Bishops' Blog

Easter Vigil Sermon

The trouble with my father was that he was quick with the quip, and a curmudgeon to boot. When asked a question, a non sequitur would follow, chalked up to ‘George being George.’ My mother warned us, but we didn’t want to listen. Finally he stopped the car at a toll booth and said ‘I don’t know how to negotiate this,’ and we knew. It was hard to see the towering figure who was my father vanishing. Someone told me about a book on the subject by David Keck, whose father, dean of the divinity school when I was a student, who was an Alzheimer’s sufferer. The book is entitled ‘Forgetting Whose We Are.’ I recommend it to you. But my point is really to meditate on that title, for it is saying two things. First, that we can and do forget profoundly, and are forgotten. But we actually belong to someone. God, and we are His regardless. He remembers us. The disease is a metaphor too, since humans wander from God and run their own affairs, and in so doing, forget whose they are, but He does not forget. In Isaiah the Lord says of His exiled children, ‘I have written your names on the palms of my hands,’ so that, lifting them, He sees the names there and cannot forget us, regardless of our remembering or forgetting.

This idea of God remembering is found throughout the Scripture. The Psalmist feels like a dead man out of mind of the Lord. God remembers his own from Abraham on. Even in Sheol, where memory is snuffed out, the Lord alone does not forget, Psalm 139 insists. Now at the heart of our faith is the Word of God. He is a God who speaks, and his Word is one with Him. That is where the Bible starts in Genesis, and that is the first and last thing to know of Him, says John. To speak, and to recall, as Word, are things we believe to lie at the heart of his being.  Both are entailed in the mind of God, which Paul tells us his own Spirit can plumb and understand. This an analogy to us, who have mind and words and memories.  Of course, but God himself has given us the comparison. At the same time God is not like us; he is as high above us as the sky from the earth, says Isaiah. When He speaks the thing springs into being. He says ‘firmament’ and it is, he says ‘human being’ and we rise up as well. He says ‘return from exile,’ and they are on their way, he says ‘ forgiven,’ and what you and I most fear is wiped away.

Jesus really died. That means he was gone, forgotten from being. Vanished. In Sheol the land of non-being. La tierra del olvido. It is a great mystery that we can say such a thing about God’s Son, but he was fully bone of our bone, flesh of our flesh. Here the story of Lazarus serves as a kind of parable, a sign of the resurrection, his and ours. He has gone to that dark and far place, until Jesus calls him, and Jesus’ very word summons him back to life. That is how we are to imagine the resurrection. The Father calls out to us. It is the same voice that called you into being. ‘George come out,’ and so we will, stench and bandages and all.  And where does my tale of Alzheimers come in? We are forgotten out of mind, but not out of the mind of God, inseparable as it is from His memory and His Word, unique in summoning into being what he remembers and speaks.

If you think about the history of the Christian faith, sometimes we have been all cross, and sometimes all empty tomb, but it can be hard to put them together. Related to this is the question- how does what happened to him relate to what will finally become of me? So we are brought back to the first Easter, and what happened to Jesus of Nazareth. He is our brother. He descended into hell, as the creed insists, as we will too. As a creature of God, he is summoned back as we are. But the difference is this- He is, at one and the same time, also the word/mind/heart/memory of God himself. He is at once summoned and summoner. And in that he is unique. We can say more. Once we are remembered into being, we will all be standing before Him. Who we were is not forgotten, but how he sees us is in light of the prototype, of Jesus. The same idea is found in one of the great prayer for Good Friday:

Lord Jesus Christ, Son of the living God, we pray you to set
your passion, cross, and death between your judgment and
our souls, now and in the hour of our death. Give mercy and
grace to the living; pardon and rest to the dead; to your holy
Church peace and concord; and to us sinners everlasting life
and glory; for with the Father and the Holy Spirit you 
live and reign, one God, now and for ever. Amen.

It is the placing in between I am interested in. He not only remembers us once more because of what happened to Jesus, but continues to sees us through the lens of Jesus’ love, for God and for us though we be in the wrong. We are not only remembered into being, but beings seen thereafter through Him. And again, what God says is so, and as he sees us through the new Adam, the true image of God, we come more and more to be so, since the mind of God will finally be seen to be how the world really is. The ‘should’ and the ‘is’ will finally meet, there, through the risen one. Remembered we are, not erased, even our trauma recalled, but now through the lens of the Jesus crucified, what we have been, and what we were meant to be, resolved, which is what the New Testament means by living ‘in Christ,’ healed, coming to ourselves, and not us alone, but with others who were a part of who we were, and with others we hurt and were hurt by, none of it forgotten, but repaired.

We walk as the burial office will one day say over us, ‘in the sure and certain hope of the resurrection from the dead.’ At some point, just as with my father, I will be forgotten, will fade into the mist of un-being. But our death, yours and mine, is no longer what death was, It is now the land to which Jesus has descended and been raised, the place he has ‘harrowed’ says the tradition. So it is, in addition to being a fearful place, the land of forgetting, la tierra del olvido, but now the place where was heard, ‘Jesus come out,’ and so will be heard your name and mine. Amen.

St. Philip's Sudanese, Lent 5

I want this morning to tell you a story. It is from long ago. Several theater plays they called ‘tragedies’ were based on its plot-line, the string of events.  The king, facing danger in the war, sacrificed his child to the pagan gods. When he got home, he was murdered by his wife who was angry at him.  Then their son, to avenge his father, killed his mother. Then the gods were to punish the son. You can see the cycle of violence, one act of revenge after the other. Finally the gods declared the truce, and the avenging spirits were given a new name, the gentle ones, and deflected from revenge into protecting the citizens. You can see the problem the ancient people of Athens, the same people gathered in the marketplace in Acts 17, were dealing with. How do you stop the cycle of revenge? You see it in many countries and many tribes in history. For example the catholics and the protestants in northern Ireland, until finally the mothers from each side said ‘enough.’ When in the summer of 2019, in Gambella, we visited the church, mother union members from warring tribes came to together to say ‘enough’ in the same of Jesus.    

There is always something in the past to resent and be angry about! But we are too quick to forget the thing that another person might be angry with us about!  We like the idea of starting anew, but it is hard to get there. How do we balance the need for justice with the call for mercy?  This problem is found throughout history, and also throughout the Bible. Read psalm 137- the sadness of exile is followed by an honest expression of anger at the oppressors. How do we deal with this natural human urge? One answer in the Bible is the end, the kingdom of God. We are to leave judgment to God- this doesn’t mean there is not judgment, only that it does not belong to us.  As we near Holy Week, as part of your Lenten discipline, ask yourself whom you need to forgive, and what cycle of bad feeling you need to let go of.

But the question comes- how is this in all honesty possible? Today’s readings offer the Bible’s answer, the divine strategy to break this cycle. It has to happen outside of ourselves. It has to be done by someone who is not part of anyone’s cycle of being wronged. And it has to be done by someone who has the power to do something perfectly new, once and for all, akin to the way that God made the world originally. The person to do so is God alone, but the person suited to such a task is one of us, bone of our bone and flesh of our flesh.

Today’s readings show us how God freed us by breaking the old cycle of vengeance, once and for all, in a way that is freeing for us. And then I want you to see how this affects us, what it does to our story and our future. First the Old Testament prophet Isaiah, who is speaking to God’s people in exile. They are far from home. The wonder if his arm is long enough to save. They remember their sins. They resent those who oppressed them. Then the Lord says, through the prophet, that He is doing a new thing. He is breaking the old cycle. He is ending the winter of their exile. He alone can do it and in his mercy he wills to do it. This is good news indeed- gospel!  Now you might challenge the prophet and ask- isn’t saving what he did in Egypt? Can't they see the same patterns, the old story now retold- well they would be right. But when God saves, it is always new. His action is newness itself. This is because he alone can break the old cycle. What he does makes it perfectly new, and in doing so defines who he is!  

This brings us to the New Testament lesson. In his letter to the Christians in Philippi. Here in chapter three Paul tells him his resume, the list or all his accomplishments. And they aren’t bad things, except for the part about persecuting the Christians! He studied the Word of God. He comes from a religious family line. He lives a spiritual life. But then Paul calls all of that ‘rubbish.’ Isn’t that a little extreme?  His point is to point out the contrast between what we can do on our own, and what Jesus alone can do. He has to come first. He alone can break the old cycle. It rules us through death, which has now become what Paul calls ‘the last enemy.’  Death makes it clear that we cannot change what matters most to change. But the resurrection of Jesus means that God does the one thing only he can.

And when the final fear of death is removed, then we can live the lives God created us to live. We are not without sin, and there is always a way for us to grow in the virtues, to see what charity would look like where we are, and to take a step toward it. We have not arrived, says Paul in Philippians. But this one thing you and I can do- to step toward the goal Christ gives to us. And the reason we can do so, he says, is the resurrection. For it is the truly new thing, the circuit breaker of resentment, the breaker of the old loop of revenge, the sufficient power to set out in the new life Jesus has called us to. This lent, may we yet more fully praise Jesus Christ, the spotless lamb and victor over death, and may He alone grant us a share in his new life. Amen.