look like, this community will be watching. What do we want that space to say to those who, as Bishop Parsley has said, are Episcopalians but don't know it yet? What do we need to do to make a welcoming space for the men and women of the city?

As long as we confess, forgive and welcome, nothing in this town will be more beautiful than Christ Episcopal Church.

The Daily Office, 5th Week of Ordinary Time

The Daily Office

"For God will bring every deed into judgment, including every secret thing, whether good or evil." (Eccles 12:14)

So, what is it with this "old grump," as one friend put it? Basically, his complaint is this: "One fate comes to all alike, and this is as wrong as anything that happens in this world. As long as people live, their minds are full of evil and madness, and suddenly they die" (9:3). It doesn't seem to matter how hard you work, how righteous you try to be, how giving you try to be to others. The same fate seems to come to all, good and evil. We suffer equally, then we all die equally.

To plod through Ecclesiastes, as the Daily Office has had us doing for nearly two weeks, is to be reminded that holy Scripture is the record of a conversation between God and those who have listened as well as they could. This book is what one man, perhaps King Solomon, heard from God as best he could. And if we think that being "religious" is the ticket to constant prosperity and happiness, then we need to hear the truth that this Teacher tells us: "Vanity of vanities! All is vanity."

Except that perhaps his problem stemmed from his own vanity: "I saw all deeds that are done under the sun" (1:13). Really? Do any of us see all the deeds that are done by every person? Or is our sight limited to what we see in the fleeting moment that our path crosses with that person's path, before they separate, and we see noting of that person's past or future. Indeed, every human being is a "secret thing" to us. Are we not even secrets to ourselves? How well do we even understand our own actions?

Only God sees the secret things that we hide from others, and from ourselves. And God will bring them into judgment. But we who know the rest of the story know who is waiting for us at that judgment: Jesus and the Cross from which divine mercy flows from that wounded side. The Teacher of Ecclesiastes braces us for that judgment. Jesus Christ, crucified and risen, guarantees that we need not fear the judgment.

Daily Office Meditations, 5th Week of Ordinary Time

Here are the meditations offered by Forward Day by Day on the scripture readings set aside for daily reading by the Episcopal Church. I hope they provide you with spiritual nourishment this week.

Proper 5, Ordinary Time, Year C

I gasped on Friday afternoon when I read the Facebook status update of a friend of mine who serves at a parish in Mobile: "It smells like lighter fluid outside." The oil has apparently arrived in Mobile. It's beginning to arrive on the beaches of the Florida Panhandle. If a tropical storm or hurricane comes ashore from the Gulf and works its way north, will the oil arrive here later this summer? Earlier that morning, I had read BP's CEO, Tony Heyward, admit that "what is undoubtedly true is that we did not have the tools you would want in your tool kit."

We Americans are an optimistic people. And what we are most optimistic about is the ultimate success of hard work. We have faith that there is no limit to what we can accomplish through hard work. But after weeks of hearing that this plan for stopping the gushing oil had a 70 percent chance of success, then that plan had a 60 percent chance of success, we are now forced to consider that failure may be the only option. We are being forced to consider that there are limits to our engineering skills, our ability to produce energy, the money we can make.

Behind the story of drought and starvation in today's reading from 1st Kings is the question of control and the limits of human power. Who is in control of nature, man or God? The ultimate point of the prophet Elijah was to remind the people of Israel that they could not control the rain by sacrificing to manmade idols. The widow in today's Gospel reading had lost all control of her life through the loss of her sole source of support. She had reached the limit of her very survival. Jesus looks on her in a compassion that is as deep as his bowels, and gives her what she needs. In the Word of God we hear today, we hear that what we should strive for is not unlimited power and control, but compassion.

The story we hear of Elijah today is part of the greater story of the prophet's confrontation with King Ahab of Israel. Ahab had married a Sidonian princess named Jezebel. She brought with her to monotheistic Israel the polytheistic worship of many gods. And the greatest of her gods was Baal, the god of rain. Ahab built temples to Baal all over the land of Israel. Now the only reason the people of Israel had not wasted away under Egyptian slavery centuries earlier was that the LORD, the God of Moses, had delivered them from slavery. But now they were encouraged to make sacrifices to the manmade idols of Baal, in order to guarantee rain for their crops. After all, isn't a god you can see easier to trust than a God you can't?

And so, at the beginning of chapter 17, Elijah proclaimed to King Ahab, "As the LORD the God of Israel lives..there shall be neither dew nor rain these years, except by my word." It was that drought that forced Elijah to go to a foreign land that led him to the widow of Zarephath and her son. So, on one level, what's going on here is a big smack down, Baal vs. the LORD, although it's actually Elijah who proclaimed the drought in the name of the LORD. Who really controls the rain? Which god is more dependable in a crisis? On another level, we're reading about the folly of human beings supposing that they can control God's creation. The means by which we attempt to manipulate God's creation to our will today may be much more sophisticated than sacrifices to idols. But what was foolish 3,000 years ago is foolish today. Be it Jezebel or Tony Heyward, the arrogance is the same.

So, are we just "collateral damage" in some big smack down? Or are we just the victims of the winds of chance? The answer we hear in both the Old and New Testament readings today is no. We are the recipients of God's compassion. There is no one more powerless than this widow. She owned no property. Whatever her husband had owned when he died had been inherited by her son. Whatever her son owned when he died now reverted to the family of her deceased husband. She had nothing, nothing with which to feed herself.

No wonder Jesus's compassion is for the grieving mother, not the son who no longer suffers. And that compassion is as deep is Jesus as his bowels. The Greek word for "compassion" literally means, "to be moved in the bowels." In our culture, we associate deep emotion with the rapid beating of the heart and the excitement we feel with that speedy heartbeat. The people of the ancient, but perhaps wiser world, associated the deepest emotions with that intestinal churning which has you at its mercy until you relieve it. To have compassion for someone is truly to feel pain on their behalf. You aren't really close to anyone until you can feel something of their pain. Jesus felt the widow's pain. He couldn't move forward until he relieved her pain. And so in his compassion, Jesus gives her the relief she needs.

Of course, by raising her son, Jesus does not exempt her or her son from any further grief. Both will die. One will be left grieving. What Jesus does is to extend their journey together for a little while longer. He hands them along in their life journey, entrusting them to his Father. But not even the Son of God can guarantee a pain-free life. If human beings make bad choices, God cannot undo what has been done. If ill winds blow into our lives, the damage cannot be undone. But we do know that God is moved in the bowels for our pain. Our pain is his pain, and his compassion. So what, or who, in the world around you moves your bowels? Might a part of that be God's compassion moving in you? I confess that while Laura and I were traveling, I felt that churning every morning. It ceased when I came back home to you. That is one sign of God's compassion for you all, and the Good News for today is that Jesus Christ will, in time, give us the relief we need.

The lesson that God's creation is trying to teach us, the message of the prophets from Elijah to Jesus, is that we must learn to accept the limits of our power, and our need for God's compassion. In that compassion lies the power to receive whatever we need to continue our journey with each other.

Sermon Preview, Proper 5

Courtesy of wordle.net

The Visitation

Luke 1:39-49

The Feast of the Visitation of Mary to Elizabeth is celebrated on May 31. Since the 31st fell on a holiday this year, that feast has been transferred to today.

I'm reminded of my sermon from the 4th Sunday of Advent, which focused on Mary's mixed blessing, and the reassurance she received from her cousin Elizabeth, who shouted in ecstasy, "Happy is she who trusted that what God spoke to her would be fulfilled!" An out-of-wedlock pregnancy that could conceivably lead to her execution by stoning certainly counts as a mixed blessing. But Elizabeth helped Mary to accept God's mixed blessing.

Our parish community is full of mixed blessings. Our beloved, historic sanctuary is now a shell, waiting to be torn down. Some of us want to move on as quickly as possible. Others may still be burdened by grief. That grief will continue to be a burden so long as you do not let yourself feel the loss. Let your tears wash over your heart. And in that Baptism, Jesus, who surely wept from heaven at the destruction of the Jewish Temple, will weep with you.

Then, I hope we all will embrace the blessings we've been given. With fewer pews, we get to sit closer to our brothers and sisters in Christ. We can reaffirm that the Church is the people, not the building. And we have a wonderful opportunity for Evangelism; to spread the "Good News" that Jesus Christ is in our midst. We made two front pages in the last week; the Alabama Episcopalian and the Sand Mountain Reporter. Many, many people care what happens to us. What will we tell them about who we are, regardless of the building? Let us share the blessings of contributions we've received with those around us who are still suffering.

And as we begin to discern together what our new church should look like, we have the opportunity to ask ourselves: What do we want our worship space to say about us to the community? Bishop Parsley has often said that there are a lot of Episcopalians out there; they just don't know it yet. How can our worship space convey the particular gifts of the Episcopal Church? Come to think of it, what are those gifts which our new worship space can express? And how can our worship space welcome those who don't know yet that they're Episcopalians, and will need to work through their initial impression of strangeness? ("What sort of Christian church is this?").

We are in the news. People are watching us. That is a blessing. How will God's promises to us be fulfilled? Through our sharing of dreams and visions this coming Sunday, the Holy Spirit will begin to lead us to the answer.