This Night: An Easter Vigil Sermon

 “How blessed is this night, when earth and heaven are joined, and we are reconciled to God.”

 

This night, this Great Vigil of Easter, is hands down, my favorite night of the year. I have my mother largely to thank for this. We were always an Easter Vigil kind of family. I remember being a small child, enchanted as I watched the new flame spark into life outside the Catholic churches where we worshipped. I remember the feeling of awe as our little candles were lit from that flame, and the sanctuary slowly filled with a soft glow. I remember being drawn into the readings from scripture, those strange, evocative accounts of God’s saving deeds. And I remember watching adult catechumens experience the sacrament of baptism and witnessing their joy as they were fully welcomed into the life of the church.

 

As I got older, the Easter Vigil was one of the places where I began to feel my own love of the Christian faith beginning to take root and grow. And I don’t think it’s a coincidence that during this time when I was realizing that church was something I felt drawn to in my own right, I was also falling in love with science fiction and fantasy. While I was memorizing the Nicene Creed, serving as an acolyte, and probably annoying all the other kids in the religious-ed classes at our church, I was also wandering across Middle-Earth with Frodo and Sam, slipping into new corners of the universe alongside Meg and Charles Wallace Murray, and searching for Narnia in the back of my disappointingly mundane bedroom closet.

           

With apologies to every single one of my seminary professors, I came to love church, through the Easter Vigil because it felt like magic. I yearned so badly to be a part of a story that would take me out of the ordinariness of my little middle-school life and allow me to live in a brighter, more fulfilling version of the world.  

           

Now, quite a few years have passed since those formative vigil experiences, but I am still captivated by the sheer mystery of this liturgy, and I am even more firmly convinced that the present reality we occupy cannot be the only story God intends for us. We gather for the Easter Vigil mere hours after we recount the narrative of Jesus’ trial at the hands of earthly powers and his horrifying death on the cross. By rights, after experiencing the desolation of Good Friday, we should have no reason to hope. We can imagine how utterly lost and uncertain the disciples must have felt this night, after laying Jesus in the tomb. We can imagine the grief and the real fear carried by the women who went to that same tomb early the next day.

 

And God knows, all of us have likely experienced similar feelings, especially after these last two pandemic years. The world today, can feel like a dark, uncertain, and frightening space as we are faced with images of violent conflict abroad, as we confront the history of discrimination and abuse that has shaped the culture of our own country, and as we continue to live into a world reshaped by growing ecological crisis. Tonight might be the first service of Easter, but we cannot ignore the reality that Good Friday is also still very present in our life together.

           

And yet. This night, this space created by the words spoken and actions performed during our time together – they remind us that the tomb may be dark, and it may be empty, but it is not a meaningless or terrifying void. Rather, it is a space of potential, of anticipation. It is a space alive with the knowledge that something truly incredible has occurred. It not an end, in fact, it is the beginning of a story – a story that called a small group of people into an utterly new way of life two thousand years ago and that continues to shape the way all of us, gathered in this space tonight, choose to live in our lives now.

           

There is a special kind of remembering that we do when we come together as the Church. The word for this kind of remembering is anamnesis – we remember in a way that makes a past event somehow present. This Great Vigil of Easter, this entire service is basically an anamnesis. We have just heard the “record of God’s saving deeds in history.” We have been reminded that God was and is the creator of all that we call good. We have been reminded that God was the liberator who brought the Israelites out of Egypt and is still standing with those who remain in bondage today. We have been reminded that God was and is powerful enough to restore life to even the most barren and broken corners of the world. We have been reminded that God was and is in our midst, rejoicing with us and renewing us with love. As we have heard these stories about how God acted and spoke, we have been reminded of who God was, and is, and will continue to be.

           

But these ancient stories are not just about God. They are also about God’s people. They are about us. In just a few minutes, we will renew our baptismal vows. In doing so, we will not only affirm what we believe about our triune God and God’s church, we will also recommit ourselves to the promises that we made as people who have chosen to live in this world as followers of the risen Christ. I know it’s dark and you’ve all got candles, but just go ahead and take a look at the baptismal covenant – it’s next up in your bulletin (BCP 304). You will notice that these baptismal promises are full of gorgeous, active verbs like persevere and proclaim, seek and strive. These promises are about worship and prayer, yes, but they also call us outside the walls of this building, into deeper relationship with our neighbors and the wider world.

           

These baptismal promises move and inspire me every time I am called to reaffirm them, and they are one of the reasons why I came to love this Episcopal Church. While I was baptized as an infant, I was confirmed in the Episcopal Church as a teenager, and I think I can claim at least a small degree of kinship with those adult catechumens I saw baptized during the Easter Vigils of my childhood. The faith that I have found in this church is one that I chose to claim when I was sixteen and have continued to choose to claim every day since. Our baptismal covenant reminds us that the Christian faith is not something that we simply observe or receive. Rather, when we choose to accept God’s grace and love, we are called into an entirely new way of being, as members of Christ’s resurrected body and agents of God’s transformative, ongoing work.

           

I never did find Narnia in the back of a wardrobe, and my Hogwarts letter remained stubbornly lost in the mail. And although 12-year-old Catherine is still a little sad about this reality, present-day Catherine has received the gift of a story that is so much bigger and so much more hopeful than anything I’ve ever read in a novel. The story of God’s saving action through the glories of creation, God’s relationship with the people of Israel, and Jesus, God’s own child, who became human, lived among us, and died so we could enter new life, this story is the one that I have chosen to orient my life around because it is a story that has not ended. It is a story where I – and all of you! – have a real and meaningful part yet to play.

           

When we boldly profess that Christ has died, is risen, and will come again, we are stepping into a story that pushes us out of our finite, fundamentally human ways of thinking and opens space for a whole realm of possibilities. We can acknowledge, decry, and lament all the spaces where the death-dealing forces of this present time remain heart-breakingly active, while also joyfully proclaiming that God’s promised future is still to come. And what’s more, we can anticipate that future by cultivating hopeful spaces for resurrection and renewal to take root and flourish in our own lives and communities.

           

And so, my friends, before we move through the rest of this glorious liturgy and into the full celebration of this Easter season, let us linger here in the darkness for just a moment longer. In this night when earth and heaven are joined, let us pause to both remember and reclaim our deepest hope in the mystery of God’s yet-unfolding story that is alive and present in each and every one of our lives, tonight and always. Amen. 

 

- preached by the Rev. Catherine Manhardt, St. James Episcopal Church, April 16, 2022

 

While it was still dark: Easter Day Sermon on John 20:1-18

 

There is so much in this resurrection story that speaks to my heart.  It has the ring of authenticity.  Our text tells us that hope began “while it was still dark.”  That is when Mary Magdalene comes to the tomb, carrying the weight of grief.  She came to anoint Jesus’ body, to try to get some closure, but the body was gone.  Mary is frantic.  What have they done with him?  Where did they take him?  Will this nightmare never end?

 

Easter begins in the dark; not with bright banners, painted eggs, and the scent of flowers, but with broken hearts, blood-stained linens, and the reek of death.  It is an appropriate place to start because that is where so many people find themselves.  Easter begins where we are:  lonely, afraid, uncertain, anxious, bereft, numb, distracted, indifferent.  We all have to look loss, and fear, and failure in the face eventually.  We are all vulnerable.  If you find yourself in the dark today, please know that you are not alone.  You’ve come to the right place.

 

Mary Magdalene is the brave one.  She is willing to acknowledge reality, even when it is painful.  She doesn’t run away from her grief.  She is doing the best she can.  But finding the body missing is the last straw.  Then Mary does something even braver.  She runs to Peter and the unnamed disciple whom Jesus loved and shares with them what is going on.  She asks for help. 

 

Easter begins in darkness, but the first rays of dawn’s light emerge when the darkness is shared, as the burden you are carrying is made lighter because you are no longer carrying it alone.  This is the first step in the renewal of hope.  For some, that first step takes them into an AA meeting or a therapist’s office.  Many have found hope renewed at their first Black Lives Matter protest or Take Back the Night march.  That first step might even be tentatively crossing the threshold of the church door.   Easter becomes possible when we are no longer alone. 

 

Sharing our vulnerability with others, trusting that they will hedge that vulnerability round with dignity and care, opens us to the possibility of new life.  Peter and the Beloved Disciple, like Mary Magdalene, struggle with their own responses to the empty tomb.  Still, at the very least, they reassure Mary that the tomb is indeed empty.  She isn’t crazy.  The trauma and loss are real.  But even more, they begin to struggle toward making some meaning of this experience; even the possibility that Jesus is still with them somehow, as he had promised. 

 

The male disciples return home, leaving Mary weeping outside the tomb.  She musters her courage once again, and peers inside the tomb to see for herself what they have reported.  Sometimes, maybe for quite a long time, what keeps us going is the hope that we might share the healing that others seem to enjoy.  We want what they have; if they can get it, maybe it is possible for me too.  But that only gets us so far.  It is one thing to credit the witness to hope of others.  It is quite another thing to experience its fulfillment yourself.  

 

Mary, perceiving with the eyes of the heart, is able to see what the others could not yet see:  not just the possibility of resurrection, of new life, but the reality.  This capacity turns on the ability to entrust oneself, not only to the care of others, but to the care of God.   This brings us to a whole other level of healing.

 

First, the angels appear, raising the question, “Woman, why are you weeping?”  The divine messengers cut to the heart of the matter.   They invite Mary to fully embrace her grief.  There are no shortcuts in the spiritual life.  Articulating a story about our fear, our failure, our loss is an essential step in healing.   The formation of memory makes the past, the past, so that we can begin to imagine a future no longer limited by it.

 

As soon as Mary names her grief, the shape of healing immediately comes into view.  But it is not a clear vision.  The Risen Jesus stands before her, but she is not able to recognize him immediately.  She thinks he is the gardener!  He asks again, “Why are you weeping?”  Healing is rarely a one and done sort of thing.  We circle around our wounds again and again, until an answer to the question appears. 

 

The answer comes clearly into view for Mary when she hears Jesus say her name.  Easter is not an abstract theory, a generic offering of resurrection and new life.  It is always specific.  There is resurrection for Mary, for Peter, for the beloved disciple, for you, for me.  It is always an experience of personal encounter, in which the Holy One whispers our name, and we recognize, finally, that we are held, wounds and all, in a love that never dies.  This is the high noon of resurrection light, which we could not possibly have imagined at dawn.  In its light, everything looks different.

 

Of course, Mary can’t hold on to this moment or to Jesus.  Healing is always a great letting go, an unconditional openness to reality.  Knowing that she is loved, Mary can let go of the past – even her past experience of Jesus – so that she is free to embrace the new way of being with Jesus that is opening up for her and for us.   Mary is free to embrace the future that God has promised: a future in which all things are being made new. 

 

Mary runs to tell her friends, “I have seen the Lord!”  That is, after all, what friends do:  they share the new life they have discovered so that others may experience it for themselves.   And so, Easter comes, again and again and again.

 

 

 

 

 

 

Jesus' Jewish Imagination

On Palm Sunday and at yesterday’s celebration of the Holy Eucharist, I spoke about the importance of grief and voluntary suffering as aspects of prophetic criticism and resistance to evil.   To follow Jesus means following him in the way of the cross, rekindling the fire of divine love through tears and hard work. 

 

But lament is not the only tool in the prophet’s toolkit.  The other tool is imagination.  Prophetic imagination envisions alternatives to the way things are: the possibility of life beyond oppression, suffering, and death.  Grief must be paired with hope.   On Maundy Thursday, we celebrate Jesus’ prophetic imagination, expressed through the signs of a shared meal and an act of humble service.  His is a specifically Jewish imagination, and it is important to acknowledge and honor the Jewish roots of our own practices of hope as we celebrate the rite of foot-washing and the sacrament of Holy Communion. 

 

In Jewish practice, every common meal as well as the meals held on festivals is an act of thanksgiving for God’s gifts of creation and redemption.  Thanksgiving is expressed in the table blessings prescribed for every meal, and include a specific commemoration for the various festival meals.   The host of the meal recites a special blessing at the breaking of the bread at the beginning of the meal.  At festive meals, a special blessing is also recited over the cup of wine at the conclusion of the meal.  

 

Our accounts of the Last Supper depict Jesus reciting these blessings over the bread and wine consistent with traditions familiar to every Jew from their earliest childhood.  Such table fellowship, however, was not only an act of thanksgiving but also a sign of unity and peace.  To share a meal with someone was to include them in the promise of God’s future reign of justice and peace.  Eating constituted community.  This is why some of Jesus’ contemporaries were scandalized by his eating with tax collectors and sinners.  It signified an invitation to them to share in the blessings of the future reign of God. 

 

For centuries before Jesus, the prophetic tradition of Israel imagined the reign of God under the sign of a celebratory banquet or meal.  Jesus’ table fellowship during his public ministry was a visible sign anticipating the fulfillment of God’s promised reign now.  It was an enacted parable of the kingdom. 

 

The Synoptic Gospels present the Last Supper as a Passover meal, the festival celebrating the Jews’ liberation from slavery in Egypt, and connect it to Jesus’ death (and resurrection).   Through the lens of the Passover, we are invited to interpret Jesus’ death and resurrection as an act of redemption (liberating us from sin and death) and renewal of God’s covenant (re-establishing a community of justice and peace).   The Church takes up this symbolism in our practice of Holy Communion, a ritual meal signifying the future to which God is calling us and gifting us with a foretaste of that future now.  Only, in our table fellowship, Christ’s death and resurrection, rather than the Exodus from Egypt, is the sign and guarantee of God’s promise of salvation for the whole creation.

 

Sharing this meal is a practice of hope.  It manifests our union with God and one another, and nourishes our capacity for faith and love.  By it, we are given the grace to persevere in the work of love for God’s promised future, and the blessing of tasting the fulfillment of that promise in our life together now.  The sacrificial love of God manifest in Jesus’ death and resurrection is made real in this meal.  Each time we gather around the table, we affirm that life is meant to be like this; not the world of division and death that we too often experience.  There is another way to live.

 

In John’s Gospel, Jesus adds another dimension to our practice of hope.   Unlike the leaders of his time and ours, who are preoccupied with status and control, Jesus admonished his disciples that he has come to serve, not to be served.  At the table we set to celebrate God’s reign, the leaders are servants.  How much better would the Church be, if its clergy could only understand that we are the wait staff!  Jesus underscores this understanding of leadership by washing his disciples’ feet after sharing the Last Supper with them.   God’s reign is manifest in a community where power is exercised through mutual vulnerability and love, rather than through domination and manipulation. 

 

Imagine a community in which all are welcome at the table, and no one goes hungry!  Imagine a community in which leaders are trustworthy servants.  Imagine a community that gives thanks for the gifts of the earth, and shares them freely and equally in the service of liberation and life!  Imagine a God who comes close to us to break bread, pour wine, wash our feet, and die to set us free to live because God loves us that much, and for no other reason.  Imagine!   And give thanks for our Jewish brother, Jesus, and for our Jewish siblings then and now, for this gift of prophetic imagination.  May Passover and Easter inspire us to realize God’s hope for the world.

Saying Their Names: A Palm Sunday Sermon

As we begin our observance of Holy Week, let us pause with Jesus as he stands weeping just outside of Jerusalem.  I have diverted from the lectionary, which would have us read Luke’s Passion narrative today, so that we could take this moment with Jesus in his grief.  You see, Holy Week isn’t only about Jesus’ passion.  It is about the suffering of all the victims of injustice for whom Jesus weeps.   Let us pause and take all the time we need to acknowledge our collective failure to recognize the things that make for peace; our failure to recognize God’s presence with us.   We must mourn for Jesus this week, but not for him alone.

 

Palm Sunday is often described as the celebration of Jesus’ triumphant entry into Jerusalem, hailed as the long awaited king of Israel.  But Jesus didn’t see it that way.  He rode into the city with tears streaming down his cheeks.  “In the world of feeling, tears are the criterion of truth.”[1]  Only Luke’s Gospel has the courage to show us the truth of Palm Sunday and it is a bitter truth; there is no way to sugar-coat it.  Jesus’ tears break through every attempt to deny, minimize, or avoid the suffering of God’s people.[2] 

 

Jesus refuses to act as if everything is just fine.  Neither is he naïve about the prospects for change around the edges of the system.   He knows that things are about to fall apart.  Indeed, they need to fall apart, so that something genuinely new and live-giving can break through our indifference, conformity, and complicity with the way things are.  We cannot solve the problems we have created from within the level of consciousness that created them.   We must undergo metanoia, the transfiguration of our consciousness and awakening of our conscience generated by the breaking-open of our hearts. 

 

This is why lament is one of the central tools in the prophet’s toolkit.  Grief acknowledges the reality that things are not as they should be.  This isn’t easy.  Amma Syncletica said “We must kindle the divine fire in ourselves through tears and hard work.”  Acknowledging reality is hard work.  We can become so inured to the suffering within us and around us that it requires effort to break through our numbness. 

 

Jesus was anything but numb.  He wept over Jerusalem, acknowledging that the failure to pursue peace would have devastating consequences for his people.  He wept over the broken bodies, broken lives, and broken hearts that he encountered wherever he travelled; the crowds of suffering people clamoring for food, for healing, for justice, for life.  He knew their stories.  He knew their names.  His love for them drove him to Jerusalem to plead their cause and share their plight. 

 

Prophets, like Jesus, name names and grieve the losses that others refuse to acknowledge.  This is the root of the veneration of the martyrs.  “Saying their names” is an ancient prophetic practice that roots our energy for healing and reconciliation in compassion.  The Black Lives Matter movement has powerfully reminded us of this truth: prophetic criticism is energized, not merely by anger, but overwhelmingly by love:  Love for Trayvon Martin, for Ahmaud Arbery, for George Floyd, for Breonna Taylor, for Tamir Rice, for Addie Mae Collins, for Cynthia Wesley, for Carole Robinson, for Carol Denise McNair, for Martin Luther King Jr., for Medgar Evers, for Emmett Till and a litany of other victims of racist violence in the United States.  So many names.  So many tears.  So much love. 

 

We cannot change what we do not grieve.

 

Grief is a form of criticism.  Tears are the criterion of truth.  In the prayers of the people, we have been naming names:  of loved ones suffering and grieving, of neighbors who have no home to retreat to at night, of refugees fleeing terror and hunger.  All is not well.  The system isn’t working.  All this is obvious to the awakened heart.

 

“Weep.  Truly, there is no other way but this” said Abba Poemen, echoing the example of Jesus on the threshold of Holy Week.  Why is grief so important to our collective spiritual evolution?  Because, as Margarete Mitscherlich-Neilson observes,

 

the defense against shame, guilt, and mourning leads to emotional emptiness in the individual and, in consequence, to psychological and political immobility, to a lack of ideas and imagination in society.[3]

 

Tears cleanse the lens of perception so that we can acknowledge reality and begin to imagine new possibilities.  Things don’t have to be this way.  Jesus weeps as he rides into Jerusalem.  Then he goes to the Temple and drives out those who were using it as a pretext to exploit the poor, quoting the prophets before him, “It is written: ‘My house shall be a house of prayer’ but you have made it a den of robbers.”  The people are spellbound by Jesus’ teaching and his action, because he imagines and enacts a future different from the way things are. 

 

Walter Brueggemann, reflecting on Jesus weeping over Jerusalem, argues that

 

The riddle and insight of biblical faith is the awareness that only anguish leads to life, only grieving leads to joy, and only embraced endings permit new beginnings . . . Jesus knew what we numb ones must always learn again:  (a) that weeping must be real because endings are real; and (b) that weeping permits newness.  His weeping permits the kingdom to come.[4]

 

During Holy Week, we pause to weep with Jesus.  We rekindle the divine fire of love within ourselves through tears and hard work.  On Holy Saturday, we will symbolize the renewal of our imagination, the love that inspires new possibilities for life together, as we kindle the new fire and carry the Light of Christ back into the world.  But for now, let us pray for the gift of tears and for the courage to remember the names of those for whom, for too long, we have failed to weep.  Only then, will we be able to perceive the new thing that God is doing, the things that make for peace.  Amen.

 

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[1] E.M. Cioran, Tears and Saints, p. 55.

[2] Luke 19:41-48.

[3] Margaret Mitscherlich-Neilson, “The Inability to Mourn – Today” trans. Beverly R. Placzek, in The Problem of Loss and Mourning: Psychoanalytic Perspectives, p. 407.

[4] Walter Brueggemann, The Prophetic Imagination, p. 56, 58.

Good Teaching

 

Today marks the beginning of our Sunday school program, and many of you are well into back-to-school mode as students, parents, and teachers.  How appropriate, then, that our scripture readings today are about the public role of teachers and teaching.  While you may not think of yourself as a “teacher” in the narrow sense, teaching is a responsibility that we all share.  In our baptismal vows, we promise to proclaim by word and example the Good News of God in Christ.  We all teach through our speech and our actions.  Our faith is written in our lives.  What do others read there?  Is it Good News?

 

That is a question that should give us all pause.  It certainly gives me pause.  My priestly vows include the promise to pattern my life in accordance with the teachings of Christ so as to be a wholesome example to others.  Thank goodness the Letter of James reminds us that “all of us make many mistakes” and “mercy triumphs over judgment.”[1]  Even so, those who have a public teaching role are “judged with greater strictness,” and that is as it should be.

 

So, what does it take to be a good teacher? 

The first quality that comes to mind is the capacity to pay attention.  “The Lord God has given me the tongue of a teacher,” says the prophet Isaiah, “ so that I may know how to sustain the weary with a word.  Morning by morning he wakens – wakens my ear to listen as those who are taught.”[2]  Teachers must be teachable.  The authority of a teacher is grounded in the practice of listening.  It isn’t enough to know your subject matter.  You must know your students.

My model in this was Betty Weber, my high school French teacher.  She paid attention.  She knew whose parents were getting divorced.  She knew who was suffering from an eating disorder.  She knew who dominated the room and who tried to disappear into the background.  Because she listened carefully to what was spoken and unspoken, she knew how to sustain the weary with a word.  And she invited us to listen carefully to each other with the same respect with which she listened to us, which is how you learn a language – or anything else. 

Looking back on my experience of her teaching, I realize that – although I was dealing with my own problems as an adolescent – she didn’t see me as a problem to be solved.  She saw me as a person with a story to be heard.  As she dignified that story with her attention, she created space in which the teaching of French could be woven.  French wasn’t something external to be stuffed into me, but more like another thread giving structure, texture, and depth to the fabric of my life.   That is what good teaching feels like – it helps us to become ourselves.  A number of years after I graduated from high school, Betty was the first person I came out to as a gay man. 

The moment I begin to see another person as a problem to be solved rather than as person with a story to be heard, I lose the ground of my authority as a teacher.  Until I have entered into the other’s story, I don’t have a clue about what they need to learn or whether I am the person to teach them.  Whether you are leading a team in a business, or directing a choir, or parenting children, or providing medical care, or pastoring a congregation, if you wish your life to be an expression of good news, if you would sustain the weary with a word, then you must pay attention.  That is the deepest form of prayer. 

And when we fail in any of the above – and we will, frequently – it will most likely be because, somewhere along the way, we stopped listening.

But even when we’ve listened long and hard, the discipline of listening only lays the groundwork for the discipline of speaking.   In an age of social media, in which many now feel obliged to instruct the public by expressing their every thought and feeling, to document every moment of their day, and to tally up the likes and dislikes garnered from others as if these were a measure of truth, we’ve lost the art of disciplining our speech.  The Letter of James reminds us that not many are called to be teachers (in a formal, public sense), and invokes over-the-top images to express how important it is to discipline our speech – and our posts, and our clicks and our swipes – because what we say and do has consequences.[3]  

James places honoring the dignity of the human person created in the image of God at the very center of his teaching ethic.  Our speech can yield blessing – it can nourish that which is life-giving – or it can curse.  Our speaking is good news when it is marked by respect, integrity, and honesty.  That doesn’t mean that we only say “nice” things or fail to hold people accountable for their behavior.  Difficult things can be said in a respectful way, but it requires discipline.  Respect is to speech as a bridle is to a horse or a rudder is to a boat.  Without it, we quickly go astray.  And we have gone very far astray in much of our public discourse. 

Not all speech is free; some of it comes at great cost.  Good teachers know this and so choose their words carefully.  We need to remember that calling attention to behavior and its consequences is not the same thing as impugning a person’s motives or denigrating their humanity.  Holding each other accountable to the standards of justice and the requirement for healing is an act of love.  Speech and action marked by respect and responsibility are the sine qua non of good teaching. 

Good teaching requires the discipline of listening, and the discipline of speaking.  What is more, it requires the discipline of letting go.  This is what the prophet Isaiah is getting at when he willingly endures insult and spitting.  It is what Jesus is talking about when he says he must undergo great suffering, rejection, and death.[4]   The result of our teaching – its success or failure – is not under our control.  Teaching is always an act of faith, entrusting the work to the mercy of God.  It is God, finally, who vindicates us; sometimes, at a time and in a manner that is not of our choosing.  We may never know the result. 

This letting go is an act of sacrificial love.  Jesus did not try to control how his teaching was received.  He didn’t demand that people get it right.  He was curious about how people understood or misunderstood him; all the better to gauge and adapt his teaching.  But he didn’t try to force anything.  He even forbade his disciples from telling people the correct answer about his identity.[5]  No cheating!  Trust the process.  Trust the student.  And always, trust God to bring something genuinely new and life-giving out what seems like failure.  

 Listen.  Then speak.  Then let go.  All the best teachers, like dear Betty, are doing it.  Rabbi Jesus, our Teacher, showed us the way. 

 

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[1] James 3:2a; 2:13b.

[2] Isaiah 50:4.

[3] James 3:1-12.

[4] Isaiah 50:6; Mark 8:31.

[5] Mark 8:27-30.

Bread Memories

 

Sharing the Bread of Like at St. James

One of my son’s favorite books as a child was Norah Dooley’s Everybody Bakes Bread – part storybook and part cookbook.  Young Carrie and her baby brother are at each other, driving their mother crazy as she tries to prepare a loaf of bread one rainy Saturday morning.  Finally, Mom gets a twinkle in her eye, and sends Carrie off to the neighbor’s house to borrow a “three-handled rolling pin.”  Mom gets some relief, and Carrie begins a culinary adventure around her neighborhood, in which she samples Barbadian coconut bread, Indian chapatis, Southern cornbread, pita, challah, pupusas, and finally her own mother's Italian bread.  She never does find a three-handled rolling pin, but she does discover a multicultural community in which all people, however diverse they may be, share the same human hunger for bread and belonging. 

 

Bread is a universal symbol of life, and it runs through the biblical stories like Carrie moving from house to house in her neighborhood; each context is different, but the basic hunger is the same: the hunger for freedom, the hunger for community, the hunger for meaning.  Beyond our physical hunger there is a spiritual hunger, and it is the combination of our need for physical and spiritual sustenance that makes our hunger human, and our meals a celebration rather than just a biological necessity. 

 

I can still smell the bread my grandfather baked filling the whole house.  It was satisfying and delicious, filling up my senses, my belly, and my heart.  The love that it communicated: the sense of safety, the sense of home, satisfied a hunger that I didn’t even know I had.  I just took these things for granted at the time.  I pray God that all children can take such things for granted.  Just the memory of that bread has sustained me through a lifetime’s journey. 

 

I hope you all have such personal bread memories.  Our scriptures carry these bread memories for us collectively:  the bread Sarah served the visitors bringing news of her long-awaited pregnancy; the bread Joseph shared with his brothers during the famine in Egypt; the bread hastily made by Jewish slaves preparing to escape from Egypt; the bread God provided those former slaves in the wilderness; the shewbread kept in the Temple; the miraculous bread that fed Elijah, the exhausted prophet, and that he prepared to feed a starving widow; the miraculous bread that fed the crowds following Jesus;  the bread at the last supper Jesus shared with this friends.  The Bread of Life.  Bread, bread, bread.

 

Different times, different places, different bread, but one hunger.  The Biblical stories remind us that God knows our hunger and continually provides the bread we need.  In John’s Gospel, Jesus offers a discourse on the bread of life that bears within it all of these bread memories.  But he goes a step further.  He declares that he is the Bread of Life incarnate, and that God does not wish to feed us with bread alone, but with God’s own life.  The bread which God gives for the life of the world is Jesus’ flesh; and not for life only, but for eternal life. 

 

Our deepest hungers – for freedom, for belonging, for meaning – can only be satisfied by God.  And God gives Godself to us freely in Jesus, so that we may become like God and share in God’s eternal life.  God shared our human nature, so that we might share God’s divine nature.  Jesus is the lure that draws us to God, to the satisfaction of our deepest hunger, exercising a kind of gravitational pull that keeps us orbiting around the divine center of our being.  

 

We can resist that gravitational pull, or become mesmerized by the false promises of transient things that never quite satisfy our craving: a political savior, an ideology, a lover, a job, a drug.  Such things leave us complaining for more.  Jesus echoes the Word of the Lord spoken through the prophet Isaiah:

 

Why do you spend your money for that which is not bread,
    and your labor for that which does not satisfy?
Listen carefully to me, and eat what is good,
    and delight yourselves in rich food.
Incline your ear, and come to me;
    listen, so that you may live.
I will make with you an everlasting covenant,
    my steadfast, sure love for David.  – Isaiah 55:2-3

 

It is only in relationship with God, in the steadfast, sure love that God bears for us, that we find the bread of life.  Jesus embodies this very love and shares it with us freely.   The sacrament of Holy Communion carries this bread memory for us, such that when we receive it, we are united with Jesus in God’s mission to satisfy the world’s hunger.  “Therefore be imitators of God, as beloved children, and live in love, as Christ loved us and gave himself up for us, a fragrant offering and sacrifice for God.”  - Ephesians 5:1-2

 

May our lives, like fresh baked bread, become fragrant offerings to feed the world’s hunger for love.  In the name of the True Bread, who comes down from heaven and gives life to the world.  Amen.

The Light Within

 

The Gospel of John tells us that “The true light, which enlightens everyone, was coming into the world.”[1]  It still is, but can we perceive it?  The light is coming, but are we looking for it in the right place? 

 

Often, we think of the light as outside of us, off somewhere in the distance.  If we wander too far away from the source, the light becomes dimmer and dimmer until it is no longer visible at all.  But what if the light that is coming into the world emerges from the heart, and is available to enlighten everyone because we already carry it wherever we go?  It is here that our Quaker relative, Thomas Kelly, invites us to look for the light:

 

Deep within us all, there is an amazing inner sanctuary of the soul, a holy place, a Divine Center, a speaking Voice, to which we may continuously return .  .  . calling us home unto itself. Yielding to these persuasions, gladly committing ourselves in body and soul, utterly and completely, to the Light Within, is the beginning of true life. It is a dynamic center, a creative Life that presses to birth within us. It is a Light Within which illumines the face of God and casts new shadows and new glories upon the face of humanity.  It is a seed stirring to life if we do not choke it.  It is the Shekinah of the soul, the Presence in the midst.  Here is the Slumbering Christ, stirring to be awakened, to become the soul we clothe earthly form and action.  And Christ is within us all.[2]

 

“Christ is within us all.”  The Light of Christ, the source of enlightenment, salvation, reconciliation, healing – is within us.  This is consistent with the message of the Gospel of John.  Christ is the eternal Word through whom all things were made, the life that is the light of all people, the light that the darkness cannot overcome. [3] The light of Christ within shines through us to illuminate a world that is radiant with the glory of God.  John’s Gospel echoes the psalmist: “For with you is the fountain of life; in your light we see light.”[4] 

 

Note the language of seeing: of perception and illumination.  The light within is not a little candle twinkling in our heart; it is the capacity to perceive reality holistically and compassionately with an undefended heart.  The light within enables us to see as God sees. 

 

John the baptizer testified to this light.  He refused to identify it with anyone or anything outside of himself:  not the Temple, or the Torah, or the priesthood; certainly not Caesar.  Religious leaders tried to force John to conform to their understanding, to the categories that they could interpret and control.  John’s reputation as a wild man came from his refusal to recognize any human authority as ultimate; he refused to concede to anyone control over access to the light.   He doesn’t conform to other’s expectations or resist them.  They just don’t matter.  He is too engaged in bearing witness to the light. 

 

Nor did John claim to be the light for anyone else:  he was neither the Messiah, nor Elijah, nor the prophet (he was merely a prophet).  The baptism he offered was an external sign of an inward reality.  John’s baptism was a preparation for, and public commitment to, the light that is coming into the world.  He baptized with water in anticipation of one who baptizes with the Holy Spirit, transfiguring our perception so that we become transparent to the divine light within.  

 

Jesus is the Christ because in him we find the perfect mirror in which to see the light within reflected back to us.  St. Paul understood this well when he wrote, 

 

For it is the God who said, ‘Let light shine out of darkness,’ who has shone in our hearts to give the light of the knowledge of the glory of God in the face of Jesus Christ.  But we have this treasure in clay jars, so that it may be made clear that this extraordinary power belongs to God and does not come from us.[5] 

 

The light does not come from us; it comes through us.  We are not the power source, but we can be a transmitter of the light. 

 

Embracing the light within opens up a tremendous field of freedom, but it also demands that we take responsibility for our lives.  Here again, St. Paul, was on target when, after admonishing the church in Philippi to “Let the same mind be in you that was in Christ Jesus,” he concludes,

 

Therefore, my beloved, just as you have always obeyed me, not only in my presence, but much more now in my absence, work out your own salvation with fear and trembling; for it is God who is at work in you, enabling you both to will and to work for his good pleasure.[6]

 

We can listen to a teacher like St. Paul, but the truth to which they bear witness has to be experienced directly.  It must become internal to us.  Even our devotion to Jesus and his way can too easily remain a purely formal, external, even transactional relationship (I will worship you if  you save me), rather than an internal reality (I will have the same mind as you).  We have to engage our own inner work.

 

And that work, though it is for our healing, can evoke a good deal of fear and trembling, because while the light is within us, so is the darkness.  Jesus himself teaches us that “The eye is the lamp of the body.  So, if your eye is healthy, your whole body will be full of light; but if your eye is unhealthy, your whole body will be full of darkness.  If then the light in you is darkness, how great is that darkness.”[7]

 

As our perception is purified by the work of the Holy Spirit within us, then we become full of light.  But in the process of inner illumination, it can be disturbing to confront dimensions of our experience previously concealed by the darkness.   Father Thomas Keating offers a helpful image to express what I am trying to describe.

 

Suppose we were in a dimly lit room.  The place might look fairly clean.  But install a hundred bulbs of a thousand watts each, and put the whole room under a magnifying glass.  The place would begin to crawl with all kind of strange and wonderful little creatures.  It would be all you could do to stay there.  So it is with our interior.  When God turns up the voltage, our motivation begins to take on a completely different character, and we reach out with great sincerity for the mercy of God and for God’s forgiveness.  That is why trust in God is so important.  Without trust we are likely to run away or say, “There must be some better way of going to God.”[8]

 

This is another aspect of John the Baptist.  He is a wilderness prophet, and trusting the light within can at times feel like an expedition into the wilderness:  there be monsters there!  But it is only in the light of God’s love that whatever pangs of conscience, or stuck emotions, or trauma carried in our psyche and nervous system, can be revealed and healed.  Perhaps we so often seek the light outside of ourselves because we don’t want to confront the darkness within.  But we must work out our own salvation in fear and trembling, trusting in God’s grace.  Then, in God’s light we will see light, and drink from the fountain of living water within gushing up to eternal life.   And this light will radiate in such a way as to bring healing, not only to us, but to the world.  As Cynthia Bourgeault suggests,

 

When we see from resonant wholeness, what we see is the Kingdom of heaven, which is neither a place you go to when you die, nor a human utopia created by all sorts of pluralistic agendas.  Nor is it something that you simply discover, “Oh, it was there all along.”  I think the secret to it: we co-create it, because the light by which we see is also a stream of energy that beams out to it and allows it, in that light, to become what it can’t be until it’s suffused with the light.  What happens when the sun suddenly hits a valley where it’s been cloudy, and all of a sudden, the whole thing is bathed in light and turns golden?  It’s the same thing, but it’s the same thing at a different energy level.  That’s what happens.  “Light shines forth from a being of light,” says the Gospel of Thomas, “and lights up the whole world.”  That as we begin to create the stable radiant field, it’s the quality of that presence that goes forth into the broken and dark and hideous and maimed places of our culture and changes them, not by programs, but by the light itself.[9]

 

Or as Jesus said, “You are the light of the world.”[10]  Amen.

 

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[1] John 1:9

[2] Thomas R. Kelly, A Testament of Devotion (New York: HarperCollins, 1992), p. 3.

[3] John 1:1-5.

[4] Psalm 36:9.

[5] 2 Corinthians 4:

[6] Philippians 2:5, 12-13.

[7] Matthew 6:22.

[8] Thomas Keating, Open Mind Open Heart (New York: The Continuum Publishing Company, 1994), p. 94.

[9] Cynthia Bourgeault, “Introductory Wisdom School Transcript,” (Center for Contemplation and Action, 2019), p.  155.

[10] Matthew 5:14a.