The Great Experiment - Easter 2010 (April 4, 2010)

The Great Experiment

J. Barry Vaughn. Easter 2010 (April 3, 2010). St. Alban’s Episcopal Church, Birmingham, AL.

The great physicist Albert Einstein formulated his theory of relativity by conducting what he called a “thought experiment.” Instead of going to a laboratory and firing up the Bunsen burner or measuring the velocity of electrons, he simply imagined what would happen to two clocks. One would be on a train that could travel at the speed of light and the other would remain stationary. OK, then, that’s about all I know about Einstein and the theory of relativity. But I like the idea of thought experiments, so let’s conduct a theological thought experiment.

Imagine a world without Easter. In the first book of the Narnia chronicles – The Lion, the Witch, and the Wardrobe - C.S. Lewis tells us that Narnia is under the spell of an evil and powerful witch who has decreed that it will always be winter and never Christmas. But instead let’s imagine that it is always Lent and never Easter or simply that there is no Easter because, after all, Lent implies an Easter at the end of forty days.

What would such a world look like?

First, the New Testament would be entirely different. If we removed Christmas from the NT, we would lose only 2 or 3 chapters at the beginning of Matthew and Luke. There are no other references to the birth of Jesus. But if we remove Easter, then we lose the ending of all four gospels; we lose most of Paul’s letters because it seems as though almost every other sentence in Paul refers to the resurrection or at least presupposes it; and we lose much of the rest of the NT because on almost every page is an idea, a fact, a concept that makes no sense without the resurrection. The gospels make absolutely no sense without the resurrection. Take the resurrection out of the gospels and what do we have? We have some lovely parables; some pretty exciting miracles (hard to beat that one with the loaves and fishes); some truly impressive moral teaching; and several other very nice things. But Buddhism also has some great parables; Islam tells us of miracles performed by the prophet Muhammad; and every other moral and religious system in the world has a set of moral teachings that is probably 80% identical to the things that Jesus said.

In other words, without the resurrection, without Easter, the question we have to ask about the New Testament, in general, and the Gospels, in particular, is . . . so what? Why pay any special attention to Jesus of Nazareth? He was an inspiring speaker; he showed remarkable compassion; he may even have worked miracles; but he was not significantly different from half a dozen other spiritual, moral, or religious figures.

Second, let’s take Easter or resurrection out of history. If we take the resurrection out of history, then we suddenly lose our bearings. In the west, the resurrection is the great starting point. Our calendars begin with the life of Jesus (as I’ve already implied) not because of his parables or miracles but because he died and rose again. The resurrection of Jesus completely re-oriented life. In the Roman world, Sunday was not a day of rest; it was the first day of the work week, but the resurrection of Jesus transformed a working day into a joyous festival.

Third, take the resurrection out of the equation and there is no satisfactory explanation for the rise of the Christian church. By the end of the first century the Christian faith had spread as far west as the British isles; as far south as Ethiopia; and as far east as India. Why and how did this happen? What energized the followers of Jesus to risk their lives to take their message to the ends of the earth? What was it about the message they proclaimed caught the imaginations of people as diverse as the peoples of Britain, Ethiopia, and India? Well, let’s go back to our thought experiment. Let’s imagine that Paul and the other Christian missionaries of the first century had told their listeners the story of a Jesus who had taught people the story of the Good Samaritan and the Prodigal Son and had healed the sick and even multiplied the loaves and fishes and then had been betrayed and arrested and tried and condemned and executed and then… well, that was pretty much it. What a … well… sad and dull and somewhat tedious little story.

But that is not the story they shared in Jerusalem and Judea and Samaria and took to the ends of the earth. Instead, they told about the parables and miracles and the suffering and crucifixion but what made the story different and caught the imagination of their hearers was the absolutely staggering ending: Jesus did not stay in the tomb; he rose again on the third day.

Let’s take the thought experiment one step further. What difference would it make if we acted as though the resurrection was real? I ask this question because I’m convinced that most of us think and act as though there was no Easter.

We’re great about giving up martinis and Marlboros for Lent but when Easter has come and gone, it’s pretty much business as usual.

What if instead of thinking of Easter as the end of Lent, we thought of it as the beginning of the most exciting part of the year? What if instead of giving up something for Lent, we took up things for Easter? What if we lived as if Jesus really did rise again on the third day?

Easter makes a difference, the resurrection makes a difference, because it reveals God’s plan for creation. It’s like turning to the back of the book and finding the answers or seeing how the story ends. It tells us that death does not have the last word. It tells us that God longs to gather human life in all its flesh and blood and messiness into the divine life and that there is future for flesh and blood beyond death and decay.

How might the world be different, how might we be different, if we took the resurrection seriously? The resurrection of Jesus is the story of a man unjustly condemned to death who is vindicated by God by being raised to new life. What does that imply for us? It implies that we belong on the side of those who have been unjustly and unfairly treated by political and economic systems – the unemployed, the uninsured, the unjustly imprisoned. The story of the resurrection is the ultimate miracle of healing. All healing is a way of pushing back death. The story of Easter tells us that part of our job as Christians is to bring wholeness to a world of fragmentation and death; to bring hope to the depressed and despondent; to seek out the lonely and unloved.

N.T. Wright, the Bishop of Durham, and former professor of New Testament at Oxford, has wonderful parable about the resurrection of Jesus. Imagine that a wealthy patron of the arts has given a magnificent painting to a church. The congregation is grateful but their church is small and there really isn’t a good place in it for the painting. They try hanging it behind the altar but it’s too tall. They try putting it in the narthex but there isn’t enough light there. They put it in the parish hall but the heat and humidity might damage the painting. Finally, they come to the conclusion that to accommodate the painting they will have to tear down their church and build a new one.

That is what the resurrection implies. We have tried to modify the story of the resurrection to make ourselves comfortable, to accommodate the injustices of our economic and political systems. We have tried to tame the story of Easter to fit our belief in a world in which there are no surprises, no miracles, and in which dead men certainly do not rise again. But the resurrection will not be trimmed or modified.

In the Easter story we have been given a thing both surpassingly beautiful and uncommonly strange, so beautiful and strange that it does not fit into our world. We live in a world of death and decay but Easter speaks to us of a world in which death is destroyed, the world is renewed, and we can be born again to lives full of joy and wonder. But this news sounds too good to be true. We have been disappointed too many times, and as the poet says, we are “half in love with easeful death.”

Our natural reaction is to find ways to take away the beauty and strangeness of Jesus’ resurrection but instead we should ask, “How does this strange and beautiful thing change us and change our world?” That’s when the real work begins. That’s when we start to rebuild ourselves and our world in the image of the resurrection.

The Lord's Prayer 2: Hallowed be thy Name, thy kingdom come, thy will be done on earth as it is in heaven...

Hallowed has an old fashioned ring to it. We call Oct. 31 Halloween because it is the eve of All Hallows’ or All Saints’ Day. The saints are the hallowed ones, that is, the holy ones. So, hallowed means holy. Hallowed be thy name means may your name be holy. But that just begs the question, what is holiness?

If hallowed has an old fashioned ring to it, then holy has a somewhat negative connotation. We generally associate holiness with morality. A holy person is surely a person of unimpeachable morals, and generally, we define holiness in negative terms – a holy person is one who doesn’t lie, cheat, steal, carouse, and so on.

However, I think an old gospel song has something to teach us about what it means to be holy. Do you know the old gospel song, “Take time to be holy”?

Take time to be holy, speak oft with thy Lord;

Abide in Him always, and feed on His Word.
Make friends of God’s children, help those who are weak,
Forgetting in nothing His blessing to seek.

Take time to be holy, be calm in thy soul,
Each thought and each motive beneath His control.
Thus led by His Spirit to fountains of love,
Thou soon shalt be fitted for service above.

What I gather from this old hymn is that holiness is a more positive than negative. It’s about what we do rather than what we do not do. Furthermore, it is not as much about morality as it is about having a close relationship with God.

So back to the Lord’s Prayer. What does it mean, then, to hallow God’s Name or to pray that God’s Name may be hallowed? First, we have to realize that in Judaism to speak of God’s Name is just a more reverent way of speaking of God. The rabbis frequently spoke of Ha Shem, that is, the Name, because to speak of God directly was regarded as irreverent or impertinent. So the prayer is really saying, May God be hallowed or holy.

But surely God is already holy. To pray “hallowed be your Name” seems as redundant as saying May earth be round or May fire be hot. So we have to ask, where and when is God’s Name not hallowed? Then the answer becomes obvious: God’s Name is not hallowed on earth.

On earth we hold many things as holy--success, fame, riches, sexual pleasure—but God is seldom on the list. We take time to watch too much TV, have an extra piece of cheese cake, sleep an extra hour in the morning, but we seldom take time to “speak oft with thy Lord; / Abide in Him always, and feed on His Word./ Make friends of God’s children, / help those who are weak…” and so on.

So to pray Hallowed be thy Name is to pray not that God would change but that we would change, that we would become people who will hallow God’s Name by our words and deeds and that our world would become the kind of place where God’s holiness would be acknowledged.

And that leads directly to the next two petitions of the Lord’s Prayer: Thy kingdom come; thy will be done on earth as it is in heaven.

The first phrase of the Lord’s Prayer already teaches us that there is a distance between where we are and where God is. God is in heaven; we are on earth. But the third phrase of the Lord’s Prayer—“your kingdom come”-- teaches us that God longs to collapse that distance, to bring heaven and earth together. But this petition is also one of the most subversive prayers we can pray.

In this petition we are acknowledging that our world is not as it should be. One of Jesus’ most outrageous statements was “Blessed are they who hunger and thirst for righteousness for they shall be satisfied.” Righteousness is that state of affairs when the hungry are fed, captives are freed, the widow and the orphan have an honored place, and we would welcome the homeless poor into our own homes.

This prayer is subversive because it exposes that fact that none of earth’s kingdoms is the kingdom of God. It is subversive because it teaches us to look for and long for the day when God will rule. Earthly kingdoms will come to an end and God will rule alone.

This is a subversive prayer because it reminds us that God does not single out any nation for a special blessing. In 1914 German soldiers marched to war with the phrase Gott mit uns (“God with us”) inscribed on their belt buckles.

When I hear “God bless America” or see it on a bumper sticker, I always mentally add “and God bless everyone else, too,” because righteousness is no more at home in America than anywhere else on earth. The poor, the hungry, and the homeless in our midst show us how far we are from God’s kingdom.

While there is much that we can and should do to make this world resemble God’s kingdom, the Lord’s Prayer teaches us that in the end transforming this sad, old world into a place that welcomes its rightful Ruler is not so much our accomplishment as it is God’s gift. We pray, “THY kingdom come”. It is God who comes to us, God who bridges the gap, collapses the great distance between heaven and earth. In the parable of the prodigal son, the dissolute young man wakes up one day and realizes that he is in a “far country” and begins his journey back home. But when he comes within sight of his father, his father rushes out to meet him. And so it is with us. We are in a “far country” but even now the Father is rushing toward us with arms open wide in love.

Finally, we pray “thy will be done on earth as it is in heaven”. In a sense, all three of the petitions we have considered today are saying the same thing. When God’s Name is truly hallowed, and God’s kingdom comes, then God’s will is done on earth as in heaven. But the final petition also touches us in the very center of our being.

We live in a world which exalts individual achievement. The athlete who wins the gold medal in the Olympics gets her picture on a box of Wheaties; the winning team in the World Series is invited to the Oval Office to meet the President; the candidate who fights his way through the primaries, wins his party’s nomination, and has the best sound bites gets to be the President. But the Lord’s Prayer teaches us that there is something more important than the single-minded pursuit of success and self-aggrandizement. “thy will be done on earth as it is in heaven”.

I don’t think it is a coincidence that this petition echoes Jesus’ prayer in the Garden of Gethsemane. In contemplating the terrible trial that awaited him, Jesus prayer, “:Not my will but thine be done.”

“Thy will be done on earth as it is in heaven” may be the most difficult phrase of the Lord’s Prayer for us to say, because we have no idea what God’s will might be. We can only pray this petition because of the second word of the Lord’s Prayer – Father. Jesus has already assured us that we are praying to a loving Parent, a Parent who wants the best for us. The problem is that although we think we know what’s best for us, the truth is that we do not really know. But God does. To pray “Thy will be done on earth as it is in heaven” is to put our trust in the One to whom we pray.

C.S. Lewis said that in the end we can either say to God “Thy will be done” or God can say to us, “Very well, then, THY will be done.” Imagine the consequences of the latter: To prefer our own will to God’s will is to drive down a dark road without headlights, it is to set out into the wilderness without a map. But to say, “Thy will be done on earth as it is in heaven” is to trust that God loves us, that God knows the route that will take us safely through the wilderness, and that God has already made a way and prepared a place for us at the end.

“Hallowed be your Name, your kingdom come, your will be done on earth as in heaven…” These three phrases take us from heaven to earth; from the heavenly realm in which God’s will is done, to our world in which anything but God’s will is done, to the assurance that the day is coming when earth will resemble heaven and God will be at home among women and men. So we believe, so we pray, so we act. May it be so. Amen.

The Lord's Prayer 1: Our Father in Heaven

According to Luke, Jesus’ disciples came to him and said, “Lord, teach us to pray,” and Jesus replied, “When you pray, say, ‘Father’…” or as Matthew has it, “Pray then this way…” In either case, the Lord’s Prayer is (if you will) the principal text in Jesus’ school of prayer. Even if it were not presented to us as Jesus’ own teaching on how to pray, it would be well worth our time to pay careful attention to this prayer. It has been on the lips and in the hearts of Christians for 2000 years. Throughout that time it has been said innumerable times every day and in every human language. Along with “Now I lay me down to sleep…” and “God is great, God is good…” it is usually the first prayer that we learn as children. The Lord’s Prayer begins and ends in God’s heavenly kingdom: “Our Father in heaven…” and “the kingdom, the power, and the glory are yours, now and forever.” But the route it takes away from and back to God’s presence runs through the very heart of human life. So I invite you to join me in sitting with the other disciples at the feet of Jesus to learn what he meant when he said, “Pray then this way, ‘Our Father…’”

Today I want to look at four lessons we learn from the Lord’s Prayer: First, prayer is a skill we need to learn. Secondly, all Christian prayer is corporate. Thirdly, the Lord’s prayer teaches us that God relates to us as a parent to children. And fourthly, that we can never go so far from God that he will be unable to hear our prayer.

“Pray then this way…” implies that we do not know how to pray. How could that be? Isn’t prayer a universal human impulse? Why did the disciples go to Jesus and say, “Lord, teach us to pray”? They were Jews, and at the time of Jesus’ birth, the Jewish faith was over a thousand years old. For over a thousand years the Jewish people had raised their hearts and hands to heaven and called upon the Almighty. Even if they had been Greeks or Romans, they would have known how to pray. All of the world’s religions have teachings and traditions about prayer. Doesn’t prayer rise spontaneously from a feeling of gratitude? I think that all of us have a natural desire to offer thanks for the good things that come to us unsought and unasked for – the startling red of a maple in autumn or the stranger who opens a door for us when our arms are loaded with groceries. Prayer seems not only natural but inevitable when disaster strikes – when a newborn’s fever grows higher and higher and nothing seems to bring it down, what parent in the world does not turn to prayer? When the crops fail, or the river overflows its banks, or there hasn’t been a drop of rain in months, is there anyone who does not at least yearn to believe that there is a God who will hear and answer our prayers? And especially at death, don’t we naturally turn to prayer to pray for peace for those who have departed this life?

Prayer appears to be a natural human response to both the good and the bad situations that inevitably accompany human life. And yet, whether we read Matthew or Luke’s version of the Lord’s Prayer, Jesus seemed to think he needed to teach his disciples to pray.

Why do we need to know how to pray? The Lord’s Prayer itself is the answer. It is at once both simple enough for a child to learn and understand and also a deep vein of spiritual treasure from which the greatest of saints can mine inexhaustible riches. To be sure, prayer is a natural and universal human impulse and God hears all prayers. However, while our natural impulses are all God’s good gifts, they need to be shaped and trained. It is natural for a child to want to speak, but without hearing her parents talk to her, she will not advance beyond the oooohs and ahhs of infancy. Hunger is a natural impulse, but a child needs to be introduced slowly and gradually to healthy and nutritious food. And so it is with prayer. The spiritual life requires as much training as sports or music. The Lord’s Prayer is a set of exercises from which both the beginner and the advanced student can benefit.

The first word is the first lesson: “Our…” By nature our prayers are selfish and individualistic. We seek to get our own needs met. But the Lord’s Prayer teaches us that we are not isolated individuals but parts of a greater whole. As with the Nicene creed, so with the Lord’s Prayer, this is a text for the baptized. In the early church, those who were to be baptized at the Easter vigil were taught the Apostles’ creed and the Lord’s prayer either right before or immediately after baptism. Baptism makes us no longer an “I” but a “we” . “We believe…” “Our Father…”

Perhaps the greatest and most destructive mistake of the modern West is individualism. In contrast to human experience from the beginning of time, the women and men of the modern West believe themselves to be captains of their fate and masters of their destiny. But in John Donne’s words, “No man is an island entire of itself; every man is a piece of the Continent, a part of the main....” This is even more true for Christians. Baptism makes us members of the body of Christ and participants in a fellowship that extends throughout time and space. There is no such thing as a solitary Christian, and there is never a Christian who prays alone. And this is the first thing the Lord’s Prayer teaches us. “Our Father…”

The second lesson is about the nature of God. Without a guide us it would be natural to think of God as remote, removed, indifferent, or perhaps even hostile. This seems to have been the belief of the Hellenistic religions. It was assumed as a matter of course that the gods were vindictive and vengeful and so sacrifices were offered to acquire their good will or to avert their anger. One did not have a parent/child relationship with the gods; at best it was more like master/slave. But the Jewish faith taught that God freely bound himself in love to his people in a covenant relationship that could not be destroyed. And Jesus opened the vision of God’s love even more and taught that the relationship that Israel had with God was the relationship that God desires to have with each of us. And this is expressed in the second word of the prayer: “Father”.

Before I go any further I have to acknowledge that “Father” is a problematic word. A few years ago a wit took a jab at our preoccupation with inclusive language:

How shall we sing the praise of Him

Who is no longer He?

Where shall we go to learn

The sex of Deity?

“Father” is problematic for many reasons. First, it implies that God is male or at least masculine. But feminists have taught us that masculine and feminine are cultural constructs. They are categories we impose on each other, but in no sense are they natural or universal. God is beyond our limited concept of what it means to be masculine or feminine. The great Catholic feminist Dorothy Day said that God’s love can be “harsh and dangerous”, but God’s love is also soft and yielding. Love makes God vulnerable. Isn’t that one of the main things we learn from crucifixion? Love took God the Son on a journey from heavenly glory to ignominious death on a cross, from the right of the Father to the right hand of a petty criminal. Harsh and dangerous are categories many of us associate with masculinity, but vulnerability is a quality often associated with the feminine. In a sense, addressing God as Father is a subtle way of undermining our assumptions about both the feminine and the masculine, because we see in God qualities associated with both genders. God is both yielding and resistant, both fierce and tender. We limit ourselves when we define masculine and feminine too narrowly, but God defies our limits and expectations.

However, the great problem of addressing God as Father is that it appears to bless a form of patriarchy. I think the way to deal with this is to acknowledge that it is true. While I believe that the Lord’s Prayer is a universal prayer that Christians always will and always should pray, it is also a product of a different time, place, and culture. The world out of which the Lord’s Prayer came privileged the masculine and could not conceive of God as other than Father. Jesus shared many of the assumptions of that world, but in his acceptance of women as his disciples, in his defiance of the conventions that kept women and men apart, and in his choice of women to be the first witnesses of his resurrection he helped lay the groundwork for the full empowerment of women, even though that took centuries and is not yet fully complete.

I sincerely believe that the day will come when someone will compose a prayer addressing God as Mother, a prayer that will catch our imaginations and move our hearts. Such a prayer will not supplant the Lord’s Prayer but it will balance it. But that day has not come yet. However, when we pray “your kingdom come” I believe we are praying for the day when women and men will share equally in God’s work and when we will perceive that all along God has been as much our Mother as our Father.

The last point I want to make to day is about how we locate God. The Lord’s Prayer addresses God in heaven. The third and fourth words of the Lord’s Prayer give people almost as much trouble as Father. To many “in heaven” implies that God is far away and not near, that God is out there instead of in here. Heaven is infinitely far away. How, we think, could a God who dwells in heaven be concerned with whether or not we find a job or our spouse’s emotional cruelty or the incessant phone calls from bill collectors? How, we wonder, could the high God of heaven bend his ears to hear not only our voices but even the silent prayers of our hearts? That is precisely the point. By teaching us to pray to our Father in heaven, Jesus is telling us that distance is not a factor with God. No matter where are and no matter where God is, God hears us. As Paul writes in Romans 8, “nothing can separate us from the love of God in Christ Jesus”, not even the distance between heaven and earth.

However, there is another message in the third and fourth words of the Lord’s Prayer. To pray to our Father in heaven is an acknowledgement that our world is not yet as it should be and we are not yet as we should be. We are not yet ready to welcome God’s rule. Our world is still a place of injustice and cruelty, of deceit and treachery. The Bible does promise that God will one day come to dwell among us, but that day has not yet come.

The Christian faith teaches us that God is both beyond us and within us, both transcendent and immanent. The Lord’s Prayer expresses the longing that God’s world and our world will one day be identical. But in this present time we must sadly acknowledge that that is not yet the case. While present with us by the power of the Holy Spirit, God does not yet dwell fully in our world.

When we pray the Lord’s Prayer we discover that we are not alone, but rather God’s beloved daughters and sons who are invited into a relationship with their heavenly Father and with Christians in all times and all places and that that the deepest desires of our heart are heard in heavenly places. “Pray then this way…”

Two collections of my sermons are on Amazon.com

Thanks to everyone who reads the sermons on my blog. I thought you might like to know that two collections of my sermons are available on Amazon.com. The first is entitled As One Unknown and the second is We Would See Jesus. Each one is $20.

As One Unknown

Table of contents

He comes to us

Introduction 7

Hymn tune: Bluff Park 9

On a day when men were numbered 13

What the wind said to the shepherds 19

In the beginning was the word 25

The toils, the conflicts, the sufferings

In a new light 35

Cleave the wood and I am there 41

Loaf bread and jug wine 49

Strong at the broken places 57

Worthily lamenting our sins 63

All washed up 69

One unknown

The bad news of Easter 77

An idle tale 83

But we had hoped… 91

A tall tale 95

Seeing Jesus again 99

Our own experience

Taking big steps 109

Enemies: A love story 117

Candles against the darkness 123

If the Lord is with us, Why? 129

Under the sign of the question mark 135

Between “Once upon a time”… 141

Nostalgia and remembrance 147

His fellowship

Saints and sinners 155

Has God rejected his people? 161

Outside agitator 169

A more excellent way 175

The Pharisee and the Prostitute 183

Weaving community 189

The impossible possibility 195

We Would See Jesus

Table of Contents

Introduction 9

Invocation 11

Waiting for Jesus

Waiting for God 15

Remembering the future 19

Songs of exile 23

Let the skies pour down righteousness 27

New lamps for old 31

The kingdom of love 35

It’s good to be king! 39

Amid tears and great laughter 43

Seeing and hearing Jesus

We would see Jesus 49

Guess who’s coming to dinner? 53

Practice resurrection 57

Keeping secrets 61

The enduring word 65

Words, words, words 69

Named, not numbered 73

The sound of silence 77

The language of heaven 81

God is in the details 85

St. Paul’s Christmas story 87

Hearts and voices heavenward raise 91

Following Jesus

Dancing with God 97

Bread alone? 101

Errand into the wilderness 103

Carry-on baggage 107

Why is this night different? 111

The foolish farmer 115

Taking the plunge 119

Final Jeopardy 123

Mind your manners 127

Dr. King remembered 131

The view from Mt. Nebo 137

Other sermons

What does love taste like? 143

You are what you eat 147

O brave new world 151

Family values 155

The devil made me do it 161

Crossing boundaries 165

Life before and after the comma 169

Very good or very nice?

“In the beginning God created the heavens and the earth… God saw everything that he had made and, indeed, it was very good.”

In the aftermath of the magnitude 7 earthquake that struck Haiti recently, we may want to question God’s judgment that the world he created is not only good but very good. Or we may want to question God: How can you create such a world and then declare it to be good?

Part of the problem lies with the word “good.” Being southerners we assume that “good” means “nice,” but that is not what God said.

We want a nice world but instead God gave us a good world. We want a world, a universe, created by Disney, an amusement park world. We want a world with manageable risks, a world in which we can have carefully managed adventures, a world over which God presides as a kind of benevolent, cosmic policeman or nanny. But God gave us a world in which there is real risk and real adventure, a world in which the stakes are high, a world in which our lives and eternal destinies are at risk.

Look around at this good world which God has given us. Think not only of “this fragile earth, our island home” but think cosmically. The universe began with an unimaginable act of violence – the Big Bang. The Big Bang hurled into motion a violent universe. Stars are born, grow old, and die long, protracted deaths, ending as black holes, dense balls of matter whose gravity is so strong that not even light can escape from them.

Life on earth is no less violent. Most species do not survive the long evolutionary climb up from the primordial protein soup. God gave us a dangerous, violent, and beautiful world which is not nice but is good.

So in what sense can this world be said to be good? How can it be good if life for most creatures is “nasty, brutish, and short”?

In Genesis 1 God not only said that the world was good, God also charged us with stewardship of the world. A world that produces earthquakes and hurricanes plainly needs a great deal of stewardship.

Scientist and theologian John Polkinghorne said that God made the world so that the world makes itself, and a world that is always making itself is a dangerous, violent, and unstable place. The Haiti earthquake shows us how true this is. Our task of stewardship is to mitigate what happens when the world makes itself.

Economist Joseph Schumpeter coined the phrase “creative destruction.” We all know intuitively that creation often requires destruction. It took the deaths of thousands of young men in the Civil War to bring an end to American slavery. The price we paid for the fall of the Soviet Union was the creation of a more dangerous and unstable world. The renewal of our inner cities requires the destruction of blocks of slums.

However, our faith, our hope is that destruction yields creation, new life, resurrection. At the very heart of the Christian faith is a powerful symbol of death and destruction – the Cross. But it is a symbol of death that has become the symbol of ultimate hope.

I believe that God’s heart broke when the earthquake struck Haiti. But I also believe that God’s heart had been breaking for Haiti long before the earthquake. God’s heart was broken with Haiti’s poverty, disease, and corrupt government. And I believe that what really breaks God’s heart is our failure to be stewards of creation, our failure to care for and love our sisters and brothers in places such as Haiti.

Where was God, we wonder, when the earthquake struck Haiti or the planes struck the World Trade center or when Katrina hit New Orleans? It’s a fair question and God is a very big God and doesn’t mind our questions, even our angry questions. But the more important question, the question that should really matter to us is Where were we when the earthquake hit Haiti? And where had we been for decades before that when Haiti and its people were suffering?

May our prayer today and always be that our hearts will break when God’s heart breaks, that we will be stewards of this world that is good but not always nice, that we will be there for our sisters and brothers in Haiti and wherever suffering holds sway, and that from every terrible destructive event God will bring creation, new life, and resurrection.

When water becomes wine

Today’s sermon is part 2 of the sermon I started last week. The thread that connects them is water. Life on earth is very wet. Now Dr. Vaughn will give a pop quiz. How much of the earth’s surface is covered with water? (This is the audience participation segment, so don’t be afraid to shout it out!) The answer: about 75%. And how much of the human body is water? About 60%.

Water is easy to define: it’s two molecules of hydrogen and one of oxygen. But what do we mean by “miracle”? Well, that’s obvious, isn’t it? A miracle is supernatural intervention in the normal order of things. A miracle is when we pray for rain in the midst of drought and get a downpour. A miracle is when someone with an advanced case of cancer goes into remission and is still healthy years later. How do you define miracle?

Probably all of us have personal stories or stories that have been handed on to us of events that seem miraculous. But I’m equally certain that we have as many or more stories of times when miracles did NOT occur: prayers unanswered… cures that did not happen…

Skeptics can raise many objections to miracles. They rightly point out that the universe is a finely calibrated mechanism. Light travels at about 186,000 miles per second, no more, no less. I’m told that if water froze just one or two degrees above 32 Fahrenheit or boiled one or two degrees below 212 that life on earth would be impossible. Either earth would be a frozen wasteland or all the water on earth would boil away, and our world would look like Mars or the moon. How can God intervene in this system without creating havoc?

My point is that it’s easy to find arguments against miracles. But we’ve all had moments when the odds have been stacked against us and somehow the miracle occurred: the rain came, the cancer went into remission, the check really was in the mail.

Maybe there is another way to explain miracles that preserves the integrity of the natural world and also allows for divine intervention. Perhaps a miracle is not something that happens OUT there but something that happens IN here, inside us. A miracle is less a change in the world, an intervention in the natural order; a miracle may instead be a change in us. Perhaps the real miracle is when our eyes are open to see God’s hand at work in the world around us.

And that brings me back to Jesus and the wedding feast at the Episcopal Church in Cana. I know they were Episcopalians because they drank all the wine and asked for more! On the face of it, this appears to be a simple story. A wedding party ran out of wine; Jesus took six enormous clay pots of water and turned every drop of it into the finest wine. That’s a miracle by any definition.

But let’s change our perception just a bit. Isn’t water always turning into wine? Wine, like the surface of the earth and our bodies, is mostly water, and water is always becoming wine. It falls to earth as the rain in Napa or Sonoma counties in California or in the Burgundy region of France. The roots of the grape vines draw it up from deep in the earth, and it fills the clusters of grapes. The juice of the grapes is squeezed into vats and aged in barrels. Then it is decanted into bottles, shipped all over the world, and we buy it at Publix or the Pig. Water has become wine again, just as it has for thousands of years.

Is that a miracle? It can be a miracle when God opens our eyes to see it as one.

What I’m going to say next is especially for Ben and Vera whom we’re about to baptize. The rest of you may listen in but this part of my sermon is for our special guests.

Ben and Vera, in a moment I will take water, the very same water that covers much of earth’s surface, the same water that makes up 60% of our bodies, the same water in which Jesus was baptized, the water that becomes wine in the vineyards of California and France, the same water that he turned into wine at Cana, and I will pour a little of this water three times on your heads, and a miracle will take place.

I doubt that there will be any thunder or lightning; you are unlikely to feel or look different, but everything will be changed. In the water of baptism God claims you as his own forever; you became an inheritor of the kingdom of God; you will be numbered among the saints on earth. In baptism God makes a promise never to forsake you. You may forget your baptism; you not only may, you will break your baptismal promises. But God will never forget that you are his beloved son or daughter.

Today you begin a journey, a voyage across life’s sea. There is water all around you and within you. Water is a very good thing. We cannot live without it. But I think we need more than water; I think we also need wine.

There are moments when the water of life becomes wine, when life suddenly becomes intoxicating, when friendship blossoms into romance, when words are no longer enough and we simply must burst into song, when we stand on top of Shades Mountain and watch the colors of dawn or sunset transform it into a magical kingdom.

Ben and Vera, tomorrow is the birthday of Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. He knew a thing or two about miracles. He watched as injustice was turned into justice and suffering was redeemed. He watched as power yielded to love.

Ben and Vera, my prayer for you is that there may be many moments when the water of your life becomes wine, when your eyes are open to see God’s hand at work in the world around us. But I also pray that you will be a part of that transformation, that you will seek out those who are less fortunate – the hungry, the homeless, the sad and weary – and be a part of the transformation of this world into the kingdom of God.

To help you on your baptismal journey, I have several gifts I want to give you on behalf of St. Alban’s.

The first gift is this t shirt. In the early church, newly baptized persons wore white robes to symbolize their new lives in Christ. This t shirt will help remind you of what happened today. On the back it has the word “Christian” surrounded by several synonyms for Christian: saint, child of God, and so on… The second gift I have for you is a small container that I want you to fill with water from the baptismal font and take with you. Baptism is powerful. The story is told of the great German Reformer Martin Luther that once when the devil tempted him, Luther shouted at him, “Be gone, devil; I am baptized!” When temptation comes, remember that you are baptized.

And the third gift is a small cross. The cross may be the ultimate symbol of how God turns water into wine because the cross shows us that God can turn defeat into victory, darkness into light, and death into life eternal.

Welcome to St. Alban’s, Ben and Vera. And bon voyage!

Good advice or good news?

William Inge, the dean of St. Paul’s Cathedral in London from 1911 to 1934 said, “The gospel is good news, not good advice… we can find no economic principles in the gospel.” I think Dean Inge was correct and today’s readings give us a great illustration of his observation.

The readings from First Kings, Psalm 146, and Mark all tell us about widows. The widows in First Kings and Mark literally give their entire life’s savings to what they believe to be good causes. Psalm 146 tells us that God sustains the orphan and widow, but frustrates the way of the wicked.”

Let’s update the story of the widows in First Kings and Mark. Imagine that you are a priest and that a woman who is neither quite young any more nor very elderly comes to you for advice. She says, “God has told me to empty my bank account and give it all to Episcopal Relief and Development.”

If you went to one of our Episcopal seminaries, then you had to take Counseling 101 and there you learned the technique of reflective listening, so you try that first, “So, I hear you saying that God has told you to give all your money to Episcopal Relief and Development?” Clever opening, huh? And she says, “Yes, that’s right.”

Then you decide that you need more information. “How much money do you have? What are your sources of income? What are your obligations?” She goes on to say that she is on disability and has a small monthly pension from the company her late husband worked for and has about $3000 in the bank. She pays $400 a month for an apartment that is subsidized for low income persons. And she has a son with medical problems whom she helps financially whenever she can.

Counseling 101 never prepared you for this.

Frankly, if she were my parishioner I would probably begin by telling her that God never tells us to undermine our economic well-being. God certainly never tells us to empty our bank accounts and give it all to Episcopal Relief and Development or Green Springs’ Ministries or even to our parish church. I would tell her that God’s will for us is to be prudent about our financial needs; I would suggest that she talk to someone in the parish who can help her maximize her return on her money and perhaps help her find a better paying job. And I might suggest that she see a good therapist who could help her work through that business about hearing God tell her to give away all she has. After all, we’re Episcopalians and our God doesn’t do things like that.

But then there are those troublesome stories in the Bible. God sends the prophet Elijah to a woman and her child who are only one meal away from starvation and commands her to feed Elijah rather than herself and her child. Elijah reassures her, “The jar of meal will not be emptied and the jug of oil will not fail until the day that the LORD sends rain on the earth.” Jesus commends another woman for putting “every thing she had to live on” into the Temple treasury.

I have a feeling that Counseling 101 did not prepare me too well for dealing with someone whom God has told to empty their bank account. It certainly did not prepare me to deal with someone who takes Psalm 146 literally.

For the most part, I have put my trust in rulers and children of earth. I have believed and still believe that we live in a world that works pretty well most of the time. I believe that people who work hard and play by the rules will usually experience at least modest success; that our market-driven economy maximizes opportunities for most of us; that our political system provides a stable framework within which people can exercise initiative and reap great economic benefits. Then, a little over a year ago, the international banking system imploded. The pillars of finance, the giants of banking, began to topple. In other words, current events began to resemble the words of Psalm 146.

Put not your trust in rulers, nor in any child of earth, *
for there is no help in them.

Every year at commencement Harvard University bestows honorary degrees upon a dozen or so men and women for their achievements in scholarship, business, politics and other fields. In 1996 Harvard honored philanthropist Walter Annenberg, the founder of TV Guide. It may only have been a coincidence that Annenberg had just given Harvard $25 million but be that as it may, it was probably more significant that Annenberg at that time held the record for money given to American institutions of higher education. However, immediately after honoring Annenberg, the university marshal said, “Mr. President, we have with us today another philanthropist…” The other philanthropist was Osceola McCarty, a black laundry woman from rural Mississippi who had given her entire life’s savings, some $300,000, to an historically black college to be used as scholarships for its students. Annenberg may have given more dollars to American universities but Osceola McCarty gave everything she had. “She out of her poverty has put in everything she had, all she had to live on…”

Don’t misunderstand what I am saying: It is probably not a good idea to empty your bank account and give it to any cause, however worthy, even St. Alban’s! But sometimes prudence and faithfulness are at odds. Sometimes we are called to make some wildly extravagant gesture, rather than to live our lives within the parameters of prudence. The gospel after all is not good advice, it is good news.

Jesus wept

According to Matthew, Mark, and Luke, Jesus visited Jerusalem only once as an adult, but John’s gospel tells us that he visited it at least three times. If John is correct, then the story of Lazarus makes a little more sense.

Bethany was a village on the outskirts of Jerusalem. Martha and Mary lived there with their brother Lazarus. It would have been a logical place for Jesus to stay during his visits to Jerusalem. Probably all of us have friends in large cities who have opened their homes to us when we have come to their towns, thus sparing us the expense and bother of staying in a hotel. Of course, in the time of Jesus there was no such thing as a hotel. To visiting Jerusalem or a similar city one had to have a friend who would open his or her home to you.

We know little about Mary and Martha and Lazarus. Luke’s gospel tells us that when Jesus visited Mary and Martha that Mary sat at his feet but Martha was busy with many things. What little we see of Mary and Martha in today’s gospel readings is consistent with that story.

At any rate, it is clear that the two sisters and their brother were friends of Jesus. So it is surprising that when Jesus hears that Lazarus is gravely ill that he hesitates rather than going at once to Bethany.

This is one of the mysteries of John’s gospel. Jesus has one idea of time; the people around him have another. For Jesus, time seems to go backward and forward; sometimes it speeds up, sometimes it slows down. When his mother tells him that there is no more wine for the wedding feast at Cana, he tells her that his time has not yet come. Present and future become one when he tells the Samaritan woman that the hour is coming and now is when all earthly places of worship will become redundant because God requires only that people worship him in spirit and in truth.

John’s portrait of Jesus also shows the early church struggling to make sense of the idea that Jesus was both fully human and fully one with God. Sometimes John’s Jesus seems to be an almost unearthly figure without human weaknesses and needs. When the disciples bring him food, he says that he does not need it because for him to do the work of God is food enough.

But the Jesus we see in the story of Lazarus is a fully human being.

At the very beginning of John’s gospel he tells us that Jesus is the very LOGOS of God who has taken human form. Logos means word, thought, reason. In other words, in Jesus the distance between God and humanity has collapsed. God’s inmost thoughts have taken on human flesh and dwell in the midst of us. At the beginning of John’s gospel, the author draws back the curtain and lets us in on the secret that others will discover during the course of the gospel as they see Jesus work miracles and finally be raised from the dead.

So if Jesus is the very thought, the very word of God, the word through which God spoke creation into existence, we expect miracles. Changing water into wine, giving sight to the blind, multiplying loaves and fishes – these should not cause any difficult for Jesus. Even raising Lazarus from the dead… But what we do not expect God’s incarnate word to do is to cry. This is the real miracle in today’s story. The raising of Lazarus from death to life is impressive but what moves me is that Jesus weeps, that there are tears at the very heart of God.

Today is All Saints’ Day. The saints, of course, are God’s elite. We know the saints because they are the ones who exhibit heroic sanctity. Like Mother Teresa they give their lives to serving the poorest of the poor; like Albert Schweitzer they spend their lives working in a tiny medical clinic in Africa while writing great books on theology and editing Bach’s organ works (actually, I think Schweitzer overdid it a bit). Like Martin Luther King, Jr. they risk and finally give their lives as they stand up for and speak out for dignity and justice for all.

This is all true as far as it goes, but I believe that the story of Lazarus tells us something else about real sanctity. Real sanctity, real holiness, also weeps. The saint is one who sheds tears over the death of a friend. The saint is one who shares her grief with others, and lets them share their grief with her.

The Spanish philosopher Miguel de Unamuno said, “...I am convinced that we should solve many things if we went into the streets and uncovered our griefs, which perhaps would prove to be but one sole common grief, and joined together in beweeping them and crying aloud to the heavens and calling upon God. And this, even though God shold hear us not; but He wold hear us. The chiefest sanctity of a temple is that it is a place to which men go to weep in common.”

Today’s reading from the book of Revelation tells us of a new heaven and a new earth in which death is no more. But it goes on to say that “mourning and crying and pain will be no more.” We all long for a world in which death and sickness have disappeared, in which the hungry are fed and the homeless have shelter. I would change only one thing about this new heaven and new earth: Leave room for tears. I believe that real sanctity is to experience the whole range of human feelings from tears to laughter. That is what makes us human, that is what makes us holy. That is what draws us to one another and also draws us toward God.

You are what you eat (Proper 13B, Aug 9, 2009)

I constantly hear stories about obesity in the US in particular and the developed world in general. Fast food and processed food bear a large share of the blame for that, plus the constant bombardment of commercials that urge us to eat to excess: We grew up with “umm ummm good”, “where’s the beef?” and “nothing says loving like something from the oven.” We are told that we live in a “consumer culture.” What an apt description! We are not told that we live in a culture of buying and selling, but a culture that consumes.

The obesity epidemic is nothing compared to the epidemic of overspending and overbuying. We have an appetite not only for food but for clothes, car, electronics goods, and for any number of other things called “consumer goods.” We don’t just purchase these things; they become a part of us and we feel deprived if we don’t have them or if they are taken away. Each thing we purchase or consume becomes a part of us.

“You are what you eat”. That famous quotation comes from 19^th c. German philosopher Ludwig Feuerbach. Feuerbach was an atheist and his point was that human beings are nothing more than matter. Our bodies incorporate the food that we consume, but when we die and are reduced to our essential elements, we, in turn, become food for others.

But perhaps Feuerbach spoke more truth than he knew. Jesus also said that we are what we eat, but he offers us a different kind of food: “I am the living bread that came down from heaven . . . the one who eats this bread will live forever.” (v. 51). The heart of today’s Gospel reading is a contrast, “This is the bread that came down from heaven, not like that which your ancestors ate, and they died. But the one who eats this bread will live forever.” (v. 58). In other words, your ancestors ate manna in the wilderness and died, but those who eat the bread that came down from heaven" will live forever. What is astonishing about this promise is not just the assurance of eternal life, but the fact that Jesus joins the promise of eternal life to the most mundane of human activities: eating.

I would like to look at both the promise “eternal life” and the means to achieve it -- eating the bread that came down from heaven.

First, the desire for life after death seems to be fundamental to human nature, The 18th century Scottish philosopher David Hume once said, "It is a most unreasonable fancy that we should exist forever," but I am not sure that many people agree with him. Indeed, in 21st century American culture, there seems to be an almost desperate need to believe that there is life after death. Suddenly there seems to be a half dozen TV shows that deal with the idea of life after death and the possibility of communicating with the dead.

Eternal life is not an “unreasonable fancy” — it is at the very heart of the Christian faith. To divorce eternal life from the Christian faith is to render the faith anemic and puny. In today’s gospel reading Jesus reminds us that “the living Father" (v. 57) sent him. The Gospel of Jesus Christ is about life, both here and hereafter. To accept that death has the last word is to accept that Gods power is limited, but that is not what the Bible teaches. Jesus promises that he will raise “raise up” those who are nourished by his body

and blood.

It is just as true, however, that the Christian faith is about life BEFORE death, just as much as life AFTER death; life in the here and now, and not just life in the hereafter. Indeed, there is continuity between life in this world and life in the next. As priest and poet john Donne put it, " . . . all the way to heaven is heaven . . . [the] soul that goes to heaven meets heaven here . . . the true joy of a good soul in this world is the very joy of heaven . . . (Sermon LXVI in Herschel Baker, ed., The Later Renaissance in England, Boston: Houghton, Mifflin, 1975, p. 561). The promise that eternal life belongs to those who eat and drink Christ’s body and blood grounds us in this world. The promise of eternal life is not annexed to some elaborate ritual; we are not askaed to bathe in a sacred river or to offer sacrifices or to repeat a magic formula. Instead, we are invited to a meal.

I imagine, however, some asking, can it be that simple? Can we really receive eternal life by eating and drinking at the Lords table? To answer that question, first, imagine how we come to the Lord’s Table. In the world of Jesus, bathing was relatively uncommon, but if one was invited to a dinner party one bathed and anointed oneself with oil. Similarly, before we come to the Lord’s Table, we are washed in the waters of baptism. Also, to sit down at table in first century Palestine implied that the guests were at peac e with the host and with one another. Jesus admonishes us to be reconciled with one another before offering our gift at the altar (Matthew 5.23-24).

The 16th century Protestant Reformers condemned the mass because the consecrated bread and wine had become isolated from the other parts of the liturgy; they had become ends in themselves. However, when we properly celebrate the sacrament of the Lords table, then we will have met Jesus all along the way. We will have been baptized into his death and resurrection; we will hear him speak in the voice of scripture; we will be reconciled with those against whom we have sinned; we will be nourished on his body and blood; and finally, we will hear him command us to go into the world to do his will.

The late second-century theologian, Irenaeus of Lyons, called the Sacrament of the Lord’s Table “the medicine of immortality.” Jesus did not employ the metaphor of medicine, but he did promise that if we are nourished on his body and blood, we will have eternal life.

Jesus wants us to live in a different kind of consumer culture. He wants us to create and live in and invite others into a culture that consumes the bread of life, in scripture, in prayer, in service to others, and in the sacrament of the altar.

The meal we share with believers on earth is the heavenly banquet in earthly guise. Saints and angels gather around whenever we set the table, whether the sacrament is celebrated with all the pomp and ceremony at St. Peter's in Rome or with loaf bread and jug wine at summer camp, because it is the earthly extension of the marriage feast of the Lamb. Come and take your place at the table. It’s time for dinner.

Too soon to tell - A sermon about the actions of the 76th General Convention of the Episcopal Church (July 26, 2008)

J. Barry Vaughn. July 26, 2009. A sermon about the actions of the 76^th General Convention.

Probably a majority of us here today came to the Episcopal Church from some other church. When you came to the Episcopal Church the priest who prepared you for reception or confirmation more than likely taught you about Elizabethan theologian Richard Hooker and the so-called “three legged stool” that he built. You were told that Anglicans believe that while scripture is first and foremost, the Bible must be interpreted by reason and tradition. Please don’t use the phrase – “three legged stool.” It does not come from Richard Hooker,;it distorts what Hooker said; and it is misleading. Hooker borrowed an image from the Bible’s Book of Proverbs and instead referred to scripture, tradition, and reason as “a three fold cord not easily broken.” I have a problem with that analogy, too, but that’s a topic for another sermon.

There is no doubt that Hooker was right. Like Anglicanism, the `Reformation also had three principles: grace alone, faith alone, and scripture alone, but scripture is never alone. It is paramount but it is never alone. Scripture is frequently ambiguous and must be interpreted in light of reason and tradition.

I think that Hooker’s “three fold cord” has another application. It is also a useful model for looking at Anglican history. The first phase of Anglican history was dominated by scripture. Anglicanism, whether we want to acknowledge it or not, is a product of the Reformation. We are one of the Reformed churches, along with the Lutherans, Presbyterians, and so on. The first great leaders of Anglicanism – Bishop John Jewel of Salisbury, Richard Hooker, and so on – were men deeply steeped in scripture.

` But the Reformation principle of scripture alone proved unworkable. The Reformers substituted a paper pope – scripture – for the flesh and blood pope and it did not work. There must be some hermeneutic, some guide for interpreting scripture, and so the age of scripture was quickly followed by the age of reason. The age of reason gave us Jefferson and Franklin and the movement we know as Deism. Deists threw out everything they deemed incompatible with reason, such as miracles, the Trinity, the Resurrection, and so on, and tried to reduce religion to a few simple principles that could be derived from reason; There is a God; religion consists exclusively in ethical behavior; and there is an afterlife when the good will be rewarded and the evil will be punished. But while this is admirable, it is not Christianity.

So the age of reason gave way to the age of tradition. Finding Deism to be pretty thin gruel to nourish a spiritual life, 19^th century Anglicans turned back to the early church. They rediscovered the catholicity of Anglicanism. They insisted on the continuity between Anglican bishops and the bishops of the early and medieval church. They rediscovered the practices of the early church – confession, fasting, pilgrimages and so on. Above all they rediscovered the centrality of the eucharist.

Anglicanism has lived in the age of tradition for some time now but I am making a prediction. Please write this down because some day I may be famous for saying this: we may have already entered the fourth age of Anglicanism and I believe it will again be the age of scripture. The church of the developing world is a church of the Bible. And this is the coming church. The world you and I live in, the developed world, is rapidly being de-christianized. So the church of the developing world is coming here to re-evangelize us. Listen carefully to what I say next: A century from now the Episcopal Church you and I know will not exist or rather it will exist but it will be transformed and the transformation will be as complete as the change from caterpillar to butterfly. But I know one thing about the church that is to come: it will again be a church of the Bible.

Week before last in Anaheim the General Convention made two decisions that have occasioned a great deal of controversy. First, they lifted the moratorium on the election and consecration of gay and lesbian bishops. Second, they took very tentative steps toward developing a liturgy for blessing same gender couples.

Whether you think General Convention was right or wrong, please keep this in mind: the church is not a museum piece. It is not static. We are a pilgrim church, not a church of those who have already arrived. The church is dynamic, not static. We are always changing.

However, the church does consist of both fixed and variable elements. The difficult is knowing what things are fixed and what things are variable. The so-caled Serenity Prayer is very applicable to our situation: “Lord, help us to change the things we ought to change, to accept the things we cannot change and the wisdom to know the difference” And there’s the difficulty – having the wisdom to know the difference between what we can and should change and what we cannot and must not change.

I believe that certain things are fixed: scripture, the creeds, the sacraments, and so on. Consider this: After the Anaheim convention, not a word of scripture has been deleted; not a word of the creeds has been changed; the Ten Commandments are intact; Jesus still tells us to love God with all our being and our neighbor as ourselves.

Harry Emerson Fosdick, one of the great American preachers of the early 20^th century, used to say, “Astronomy changes but the eternal stars abide.”

When we began to ordain women to the offices of priest and bishop, many claimed that we had abandoned the faith, but theologian Paul Avis observed that the baptismal faith of the church was unaffected by the ordination of women. We still confessed that that we believed in God the Father, in his Son Jesus Christ, and in the Holy Spirit. This remained the faith of the church regardless of whether we ordained women or not.

I believe the same is true today. I know that some of you are deeply troubled by the decisions of General Convention. But please remember two things: the baptismal faith remains unchanged. And secondly, remember that the church in general and Anglicanism in particular are ever changing. The church we are today will bear little resemblance to the church we will become in a century. Or to paraphrase what Mark Twain observed about the weather in New England, If you don’t like the Episcopal Church, just wait a minute.

In conclusion, I want to offer a Buddhist parable that may be helpful.

A farmer had worked his crops for many years. One day his horse ran away. The farmer went to a monk and complained bitterly about his bad luck. “Too soon to tell,” the monk said. The next morning the horse returned, bringing with it three other wild horses. “How wonderful,” the farmer exclaimed to the monk. “Too soon to tell,” the monk said. The following day, his son tried to ride one of the untamed horses, was thrown, and broke his leg. The farmer again complained to the monk of his bad fortune. “Too soon to tell,” the monk said. The day after that, military officials came to the village to draft young men into the army. Seeing that the son’s leg was broken, they passed him by. The farmer went to the temple to offer thanksgivng and encountered the monk and told him his wonderful news. “Too soon to tell,” said the monk.

It is too soon to tell the effect of the most recent General Convention and its decisions. But we are not asked to get everything right; we are only asked to be faithful and to trust God.

Dancing with God: The baptism of Priscilla Nicole Kottmeyer

Today is not only Trinity Sun, it is also the day we baptize Priscilla Nicole Kottmeyer. Now, I know that all of you have come here to listen to me talk about the doctrine of the Trinity, especially with regard to the contributions of the 4^th c. theologian Tertullian, and I have prepared about 45 minutes of notes on that topic. However, important as the Trinity is, Priscilla’s baptism is even more important, so here’s what I’ll do: I’ll meet you back here this afternoon for my talk on the Trinity. And don’t think you’re going to get away. I know who you are and will know if you don’t show up later this afternoon!

But today is Priscilla’s big day, and I want to talk to her. The rest of you are invited to listen in.

Priscilla, first let me tell you that you have picked a great day to be baptized, but I’ll explain a little later why this is such a good day to be baptized.

You have also picked excellent parents and grandparents. Your grandmother Kottmeyer is from Strasbourg, France, a beautiful and historic city. And the Measels are from right here in Bluff Park. But the most important thing about both your parents and grandparents is that they love you very much and today they are making the commitment to raise you in the Christian faith.

Priscilla, I know that you are wondering what baptism is and what difference it will make.

The first thing you may notice about your baptism is that your parents and godparents are answering a series of questions on your behalf. For the next several years, people will be doing things for you that you are unable to do for yourself. Right now, people are feeding you, bathing you, changing your diapers. And in a few years, they will be driving you to school and ballet lessons and soccer practice. Soon you will be doing things for other people that they cannot do for themselves. That is a big part of what it means to be human. None of us is complete in and of ourselves. God made us incomplete. God made us so that we need each other and must seek out each other. In other words, God made us so that we must learn to love one another, and if we fail to love, then we remain incomplete.

Baptism is one of the first examples of how we need each other. Whether we are baptized as infants or as adults, it is something that is done for us and to us. We cannot baptize ourselves.

The second thing you may notice about your baptism is that your parents and godparents promise to reject one thing and to accept something else. What’s that about? Right here at the beginning of your life, why should we ask you to reject anything?

Priscilla, you will find that life is a series of choices. To choose one thing is to reject something else, and it is very important for us to choose well.

Today we ask your parents and godparents to make the most important choice of all on your behalf. We ask them to choose light instead of darkness; goodness rather than evil; life rather than death; to follow Christ rather than the Evil One.

Priscilla, you live in a world that hovers between darkness and light. That sounds a little scary, but there is nothing for you to fear. The darkness falls only in places where we block the light. The light is permanent; the darkness is temporary. The Bible tells us that the light shines in the darkness and the darkness cannot overcome it. There are times of darkness in every life, but if you look for the light, you will find it.

Third, your parents and godparents not only reject the darkness on your behalf, they also promise to help you learn how to follow Christ. Starting now, your parents will be bringing you to church every Sunday. I know they will because they promised me they would when I talked to them about baptism, and I intend to hold them to that promise! In a few years, you will start coming to Sunday School and begin learning the story of Jesus of Nazareth. His story is not only one of the most wonderful stories you can learn, it is also the most important.

Jesus lived long ago in Israel. He was not only the son of Mary and Joseph of Nazareth, his followers experienced the power and presence of God in him in such a powerful way that the only way they could explain that experience was to say that he was the very embodiment of God, God incarnate, God made flesh, the Son of God. For a short time, Jesus taught people about the nature of God, healed the sick, and confronted the powers of evil and injustice. But the authorities feared him, arrested him, and had him killed. But three days later, his followers found his tomb empty and experienced Jesus not only as alive again but more fully real and alive than he had ever been. So even though Jesus lived 2000 years ago, we believe that he is just as alive today as he was way back then.

Priscilla, the most important story you can know is the story of Jesus. The most important friend you can make is Jesus. And today your parents and godparents are not only promising to help you get to know him, we believe that baptism is also the time when Jesus promises to get to know you, too.

Now, I said that Trinity Sunday is a great day to be baptized, and I would like to explain that. You did not come into the world alone. You came into the world as part of a complex network of relationships. These relationships make you who you are. None of us exists alone. The African word ubuntu expresses this perfectly. Ubuntu means “You are who you are because I am who I am and I am who I am because you are who you are.”

The Trinity is a good example of this. Many years ago a great Christian thinker explained the Trinity in terms of dance. Now the dance he had in mind was not the kind of dancing we normally see today. He was thinking of the circle dances that we still see on special occasions in Mediterranean countries. While there may be many dancers, they are one in the movements they make; they are one in rhythm. So, he said, it is with the Trinity. The Father is not the Son; the Son is not the Spirit; the Spirit is not the Father. But they are one in love; one in power; and one in eternity. The Trinity is the dance of God, a dance that had no beginning and will have no end.

Priscilla, in a few minutes I will pour water on your head in the name of the Trinity. In doing so, I will be inviting to dance with God, and inviting God to dance with you. It is the beginning of an eternal dance, an eternal relationship. Sometimes you will dance boldly and joyfully, sometimes you will dance slowly and sorrowfully. Sometimes you may not think you have the strength to dance at all and God will do all the dancing for you. Sometimes you will hold up others who no longer have the strength to dance for themselves. But the dance goes on in every time and place, when life is joyful and when it sorrowful, when it is light and when it is dark.

Welcome to the dance, Priscilla. Welcome to God’s family.

Human Rights and Religion

About half of my friends disagree with me because I favor marriage equality and the other half think I'm crazy to be a priest because all religions are bad. I have to say that the conservative churches were seriously wrong on CA's Prop 8 and should be ashamed of themselves. What would happen if everyone could marry the person they love with all their heart, even if that person were of the same sex? It's ridiculous to think that somehow that would undermine heterosexual marriages. Is love finite? Are there only so many weddings allotted the human race? Would caterers run out of wedding cake? Would Niagara Falls dry up??

But I'd like everyone to keep in mind that both abolitionism and the civil rights' movement were church-driven and both vastly expanded the scope of human liberty.

Also keep in mind that by far the greatest enemies of liberty in the last century were the regimes that were most antagonistic to religion: the Soviet Union, the Third Reich, Pol Pot's Cambodia, and Maoist China. So I am happy to acknowledge the enormous evil done by religious institutions (and this is no small thing): the Crusades, the Inquisition, the wars of religion that followed the Reformation. I have no idea how many were killed or harmed by these atrocites, but I suspect that the number of people killed in religious wars, jihads, and so on is insignificant when compared to the number killed just in the 20th century by the regimes previously mentioned.

Guessing conservatively, the Third Reich killed at least 6 to 10 million people; the Soviet Union well over 10 million; Pol Pot exterminated at least 1 million; Maoist China destroyed at least 10 million lives. In total, at least 30 million lives were ended JUST IN THE 20TH CENTURY by regimes that opposed all forms of religion.

Yes, religion is capable of doing dreadful things, but religion's opponents seem to be capable of doing far worse things.