Bishops' Blog

Sermon 1 Lent, March 9

What am I doing up here? Well, preaching! And what is that? It is proclaiming to everyone that the gospel news about Jesus is true! To unbelievers, who need it, and to believers, who may need a booster shot. But that isn’t the only way our words can serve God. We might get in a conversation with an atheist, who thinks in his or her despair that there is nothing but power, or atoms…you might give that person a reason to think again- that is called ‘apologetics’ from the Greek word ‘defense.’ It can’t prove the Gospel, since it needs faith, but I can come to its aid.  But there is one more way Christians can serve with words, called ‘theology,’ Here we don’t defend the faith, but we assume it. But that isn’t the end of the matter, since the Gospel inspires wonder. Paul calls it ‘the worship of the mind,’ and in its service Charles Wesley wrote ‘ and can it be?’ Here we take two things that are true, and struggle to see how they are both so at once. God loving but just. Jesus made sin who knew so sin so we might be the justice of God. The kingdom come in the resurrection of Jesus but not yet. Here too there is no resolution until we stand before the throne, when the circle is finally unbroken.  As I say, this all is in the key of wonder and bated breath.

Our liturgy quotes the Epistle to the Hebrews when it says that Jesus was ‘tempted as we are yet without sin.’ How can both be true? You can see why I am raising this question this Sunday, as we hear how Jesus was tempted in the wilderness by Satan, and yet was impelled to go there by the very Spirit of God. There Satan tempted, tried, tested, him, call it what you will. We want to know what it meant for that to happen to Jesus, as opposed to happening to us, and what his  prevailing means then for us. 

Let’s start, like detectives, gathering some evidence. the first is the most obvious, that the three trials of Jesus are all religious. He is tempted to perform so as to convert the world. He is tempted to bring the kingdom in quickly, as the early Christians themselves prayed ‘Maranatha’, ‘come quickly Lord.’ And thirdly he is tempted to put all the rebellious kingdoms under the rule of God, though it may take a bad means to a good end. He would, like Borramir, in the Lord of the Rings, use the ring of power, but for good. And I might add, each has a biblical warrant- the miraculous manna in the wilderness, being borne up by angels, and the kingdoms of this world become the kingdoms of our God. These are not temptations to gluttony or adultery or to violence. They are spiritual sins, like that of Satan the fallen angel himself.  They involve bending the knee to the evil one. They are self-assertive, and lack the trust that God will do as he says, like those Israelites in the desert who feel Moses has tarried too long, and make themselves a golden calf in the meantime to quell rebellion in the masses.

Now our second piece of evidence. This passage at the beginning of the ministry of Jesus, anticipates, and in some ways parallels, the scene at its earthly end, in the Garden of Gethsemane. There Jesus cries out to his Father to let the cup pass. Faithfulness here shows weakness. He would rather the plan not be so, and says it. Then on the cross he cries out, to be sure in the words of the Psalms, that his Father has abandoned him. He is undergoing what he has us pray not to undergo, the great and final trial, when all seems bereft, translated in the Lord’s prayer simply ‘temptation,’ but let us say Temptation with a capital T.  But of course the early Christians realized that this was not their Lord’s failing, but his triumph, as He himself proclaimed in the words ‘it is finished.’ 

St. Athanasius, a key writer of our Nicene Creed, famously said, ‘what God has not assumed, he has not redeemed.’ He means this from the God’s eye point-of-view. Here is the hinge, by which we begin to enter into understanding. God the Father has submitted himself to the lostness of His world in his Son. And I mean all the way, to abandonment, to death, which is unthinkable, for God cannot die. Our minds go blank.  This terrible and wonderful submission is  visible in the temptations in the wilderness. What seems at first a challenge to Godhood- tempted? Lost? Is in fact the height of his love, which is after all his nature to an extent and in a way we also cannot comprehend.  This mystery lies at the heart of a God who needing nothing makes a world, free, fragile; he is also the God who overcomes sin not around, but through death, wherein his divine and very new life enters the world.

 Let’s go back to the temptation story. What we have learned is that nothing in this story  is what it appears at first. The messiah who works wonders, brings in the kingdom, and rules the rebellious nations- he would be no such thing, but willful, impatient, ready to trade means for ends. And the messiah who is pressured, hungry, tried, is in fact utterly identified with His Father surrendering  himself in suffering for the world. Easy victory is defeat, seeming defeat is victory won from within. ‘Temptation’ in turns out, can means two things- in the mouth of Satan, being on God’s side on our terms. But ‘temptation,’ in the mouth of Jesus, means bowing to suffering and alienation in a way that turns out to be the very form of God himself.

Paul puts it this way…

Who, being in very nature^[a] God,
    did not consider equality with God something to be used to his own advantage;
⁷ rather, he made himself nothing
    by taking the very nature^[b] of a servant,
    being made in human likeness.
⁸ And being found in appearance as a man,
    he humbled himself
    by becoming obedient to death—
        even death on a cross!

Where, between these two reversals in opposite directions, does that leave us?  On the one hand it leaves us with a bothersome suspicion about how we might use religious things for our own ends. And on the other, it leaves us with wonder, which is another name for worship. What more can we say? Though we should meditate on the high things of Christ, we do well to finish the matter, here  at the outset of Lent, in a way simpler and closer to the ground, where after all the disciple treads. First we cleave to his words, especially when we think we know better than their plain sense. Second, this Lent we do a moral inventory of our wants, including the religious ones, with a scrutiny our own motives lodged therein. But for all that, third, we pray that a moment of theology might drive us back to the Gospel, for the temptation story is not ultimately about alienation, but about victory, not ours, but His, so that we are left, on the way, though struggling, more confident. Amen

Sermon at Church of the Epiphany

I want in this sermon to think with you, as Christians, about freedom.  For there is nothing we want more, nor anything we are less able to possess, to hold. It is like gossamer, which vanishes to the touch. Here is a simple example, one you have doubtless felt yourself. At seventeen, feeling myself under heavy disciplinary hands, parent, principal, I imagined that the answer was college, escape, running my own life. At eighteen, freshman, confused, depressed, being on my own felt nothing like freedom. I had seen the enemy, in this case of freedom, and it was us (and not some authority without).  Or take the opposite experience. You spend painful hours throughout your youth, playing scales, or hitting a tennis ball, or working a lathe. Nothing free about it.  But eventually you become expert. And then you can stop thinking about the how, for you have internalized it. and your attention is turned to expressing yourself, which is after all what human beings in the so-called modern world most want. You can do something creative with a tune, or a shot, or a cabinet, and you are in a sense free, for you have something like the grammar of the thing, so that you can say something that is yours. Here freedom doesn’t feel so at the beginning, but grows out of discipline.

Let’s try one more run at the matter, this third being familiar as well. If we were to ask what words are the most important in our culture, surely ‘trauma’ and ‘addiction’ would be on the list. Things happen which affect other things we do later, in a deep way which it is at first hard to see. We realize that we have been doing things we didn’t want to do. The most famous example is found in Romans 7: ‘ what I want to do I don’t, and the thing I hate I do.’ We are mysteries to ourselves. But of course this sentence by the apostle is in the context of discovering the freedom of Jesus Christ. We might compare, in a quasi-religious way, the steps of AA, where the member comes to understand that he or she is powerless as a prelude to taking responsibility for his or her actions. The experience is real, but the relation of powerless to free is mysterious.

Enough head-scratching! When Paul says ‘the Lord is the Spirit, and where the Spirit is there is freedom,’ he is saying that freedom is an attribute of God, like goodness or wisdom. He has it for real, we only partially, at best. And if that is true, then human freedom is always in relation to something else; you might say it is directional, from somewhere and toward somewhere. Freedom isn’t something isolated, or solipsistic; you might borrow a word from the scientists and say that freedom is entangled, for it happens in the space defined by what it is surrounded, and sheltered by. If you start there, then you can make sense of one of the greatest theologians to think on the subject, St. Augustine of Hippo, the bishop in North Africa in the 5^th century, as the Roman empire was collapsing around his ears. Freedom was obvious if by it you meant the power to go this way or that in life, to have a salami or peanut butter sandwich for lunch. But when it comes to God These decisions were, to use a Latin word, arbitrary, based on choice. But when it came to faith in God, that was more like being carried downstream by a great wave. You cannot up and change which fast-moving stream you’re in. Another, greater, has to pick you up and move you. That divine hand required grace, the free action of God. Turning to God is a greater kind of freedom. So to Augustine we are free, and yet not, and our experience consents to this insight.

Let’s try one more angle of entry. ‘Where the Spirit is, there is freedom.’ Ok, but that is not the same thing as saying, ‘where freedom is, there is the Spirit.’ The latter is not true, though we humans often want to think it so.  Paul is not saying that whatever and whenever we feel free, that must be evidence of the Spirit. Much of the worst theology and spirituality of our age really assumes this, but since Genesis 3 and the Garden we humans have a gift for self-deception.  There is a connection but the other way around. When we surrender to the call of Christ, there the Spirit works, and there we come to be free, however hard its experience may prove to be.

But what we really need this morning is to allow the story highlighted on this feast day, that of the transfiguration, to inform how we should think about freedom.  First a couple of notes. There is another transfiguration Sunday, in the middle of the sweltering Texas summer, as hard as that is to imagine. But this transfiguration is right before Lent, so as to underline that we catch this true glimpse so as to fortify us for the Lenten walk, lest we lose heart and think this whole gospel thing comes to naught in the face of all the worldly evidence to the contrary. And secondly, we hear this year Luke’s version, and one feature of his is the use of the Greek word ‘exodus,’ which means what it sounds like.  Moses and Elijah are pointing us back to the Old Testament so as to point us forward. All the law and the prophets have prepared for this. All of Israel’s faithfulness and rebellion have led, by God’s providence, more great and merciful that our minds can comprehend, to this. And the same can be said of our own lives as well, our straight paths and detours directed by God the Spirit to this day, possibility, challenge, in our life and mine.

‘And all of us, with unveiled faces, seeing the glory of the Lord as though reflected in a mirror, are being transformed into the same image from one degree of glory to another, for this comes from the Lord, the Spirit’

Let us end with these words, also from our passage of Paul’s from Second Corinthians.  Freedom happens when we behold the glory of God in the face of Jesus Christ. We behold it by grace, for only so are our faces, no more holy in ourselves than others, unveiled. Christ has unveiled them, and this is a great mystery. We behold as in a mirror, for the glory is too bright to survive. Jesus at once shows it to us and shields us from it- the brightness is accommodated in the incarnation to our weakness. In the bolding we are transformed into what we see, Him first, then us, the one beheld and the one transforming one, because God, Father, Son, Spirit are one, and their work one as well.  Yet we are only transformed to an extent, and in stages, with more to go, even in heaven seeing more, going as C.S.Lewis said, ‘further up and further in,’ but never static, for we are always following. The attention is always on the Lamb, we only the chorus. And the beholding is glory, which means holiness, brightness, beauty, power. And so, finally we see that this freedom we want, is not as we imagine it, a holding, but something more like beholding, and all this life of discipleship here, and son- and daughter-hood there, more like having our blinkers, step by step removed, a freedom not from, but always for, and toward, Him. Amen.