I had some T-shirts from 40 or 50 years ago—three of them even older than that. I had seldom worn them. They were mementos of places I had been and places my in-laws had been (as in, “they got to see the Galapagos, I got the T-shirt”). (Though I do like the T-shirt.) How many times had I moved these basically unworn garments? I can think of at least six. After the last, I decided to start wearing them. They are wearing out now, one by one being turned into rags.

What had I been waiting for? It was foolish not to enjoy them, foolish to think that they were mementos that should be eternally preserved. 

On the other hand, there was great enjoyment had by my coffee shop companion as she wore that nice jacket. Had she worn it out earlier, she would have missed this current satisfaction. It was like a piece of the last century that suddenly appeared, aglow with the crisp lustre of being new while simultaneously being a gift of the past; it was like two different periods of her life being present at the same time. 

    Then I realized the same: when I wear that Galapagos T-shirt, I am bringing my wife’s parents back into the present moment, remembering their love of archeology and biological science while also remembering their love of a rather young son-in-law and of our fledgling children.

    A guy in line at that coffee shop asked me if I had been to the Galapagos. “No,” I grinned; “my wife’s parents gave me the T-shirt.” He had lived in Ecuador and said that, while he didn’t have the T-shirt, he had seen the Galapagos. They are, to all reports, worth seeing.

But more important, I think, than traveling to visit interesting places, is the work of putting our lives together as a coherent thing. It’s so easy to think of our lives as a bunch of episodes that happen to have followed one after another, but what is it that knits our whole life together? How can each of our lives be (by God’s grace) one narrative, one story? Maybe it is good to save some things—not for ever, but for future use. We won’t use them after we’re dead! There is likely something in your closet right now that you could bring out and start wearing.

Putting the pieces of your life together is part of the work of being a pilgrim, whether you do it in Spain or in Texas or somewhere else. What is God doing with your life? What is the story that holds your life together? It’s a good question to ask.    

 And there might be a clue waiting for you in your closet. 

These are fun to think about, but what’s the point here?  At the ordinary and accustomed, look again, with a longer and deeper perspective, to see the extraordinary in your midst.  I am not saying that being a deacon (or a mature Christian for that matter) is being Don Quixote, though we shouldn’t go through life seeing only windmills. We need to see reality through with a Biblical imagination, so as to see the really real, the yet more real, beneath and throughout, the extraordinary dimension of the world around us and ourselves.

Consider in this light our Gospel reading from Luke 22. Jesus is the prototype, not just the first, but the foundation and model. Jesus says we are to be deacons because he was a deacon, a servant. But we imitate him in such a way that he is always prior, always more authentic. His servanthood is always prototypical. But the Gospel places us with Jesus in a familiar narrative. The community is in conflict and rivalry, with the effects of culture running around and through us. There ensues the surprise of Jesus himself in the Gospel, with the claim He makes, generating a new kind of common life, at table and amidst suffering. All of this now has an horizon of the kingdom, of ultimacy. And a church squabble becomes the doorway into the deeper reality that lurks in everything with Christ.

Theology at its best clarifies the Scripture’ description of what is really real.  It isn’t a tool. It is, in the words of St. Augustine, not to be used, but rather enjoyed. That being said, it can help us, in the same way that Jesus tells us to seek first the Kingdom of God, though we ought not to be surprised that other goods would, in His kindness, be added unto us. You all are to be servants of Christ is a twisted and confused world. This will be not a little stressful. And repairing to the imaginative vista which Scripture promises, so as to see the world around you, and its conflicts, and yourself with your own conflicts in its midst, in a new light, promises its own kind of relief. I am reminded of that great hymn which tells us that ‘the peace of God it is not peace, but strife closed in the sod, but brothers (and sisters) pray for but one thing, the marvelous peace of God.’ You can be sure of receiving this, as cognitive, affective, practical corrective. Authority is not what the world imagined. Whatever we were fighting over isn’t worth what we sons and daughters of Adam and Eve supposed. The outcome of all this is only partially related to us, and far better than we suppose or deserve.  And how we see time, and how the Lord does, are blessed disjunctive. The one thing irreducible to a life stratagem turns out to be the one thing actually helpful in that domain.

 I must confess that I hope you all have retained at least a bit of optimism, a slight refraction of the rose-colored lens, for the Church. This work can be fulfilling. But uplifted is a matched-set with downcast, which sooner or later we all fall into. Think of the movie ‘Aliens’, where the heroes realize that the bad guys have gotten into the space ship’s air-ducts. The world you as deacons are witnessing to isn’t just out there, its in here, and in us!  This is underlined in Luke 22, where, before you get to today’s reading about serving, we hear that the chosen apostles included a betrayer, and communion with Jesus is being fed with the bread of his death. After our passage we hear that Peter himself will be sifted by Satan, and the Son of God himself praying that the cup might pass. Anyone who supposed that faith is not realistic about the world and about life hasn’t read the Gospel story. But what you are being ordained into is real participation in the life of the Son. It is a taste of the Kingdom. It prevails against the gates of hell. It is the Lord calling your name of the far side of Good Friday. It is glimpse of the benighted sons and daughters of Adam and Eve in their festal garments. Just as its grasp of the blight is greater than we imagine, so is its consolation.  Think of Ezekiel here- the cup is gall to the taste, but it turns sweet in his stomach, milk and honey.

Well, that last paragraph isn’t ‘clergy wellness’ as it is usually conceived, but rather as the Gospel conceives it. And finally, remember this. In the Gospel you and I together must answer to the Lord ourselves. But there is little of what we moderns call individualism. You are a deacon because you, we, plural are deacons, which is important because you, the Church, the body, is diaconal, though we do not always remember or rise to it. My friend Kathryn Greene-McCreight in her profound Christian mediation on depression wrote that there were times when all she could do was stand in the congregation and let the others, known and unknown, pray in her stead  May such times be few. But her meditation reminds us that this order is a symbol on behalf of all, and at times all will in turn encourage you when you wonder where the progress is. But what matters is that He is a deacon, He washes your feet. And for this we rise up and serve, most of all in gratitude, all the days we are given. Amen. 

Here are some important clues to consider about our pagan ancestors, wherever they may have lived on the earth. First, they believed that spiritual forces, good and evil, were close, real, powerful. Theirs was not a thinned out world. Second, they had a story of their origin, the how and why of our being here, and hence our ‘who.’ Third their need to pray and to sacrifice was as palpable as to eat or drink. The world was dangerous, and an offering was required.

There is a famous letter from pope Gregory to St. Augustine of Canterbury, when the latter, having been dispatched to the wilds of England in the 6th century, encountered their vigorous pagan observance. ‘Tear down their temples, and build churches on the same places; cancel their festivals, and observe saints’ days on the same dates.’ While the strategy feels brutal, we might spiritualize the advice. That pagan has something within to be transformed. Conversion could be described in terms of just such a repurposing, for we are all acquainted with the inner pagan with his or her own spiritual agenda. There are powers- but the risen Jesus rules over them. There is an origin story, but it happened, and has been narrated in the Bible about Israel and Jesus. There is the need for sacrifice; and the blood of Jesus suffices; for Him is true worship owed! Jesus has taken captivity captive, and that entails repurposed pagans like us! Let that be your word to yourself for this Advent week.

But what’s all this got to do with readings? The first thing to note is that they all pertain to the Gentiles, la gente, the peoples of the earths, which means of course us (even Israel having been selected by God from among the nations). It is not an appellation we are used to, but the readings remind us of its importance. Of course the hearers of the readings in their original first-century context would have had in mind not only local tribes and nations- but Rome. They were complicated! The source of law and order, not to mention bread and circuses, and propaganda, and a vision of connection (read empire) bound to disappoint. They were also rich, corrupt, creative, violent. Incidentally they called themselves the ‘moderni,’ the latest thing. Rome in turn dreamed of a wonder-child to come, and launched pogroms against outsiders. They are not so far away, separated by two millennia though we be. Let’s look in more detail about what the readings look ahead to in relation to them. Predictably the themes I find are three, with which our yet partially pagan partially converted hearts will resonate with.

Well, what I have said so far has been a little abstract, (and I hope a little interesting), though it hasn’t gotten into our kitchen, emotional or cultural. But that is where the Gospel means to get. The Bible wants us to think of ourselves as something we don’t usually, namely as ‘Gentiles’, but if we do so, in our time and place, where does that take us?  That is also where our readings mean to take us. Here to we find three longings/needs/failings in ourselves. We live in a harsh conflictual, irreal, time. We are as Gentiles sons and daughters of Babel, the progeny of Cain. We want things to be set right, inside and outside of us. This means both becalmed and fair. But we are far from this. Our efforts seem to drive further from such a goal. Our politics be what they may, who does not feel this diagnosis?  Both Isaiah 11 and Psalm 72 are Messianic hopes for this forlorn, post-Babel world, that the shalom we hope for would be brought and embodied, by the king.

The second feature of our pagan hearts goes in contemporary parlance by the word ‘identity,’ upon which a culture fastens when it isn’t sure that it is.  Romans 15 contains a string of references to the hope of the Gentiles in Paul’s Bible, namely the Old Testament.  But the reader or hearer is given more than an origin long ago. We are given a history of which we are a key chapter, the situation in which we sit this morning, together in our diversity in Church, a key symbol of the point of it all.  ‘Praise the Lord (that is, the God of Israel), all you peoples.’ This event, the coming of the divided and confused nations to real faith, is what Paul in Ephesians calls the ‘mystery,’ which means something like ‘the key to history.’ Because of the Messiah, the very fact of the Church, with all its serious faults, is itself a sign of hope, not in us but in Him.

And the Gospel? Well, we long for the coming of the righteous king, the Son of the God of the universe. But should we? When he comes to this mess, what will He have to say? The prophet Malachi has it right, ‘who can abide the day of His coming?’ The third theme was sacrifice, because we know viscerally that, as Pogo, famously said, ‘we have seen the enemy and he is us.’  The coming of the Lord in judgment is a fearsome thing, which John the Baptizer knows well.  We are John’s ‘brood of vipers,’ the image being one of a field being burned off, and the snakes fleeing from the approaching fire. And we as Christians do not deny that this judgment is righteous altogether. But what the Gospel says to you and me each morning is that the king of shalom has taken upon himself the burn, he has absorbed it. No Gentile shaman, nor powerbroker, nor mystic poet, foresaw that. It is in neither our imagining nor our desires. It is far better than both. And it is why Advent in all of its realism, in our lives as well as our world, is the fitting preparation for the coming of this surprising prince of peace. Amen.

This morning I have for you one point, historical really, I want you to remember, and so to wrestle with. It is an example of awakening to the fact that the Bible is not safe, nor comfortable. It happened a little more than a century ago, and one figure it is associated with is Albert Schweitzer. He was a great scholar of Bach, and a doctor who toiled for years in a jungle hospital in west Africa. But he also turned his mind to the New Testament. What he realized was that scholars had domesticated the Bible.  They had made it safe and familiar. God was supposed to be building the Kingdom through cultural progress of Western society.  But this idea had, as Schweitzer said, fallen to pieces, and whatever remained was blown to bits in the trenches of Word War I.  Jesus was in fact a figure far stranger, coming, said Schweitzer, as ‘one unknown.’ He was first and foremost, the prophet of the end-time, of God’s sudden arrival on the last day, an arrival bound up with Jesus’ own person in a startling way. 

It is fair to say that all New Testament scholarship since Schweitzer (and others) has emphasized just this point: the writers of the New Testament share with other Jews of the first century the expectation of the end of the world! Theology calls that ‘eschatology,’ which means ‘the study of the last things,’ which are, personally for each of us, death, judgment, heaven and hell, but in the New Testament, the end of conclusion of all things. Listen to Luke 11: ‘if I drive out demons by the finger of God, then the kingdom of God has come upon you.’ There are many debates about the New Testament, but the assumption, the background, the horizon, for every single verse is the coming of the Lord to bring in the end of all things and the beginning of the Kingdom of God. And that was, and is, a surprise.

But what exactly does that mean, in the New Testament, and also, on this confirmation Sunday, in our lives as followers of Jesus? The ‘end’ we speak of can mean three things, and each matters for us. Each meaning has within in the edge which this way of hearing the Gospel should have. The first is the end, by which I mean, the goal, which is found in the death and resurrection of Jesus. He is the end of the old world, and the dawn of the new. He is the hinge of history, He himself. The first reading, from the second chapter of the prophet Isaiah, written a full seven centuries before Jesus, tells us what that culmination looks like. The nations, no longer divided and enslaved by sin, come to his most gracious rule, as the Collect says.  Zion is the goal of the pilgrimage, the site of the sacrifice, the home of God’s law and word, and all of these are summed up in Jesus. In these he unites by his self-giving and his authority as the Risen, the nations otherwise warring.  This results in the Shalom, the peace, the Shabbat eternal, which we were all created for.   That rest is found, even as we journey, in Him, as the Epistle to the Hebrews reminds us.

Second the end of which the New Testament speaks, means a change in our lives, a conversion, which is to say a turning.  That is what the epistle reading from the 13^th chapter of Romans is talking about. Something must die and something must come to live in us.  We  are to be ‘watchful,’ and so that is the theme of Advent as a whole. What is entailed. In that? We wait on the Lord’s time. He come unexpectedly. We live in the dark but can see the first signs of dawn. We need armor for life in this dying world is dangerous. We must be disciplined, as we throw overboard quarrels and anger and things that bind us, whatever they may be. We have to be sober, in whatever sense that takes for you. The end of all things must take place in your heart and can only take place by God’s initiative, by grace.

And what then is the third sense that the New Testament’s ‘end’ might take?  The simplest to understand may be the hardest for us moderns to accept.  Things will actually come to an end. The eschaton, the conclusion, is also akin to history. It will happen.  It is not the same as environmental night or winter, but akin to it.  A sifting will take place. The ordinary process will be disrupted.  There will be another, greater flood, followed by the new covenant of which Jeremiah spoke, and which Jesus, about die, initiated us by the new Passover meal we reenact every Sunday.

Finally, what does all this mean in the lives of those about to be confirmed, and for those of us already confirmed?  A century ago, scholars woke up to a central theme of the New Testament, hidden in plain sight, the return of the Lord. We too are summoned anew this Advent to just such an awakening, implying as it does that we walk about spiritually asleep a lot of the time.  As I have suggested, this awakening is threefold,  in how we think about Jesus, personally in how we grapple with uncertainty and indeterminacy in our lives, and finally how we make our peace with time. But we can welcome, and we can be grateful, for this awakening, this shaking, this restoration to our right minds and hearts, because it means the prince of peace stands at our door, really his, and knocks. Amen.

 In order better to follow the argument, here is a precis to which the reader can refer back:

• A plethora of social ills are better understood as we see the common influence of technology, including social media. These contribute to pervasive distortions in our culture and self-understanding. 2) The theologian Jacques Ellul and his deployment of the concept of ‘powers and principalities’ help us understand our predicament. The key interlocutor is not philosophy but dystopian movies. 3) Artificial Intelligence, better described as ‘alien,’ supercharges the crisis, whatever one makes of the prospect of its autonomy or sentience, and poses a threat to every domain of life. 4) The crucial doctrine is that of human dignity, rooted in the image of God and inseparable from embodiment. We imagine the particular calling of the Church to witness here and now on behalf of dignity.

Read more here

       My text this morning is from Philippians 3. Paul has rolled out his CV: who doesn’t want at times to justify oneself by achievement, in spite of the voice of conscience within that reminds us that there is an equally long list of busts and bad ideas, and even the accomplishments had a great deal to do with companions who came alongside us? But Paul’s rejection of living from his own accomplishments comes from another, deeper place.  He has come to see his professional and spiritual cv as all rubbish, he says. For his attention is now fixed on Jesus’ resurrection from the dead, which turns our gaze back, true, only to turn it decisively forward, to what lies ahead for us, because of Him.

    Human beings are always looking for home, though when you get there it isn’t what you recall. But we are built to seek it still. Just like Odysseus…or an old priest settling as close to Fenway Park as he can get. And that is what Paul is looking for, though it would seem ‘home’ is what he is here setting out from, what he is leaving. Nonetheless he does not look back but forward. And so are we to do as well, though for us Christians ‘home’ is complicated, Paul tells us we don’t have an earthly one, and that we have another home, as a result of which we are here travelling as exiles.  For us Christians ‘home’ is something both ahead of us and with us all along. How can that be?

      The answer is that Paul now must see everything, himself and his own story, all that has occurred, in the light of the resurrection. And what does that require? Here’s what he says-  ‘forget what lies behind, straining for what lies ahead.’ To be sure, we have to make sure turning toward the resurrection is not just a pretext for avoiding the emotion of saying goodbye (whether that that was what my beloved mentor was doing I leave in abeyance!).  Memory of what has preceded is now committed to God’s memory, blessedly better than my own. An era can end, and we look ahead, uniquely as Christians, confident that what comes next is part of the same enterprise, which was not ultimately ours. 

      I will publish some of my writings over the past decade, and in preparation for this I have reread what I have said over these years. I believe we are still, ten years on, what we aimed at then: a distinctive witness within the Episcopal Church, which we have sought to live out in the mode of friendship rather than conflict. There have also been surprises: I know more about novel viruses and disciplinary canons than I expected or wished. But what has remained the same is our desire to retrieve, hear, and live out the great doctrines of the faith we have inherited. This convention is a reprise of some of the features of our context into which we move. But I am very confident in, and expectant of, the faithfulness and creativity our new bishop and his team, and all of you will bring to ministry in this new moment. 

      Since I am in an autobiographical, and maybe a tad nostalgic mood, indulge me one last moment. This memory is not from 1999, but from 1975, another quarter century earlier. A year earlier still I had been converted, by the grace of God, to faith in Christ, and I at twenty had a vague notion I might be called to be a priest in the Episcopal Church. For reasons not clear to me, I had written every reservation with a church, and received one response: a job as assistant to the vicar of Our Father’s House, Ethete Wyoming, on the Arapaho Reservation, as well as educational tutor to the children in the group home overseen by his social worker wife. They offered a flat, use of an old Fiat, and nightly dinner with the couple. So on that August morning I arrived at Logan in Boston, said goodbye to my parents, and headed down the walkway to my gate. I felt uncertainty, curiosity, exhilaration- which is to say freedom, not only about an unknown land called ‘Wyoming’ but also about what the Lord had in mind for me! It was a new kind of freedom, the kind we all know, who have handed our lives over. The walkway had become an adventure. So I feel at this moment of my life as well.

     Leave the past behind, and strain on to what lies ahead, says Paul. But we are not Lot’s wife, not forbidden a glance over our shoulder on the way. What I by contrast see in the backward glance is the providential hand of God, in things we, I, got right and wrong. I see a host of people given to me as companeros en el camino de Dios, so often the right person at the right moment. In the perplexity of early COVID time, a. deacon who is also a doctor calls me up and says ‘Bishop you don’t know it but you need my help,’ and proceeded to ride shotgun Sunday by Sunday as Covid advisor/ deacon/friend to Stephanie and me. Something similar happened throughout with so many of you. She serves here as a stand in for all the deacons, and is similar to so many lay leaders who have come alongside over this decade.

     Three years ago I convened on zoom a Lenten group about ‘Being Christian and Being Old.’ It was a lively group, I as much a learner as a teacher with everyone else, which is to say, it was the best kind of adult Christian education. My body was already whispering to me that retirement wasn’t so far away.  We considered the wisdom of self-knowledge in the Psalms, and then how John was foretold by the risen Jesus that he was bound to be taken where he did not wish to go. We considered old and wounded Oedipus finding harbor at the last at Colonus, Lear forgiven his foolishness by his daughter, and evangelical Anglican Jim Packer with his bracing rebuke, ‘retirement’ isn’t biblical!’  Do we dare plan for what we cannot see, but do we dare not to? Who knows, but our shared and humorous perplexity in the group was informative. At our best we each can feel, even here in the late innings, something like the exhilaration of that airport walkway, in the company of the wounded and risen One, who remembers the past for us, summons us as His cloud of witnesses, and is making all things new! Amen. 

    Who then is the Jesus of All Saints’ Day?  This morning  we see him in the light of the often-overlooked book of the prophet Daniel. You might add the Book of Revelation, where all the saints by tribe surround the throne of the wounded lamb, though there they sing the same triumph song of Daniel:’ ‘glory and honor and praise be to our God and (they add) to the Lamb forever and ever.’ Understanding more about the prophet Daniel sheds light on the Jesus of All Saints. And when this is clear, we can then see how it informs our own lives of faith, here and now.

    When my son was eight years old, the seventh chapter of Daniel was his favorite passage, and you can see why. Monsters with terrible teeth crawl out of the slime to terrorize humanity. It is a harsh but, in its own way, recognizable picture of how the world is, power and oppression, in cycle after cycle. Who has not at times felt that such is the world? But look closer, and you see the prophet has here a kind of good news for us- the rampage does not go on forever. By God’s protecting hand it will only last for a time, two times, and half a time, which means half as long as the fully Biblical seven years, cut short by God for that is all that humanity can withstand. Think of the verse where Paul reassures us that God does not try us beyond our capacity.  And even in evil there is a kind of order, one tormentor after the other, unfolding as He has predetermined. The message is that, even in the face of evil, we can see that all things are in the hand of God.

   A hard vision with cold comfort, but beyond the confines of our reading, let me tell you how the story comes to its conclusion.  There is a second narrative, the inner history of the world, the open secret, God’s plot line. Over the chaos is the ancient of Days, on his throne,  with the chariots of fire about him and a river of fire flowing from him. And then to Him came ‘one like  the Son of Man‘ all the nations of the earth are his train, in his wake, taken up with him to the Father, where the Son is given all authority and all glory. Here, in the Old Testament, a vision of the triune God, of the Christ, of the ascension, though we cannot see the face of the Son until the revelation in the New.  We, the nations, being carried to our Father, in the wake of the Son of Man: that is the real story of humankind, and indeed of the whole creation which sings a canticle in praise.

Let’s pause for a moment- what then does Daniel tells us about the Jesus of all the saints? The latter are honest about the deep brokenness of the world. But they are by grace lifted up to see the wider vista, and seeing it is a consolation. And that vista has Jesus at its center, we part of His throng, we the spoils of His triumph. What we call ‘mission’ is not so much our projects and stratagems, but rather what we see from the corner of our eye. We can also see that worship is not something we do of our own accord, but rather has a setting as wide, finally,  as creation.

You have surely heard about the two sides of our brains, with their two ways of knowing. They are sometimes described as creative and analytic, but they go back to a ability, which we needed to survive, on the one hand to scan the horizon (for danger) and on the other to see in detail (discriminating, for example, seed from pebble). Daniel 7 is scanning the horizon, not for danger, but rather for help!  But when you think of Daniel, you think of the three young men in the fiery furnace, or the lion’s den (or maybe, if you had a very good Sunday School, of mad king Nebuchadnezzar on all fours eating grass!). My point is that- the book is also eminently practical, down to earth. But it guides how to do what? To live faithfully in an alien land, how to read the cultural signs among your pagan neighbors.  This is no less true for us, who, in our own way, week to week, are trying to figure out, as Christians, how we too can sing the Lord’s song in a strange land, in the exile. 

   To the confirmands- you, like all the saints, need both, the wide and the narrow frame. As to the latter, make friends. Witness wherever God puts you. Be ready to see the glimmer of the longing for the divine in Nebuchadnezzar. But remember your story is distinct, i.e. don’t eat everything the culture serves you.  Even in the fiery-est places expect to find another, like the Son of Man. And, in both our wide and narrow lens moments, remember that the end of the story, the last Chapter, of your and our lives, as well as the Book of Daniel, belongs to God, who will raise the just and the unjust, and will have for them, us, all, the last word. And can be confident that that word, coming as it does on the day of the resurrection, whose first fruits is the Son of Man, Jesus, will be to us ‘Yes’ and will call out from us “Amen.’   

The eminent anthropologist Clifford Geertz famously used the term ‘thick description,’ and here is what he meant by it.  While philosophical terms move in generalities, understanding a phenomenon in its particularity requires adding layer upon layer of historical, physical, social, and philosophical description. We might compare understanding to the old overhead projectors with multiple transparencies. Thus one builds up a picture of something located in place, time, and culture.  What if we were to think about the word ‘participation’ in this way? (For this is what Luck’s book implicitly offers).

 In this book, the overlays offering a thick description of ‘participation’ are richly varied. First the Jewish philosopher Joseph S. guides us, with a complex reading of the figure of Adam in Genesis. He differentiates ‘first’ Adam as the being gifted with insight and will, ‘a little lower than the angels,’ from ‘second’ Adam, a creature of the earth who gives and receives mercy. This tension within the ‘image of God’ is within Adam prior to the fall, though ‘sublapsarian’ Adam has yet another tension. For this reason, already from creation the form of participation for Adam the creature is obedience

The second vector on participation, guided by the New Testament witness, is table fellowship. This reaches back to the Passover tradition, through Jesus’ own table fellowship, to include the Last Supper and His atoning death it interpreted, and on to the Eucharist in the early Church. Here too participation has a complex, particular, and multi-valent meaning.  Here too meaning moves ‘thickly’ from the specific to general, from Christology to ecclesiology. The third overlay, with perhaps a more uneasy fit with what has preceded, is participation as found in contemporary writings about social and systemic change. “Participation’ is not one thing but many, including distance, struggle, private emotion and public action, stasis and disruption.  “Participation’ has seasons and its own variety of plot-lines. Here too we need to ‘take captive’ these secular categories and insights for Christ, and in this task what has preceded in the book can be our help in developing a practical and pastoral theology for parish life.

   To be a creature is to live toward something. If you are a bird or a bee, it’s simple, eat, reproduce, guard your young.  What they do to accomplish these isn’t simple: think of those tortoises swimming thousands of miles to get the that beach to lay their eggs.  Humans are creatures too, but we can know where we are going, and to think and care about it- which is not so far from following your passion!  For we humans are defined by what it is we are living toward. Who you are is what you’re toward.  Some of that goal you get from your family, your culture (or, sometimes, rebelling against these!) and some from our own decisions. This brings us to this morning’s psalm, 84.  You are a pilgrim and it’s a walking song, like the chants if you were in a marching band or the Marines. Confirmands say ‘yes’ to being a Christian, and being a Christian is being a pilgrim. We can go on pilgrimages like the Camino in Spain to remind us that our lives themselves are pilgrimages (and every Church service it built like a mini-pilgrimage, from outside journeying into Church and up toward the altar).

    You are like a bird flying home to the nest! But the difference is that you know where that is, it has a name, and you were built by God to yearn for it. You will go through deserts with wild animals, but God promises to give you the oasis you need to keep you going. But most of all, the place you are headed, the holy city Jerusalem, the Temple where you will meet God, is overwhelmingly beautiful.  You see, what we Christians believe, and walk toward, is true. And it is good, which is why our lives should attempt to align with it. But it is also beautiful, a shining city you can already see as you drive toward it at night. So the passion you are to follow isn’t just inside you, it is out there, objectively, with the power to draw you because it reflects the One who made your heart.  In a world that is broken, confused, dark mixed with light, a hall of mirrors, you as a Christian are drawn by what lies ahead, which is breathtakingly beautiful, life with God. 

   Your rector knows a lot more than I do about how Eastern Orthodox Christians pray, but I can tell you that there was a tradition called ‘the Jesus prayer.’ They believed that the Gospel was summarized in brief in the words of the sinner standing in the synagogue in today’s Gospel and saying ‘Lord, have mercy and me a sinner (which are also the words shouted by blind Bartimaeus at the side of the road as Jesus himself walked on pilgrimage toward Jerusalem and his atoning death on the cross).  Draw your breath in and say ‘Lord Jesus Christ, Son of the living God,’ and exhale with ‘have mercy on me a sinner.’ The idea was to pray continuously, embedding your prayer into your very bodily existence, as deep and constant as breathing. To live is to breathe is to call on Him. In a famous book this prayer called ‘The Way of the Pilgrim’ the practitioner said the prayer so much that his tongue went numb, which I do not recommend. But the idea that calling out to God should inhabit all our life is indeed a good goal.  But of course in the Gospel story the one crying out is aware that his passion falls short and goes awry, that his prayer does not inhabit all his life, that he feels stuck at the side of the road.  But the point of the Gospel reading is not his distress, nor his passion, however frustrated, to get to the temple and the saving waters, but rather Jesus, who proclaims that the sinner is set right, made just. He does this by drawing close, speaking to him and us, then and now in His Word, touching us then, and even now, in the sacraments.

   The same encouragement is found in the great hymn, How Firm a Foundation. it describes the struggle and the wandering, things that make us afraid, deep waters, fiery trials, feeling abandoned. And a firm foundation is what the Temple has toward which we move, though we are not there yet. Just the same the pilgrim as a foundation, how, amidst the trials, in the Word, which travels with us like the cloud and the pillar for the children of Israel.

       Let me close with a point of personal privilege. It is not only the young who are on the camino, the pilgrim way, but we the old as well, who must be ‘sailing to Byzantium,’ the city of the king, as the poet said. Our experience tells us that as we age, our memories are uneven, fading in part, like the old sepia photo. Leaving, memory, and the uncertainty of what’s yet have been on my mind, as is doubtless true for you who are in my same age bracket. But against that background, what lies ahead, but is at our side too, is brighter, and more beautiful, simpler and deeper: his summoning voice in His Word, grace, the free forgiveness of sins, the promise of the resurrection, the cloud of witnesses close because He is close, Paul tells us that the outer person wastes away, but the inner person is renewed day by day. When we were young, it was already so, but we might have been too busy to notice, but now we have time to turn aside to gaze on the bush aflame but not consumed, the lovely dwelling place toward which we walk, and in which we dwell, for the ark travels with us. May our baptizand, already immersed in this pilgrim life, as well as our confirmands, in the years to come, see more and more how bright, how, real, how beautiful are the things of God before us in Jesus Christ, and take encouragement, and passion, and the strength to walk on, from them.

Amen