Exodus 20:1-17 •
Psalm 19 •
I Corinthians 1:18-25 •
John 2:13-22 •
There is something confounding about Jesus, and his actions in our Gospel today. As I prepared this sermon I felt that these passages are in some way about faith. However, as I pursued this idea that the Ten Commandments, God's foolishness being more wise than all human wisdom and Jesus driving money changers out of the Temple all point us to the nature of faith, giving expression to this thought has eluded me. I wonder if this experience of pursuing yet never catching hold is an aspect of the experience of faith. I do not mean that this experience is faith, but part of what it means to be a person of faith. I wonder if at times we are drawn into that which will elude us and be on the edge of our understanding and comprehension, and thus eludes a certain type of articulation.
I recently saw the movie "No Country for Old Men", at the end of the film I did not know what to think. I was at a loss, It was clearly an excellent film, not being familiar with the book upon which it is based I had not expected, the story line, nor the violence nor the ending and the lack of resolution. The movie ended and it had told its story and yet nothing was resolved. Things had happened, and things were different, things had come to a conclusion but nothing resolved. At the end of the movie I simply felt adrift at sea. The movie, its images and its story have stuck with me like few movies I have seen.
No Country for Old Men is many things, a horror film, a hunt and hunted film, but it is also a movie about a sheriff Tom Bell struggling to comprehend a world he thinks he knows turning more violent and incomprehensible: the unrelenting and at times seemingly random violence of a mob hit man is part of this changing world that Sheriff Bell can't comprehend. This inability to comprehend and control leads him to retire. The hit man believes in fate and that anyone who crosses his path is fated to die unless chance or fate says otherwise when he decides to flip a coin. Anton Chighur believes in fate and necessity and leaves a path strewn with dead bodies. Only one person in the movie refuses his sense of necessity and fate and throws his violence on him and his own choices, Mary Jean, Llewelyn Moss' wife. Bell can't comprehend such a criminal, at one point he is talking with a sheriff in El Paso about this. The Sheriff talks about how he would have never believed it if someone told him someday he'd see teenagers walking the streets in green hair, to which Ed Tom Bell responds "Signs and wonders!" Bell is looking for something, some sign that will allow this all to make sense somehow, and also refuses to fully enter the events to understand them because he does not want to be pulled into this new world of which he is also part, whether he wants to or likes it or not.
I want to sit with this feeling of speechlessness of confusion puzzlement and incomprehension. One way to interpret Paul is saying that what God did in Jesus Christ doesn't make sense. It leaves everyone dumbfounded that a crucified man could be the savior of the world and God in human flesh. And the stories of Jesus don't always make sense either, like the story of Jesus chasing out merchants and money changers from the temple, with a whip he made of cords. Neither the disciples nor Jewish leaders of the time understood Jesus actions, and left them scratching their heads and asking for explanations and proofs.
Jesus' actions are not always understood. Jesus becomes violent here, and it isn't in response to the Roman occupation and its injustices but in response to a practice that had grown up around the temple because many no longer own flocks or other animals for sacrifice, and even if they did many Jews came from lands very distant from Jerusalem and could not bring their sacrificial animals with them even if they had them. The practice Jesus objects to is one of acculturation and cultural and historical adaptation. But it is an adaptation that has negative consequences, sacrifice and worship has now become at least in part a commercial transaction, one in which one can surmise that some are making a profit off the worship of and sacrifice to the God of the universe. Jesus responds in a premeditated and measured violence against this affront to God and the worship of God, this adaptation to the times. The response of the leaders is one of bewilderment: How are people to offer the appointed sacrifices if they can't get the appropriate animals. Jesus' actions don't make sense and so they ask for a sign. Jesus, in a saying misunderstood and used at his trial to condemn him of blasphemy, says The sign he offers is his crucifixion and resurrection.
What Jesus offers as a sign Paul says is foolishness to everyone. What God did in Jesus Christ makes no sense. God's actions in history in the life death and resurrection of Jesus of Nazareth, leave us with a quizzical uncomprehending feeling based on human evaluations, whether cultural, political, or interpersonal. These logics run up against a wall in Jesus Christ. Faith makes connections beyond these. Faith does not demand signs. Faith works on a different logic than the wisdom of the world. What is the logic of our faith this way of the cross, this being open to God and God's ways? The sign Jesus offers is the sign of God's wisdom and action in the world, the logic of the cross and resurrection. That overcoming the world and death, means passing through death. Life comes only in its seeming loss. Why does the selling of animals for sacrifice and money changers in the temple contradict this logic and wisdom of God? This is not clear to those who observe Jesus' action, the cross and Jesus death as truly what saves and brings an end to evil and injustice, can baffle us especially when all these things did not cease to be. God's actions and wisdom don't always make sense to us.
However, this does not deny that there is a real, true and good human desire for things to make sense. It is the pursuit of truth, but it can also be, and usually accompanies this pursuit, the desire to be in control and thus to be able to predict. This is part of how the pursuit of knowledge in the hard sciences is to proceed ideally. In life , in faith, in following Christ this can be a barrier to truth and can lead to destruction, largely because the Truth we are ultimately seeking is God who is totally other. Yet it is also because control does not lead to understanding nor provide the resources needed to sustain oneself in life. This is part of what I am taking away from No Country for Old Men. The three main male characters all believe that in some way they are in control and in the course of the movie this unravels for them (thus the feeling of no resolution and being at loss at the end of the film), but in very different ways for each. Sheriff Bell control is having a world that makes sense, dealing with criminals he knows, terrain he can interpret actions that are predictable. For Llewelyn Moss Tom Bell understands his actions and motivations, but Anton Chighur and to a lesser degree the drug runners, actions do not make any sense and seem to have no reason behind them. Moss sees himself as someone in control through expertise of the hunt and his tenacity. Moss is in control through action ingenuity and perseverance. He is capable and resourceful and this will get him through any difficulty or challenge. Anton Chighur controls the world and comprehends it by being a simple force of fate, necessity and nature. As far as he is concerned his actions and every death simply follow the logic of consequence and necessity. Mary Jean Moss rejects this sense of control and in the face o her death becomes the strongest charter in the movie. Ed Tom Bell is offered through two dreams another world , an acceptance of limitations and of an offer of grace- but he must give up trying to make sense of it all and accept he isn't and never was in control, nor ever comprehended the world.
Monday, March 16
Wednesday, March 11
Reconciler Update
My hope for all of us this Lent is that we may find our faith renewed and find ourselves growing in the love of God. Yet, I am aware that even in my own spiritual life that Lent can have an opposite effect. I can feel burdened by a fast or other discipline I have undertaken. If I break the fast or am inconsistent in keeping to a discipline I can feel like Lent was awash. This is a temptation of Lent and of the spiritual disciplines in general. An other temptation can be to be quite proud of our being able to keep our fast or other discipline through out Lent. I think there are in these temptations a positive and negative impulses. In the positive both can be born out of a desire to follow in the way of Christ perfectly, For we know as our closing hymn on Sunday says "Forty Days and forty night thou was fasting in the wild; forty day and forty nights tempted, and yet undefiled." (#150 Hymnal 1982, Episcopal Church). We want to be "undefiled", yet this desire turns into a work that we feel we must do. We then become burdened and either stumble under this burden or become prideful that we have carried this burden.
So Lent can become quite distressing and especially so, as our Lenten discipline brings to light sins or failings we have and we then encounter them in stark relief, which is suited to a time of repentance and self-examination. However, if we have succumbed thus seeing Lent as a time of Spiritual accomplishment and perfection, finding our dark selves rising to the surface can lead to confusion and distress. The closing hymn from this past Sunday offers us the solution to these attitudes: "Then if Satan on us press, Jesus, Savior, hear our call! Victor in the wilderness, grant we may not faint or fall!" We are not the victors in this wilderness, nor is it upon our own resources that we are to rely in Lent or the Spiritual life, but upon Christ who is the Victor and who has fulfilled the Law and all the requirements of the Spiritual life. If we are to find ourselves perfected it is in reliance on and faith in Christ. We are to rely on Christs strength having faith that Christ has already overcome and is victorious.
So in a sense Lent is nothing special, in our life of faith. What applies to Lent always applies. We keep Lent because it can help us refocus and return to our call and to that reliance on Christ, which is our faith. We undertake these disciplines and we fast, we take this time to focus intently on our Spiritual life and our selves so that we may open ourselves ever more to the tranforming power of the Resurrection. We enter a desert and intensify our struggles with ourselves and sin and temptation, not to make ourselves perfect but to be perfected by God, as we are formed ever more into the image of Christ. A subtle distinction but one essential for a Holy Lent and for our entire spiritual journey in this life.
So Lent can become quite distressing and especially so, as our Lenten discipline brings to light sins or failings we have and we then encounter them in stark relief, which is suited to a time of repentance and self-examination. However, if we have succumbed thus seeing Lent as a time of Spiritual accomplishment and perfection, finding our dark selves rising to the surface can lead to confusion and distress. The closing hymn from this past Sunday offers us the solution to these attitudes: "Then if Satan on us press, Jesus, Savior, hear our call! Victor in the wilderness, grant we may not faint or fall!" We are not the victors in this wilderness, nor is it upon our own resources that we are to rely in Lent or the Spiritual life, but upon Christ who is the Victor and who has fulfilled the Law and all the requirements of the Spiritual life. If we are to find ourselves perfected it is in reliance on and faith in Christ. We are to rely on Christs strength having faith that Christ has already overcome and is victorious.
So in a sense Lent is nothing special, in our life of faith. What applies to Lent always applies. We keep Lent because it can help us refocus and return to our call and to that reliance on Christ, which is our faith. We undertake these disciplines and we fast, we take this time to focus intently on our Spiritual life and our selves so that we may open ourselves ever more to the tranforming power of the Resurrection. We enter a desert and intensify our struggles with ourselves and sin and temptation, not to make ourselves perfect but to be perfected by God, as we are formed ever more into the image of Christ. A subtle distinction but one essential for a Holy Lent and for our entire spiritual journey in this life.
Monday, March 9
Sermon Second Sunday In Lent- Acts of Faith
Genesis 17:1-7, 15-16 •
Psalm 22:23-31 •
Romans 4:13-25 •
Mark 8:31-38 •
The fulcrum here is Paul. As Protestants we know well Paul as that teacher of the nature of faith, the very place we have gone to for the doctrine of "alone by grace through faith." This sumary of the Gospel has had all sorts of misunderstandings to lifting from simple belief completely seperated from any form of life reflecting the Gospel, such that to encourage people to live out their faith it was feard that this was to introduce works into faith. On the other end faith becomes this thing that one manufactures that must be without doubt or question and is shown in a life a near moral perfection or at least keeping to a strict outward moral and ethical code, which can include such things as no smoking, drinking or veiwing or participating in entertainements of varius kinds. At this end of the pedulum swing one must constantly prove ones faith based on various external standards of belief and behavior. The passage before us tonight in Romans is one of the prooftexts of the assertion that it is by faith alone that we are righteous, or to use the theological term Justified. Paul argues that the promise of Abraham was not according to the works of the Law but the righteousness of faith. A key peice of his argument is the assertion that Abraham exhibited great faith. However, in Pauls argument the point isn't simply Abrahams faith, but that Abraham and the promise of God comes before the Law. Paul's claim then is that Abraham lived according to faith and not according to the works of the Law. In faith not his works of the Law was the basis for God reckoning Abraham righteous. To rehetorically drive his point Paul use a seriese of intensifieres concerning the greatness of Abraham's faith, which may give us the impression that the faith he speaks about has no room for doubt, no place for our own individual belief to falter. yet Paul should be read in light of Genesis and Genesis in light of Paul. Let us accpet as true that Abraham was a person of great faith and that God declares him a righteous person not based on his works but upon his faith. Accepting these things as true let us see what such a person full of faith is like. To do so we must turn to Genesis and the stories of Abraham in Genesis speicifically our text in chapter 17.
How does the story of Abraham's life in Genesis match up with Pauls praise of Abraham as the father of faith? We are getting toward the end of the overal story of Abraham. It has been a long time since Abram and Sarai left their home in Ur and travled to canaan based on the word and promise of God. They have endured much and prospered some, but remain semi-nomadic herders of sheep and cattel. God on several occasions after the first call promises Abram that he and Sarai will be the beginning line of a great nation. Yet through it all and despite the repetition of the promise Sarah her self does not bear a child. In their desperatin to have a child (and help God along with the promise, or in an atempt to live into the promise on their own) Hagai becomes suragate to Sarai and Abram has the son Ishmael by Hagar. This brings us to our story today, and again God reiterates God's promise to Abraham. This great person of faith how has he been unwavaring and without doubt? In our passage we see Abraham in responce to Gods promise bring to God his solution, Ishmael. But God's plan includes Sarah who has taken part and walked in faith as well as Abraham. God does not accept Abrahams feeble attempt to live into God's promise. From the first of Abraham's travels from Ur, in responce to God's call, this story of faith includes lying about his relationship to Sarah to save his own life, having a son by Hagar his wife's maidservant as a means to fulfill God's promise, arguing with God about the destruction of Sodom and Gemorah which occurs after this theophany in Genesis 17. Abraham and Sarah struggle with Hagar and Ishmael after Isaac is born. Fear and jealosy drive Abraham and Sarah to send Hagar and Ishmael away to an almost certain death except that God intervenes. The unwavering faith and hoping against hope and steady belief in God was part of a life that included all these false starts, attempts at self preservation and attempting to help God out with God's promise. Faith that Paul is talking about must be something more than always believeing and never doubting and always acting out of belief in God.
What if our fiath, the faith that Paul is talking about has as much to do with God's character as with ourselves? What if faith isn't something we own or posses of ourselves as something earned or naturally posessing? What if faith is a gift recieved through certain acts? Reading Paul and Genesis together suggests to me that faith is larger than our consistency, larger than any presentation of ourselves to the others or to God. In the midst of all Abrahams false starts, failure to trust God and attempts to help God along with God's plans, there is one consistent thread, Abraham is always open to God as God, as the totally other and the very substance of life. This is one side of the faith that leads to the accounting as righteous. This is such a faith because it allows God to work it trust that no matter what God is the faithful one. We like Abraham are inconsistent and faithless, we try to keep up a good image but we are inconsistent, but Abraham trusted God's unfailing love and unwavering faithfulness. God is full of faith and so as Abraham remains open to this faithfulness never claiming any right before God, he becomes a person of great faith through God's faithfulness. Abrahams faith, which God reckons as righteousness is a gift of God's faithfulness to Abraham, not what Abraham earns because of his faithfulness to God. So that the source of Abraham's faith is God, not Abrahams own works.
What then does this life of openness to God look like? How do we know if we are open to God? Jesus tells us: " If any want to become my followers, let them deny themselves and take up their cross and follow me. 8:35 For those who want to save their life will lose it, and those who lose their life for my sake, and for the sake of the gospel, will save it." "Mark 8:34-35) Taking up the cross is an act of faith that is not a work of the Law. This loosing of oneself and taking up the cross is an act of faith but not a work. The act of letting oneself and identity go and taking up the cross is an ongoing activity that perfects. But it doesn't necesarily mean having it all figured out, the disciples and Peter in the text certainly don't! The Life of Abraham and Sarah are examples of taking up the cross and letting go of the self. They travel from their home and become nomads, never settling down after taking up the call of God. In the midst they have their failings, they fail to understand what God is doing and they try to help God out. Their selves still raise their heads and at times they continue to act out of selfishness and mere self-preservation. But in the end when the entire story is told they perservered and they no matter the moments of self, or of doubt or failure of nerve they never gave up on God, they alwasy were open to God's appearing and God's word to them, they never settled down. God had sent them on a journey that lasted their entire life time. They are examples of deing to ourselves letting go of what people tell us should be done when we know God has called us to other things. They lost their selves and found new names, that were more themselves given to them by God.
Faith is not something you drumb up in yourself. Faith is not banishing all doubt and never asking a question. Rather faith is the letting down of ones defenses and the walls of human identity and opening oneself up in trust to the faithfulness of God. This faith does require or should have resultant acts things that could be described metaphorically as taking up ones cross and dying. But the act itself does not make one perfect or righteous. God is not asking that we live perfect lives, but in the messiness of our lives, and even when we know we have sinned and messed up that we do not let those things close us to God, that we in faith await the presence of God in our lives. This is much easier now that Christ has come and fulfilled all righteousness and perfectly fulfilled the Law of God, so that we now can do this in assurance that we are Christs.
Psalm 22:23-31 •
Romans 4:13-25 •
Mark 8:31-38 •
Acts of Faith
What is Faith and are their acts of faith that are not works? Tonight I proclaim to you that it is by faith alone and not by works that we are righteous. This may seem to be a contradictory proclamation to that of last week. Last week I spoke of "faith" in terms of what you or I posses consistently over time of our own belief and trust in God that comes of our own accord. So then what is the faith that produces righteousness? Last week I attempted to put forward that this true faith was not devoid of acts. Today I must say that this faith cannot be by works. However this faith is not about simple beliefs held or a trust that comes from my own resources that makes one righteous or saves. In this distinguishing of faith from faith, the faith I spoke of last week, the faith that is as often as not the faith of Protestant forms of Christianity, is a work as much as trusting and living according to the Law. On the other hand the faith that Paul is talking about is that which is connected to the reality of loss of self and identity in Jesus Christ. Paul's use of Abraham as the father of faith or our father in the faith, shows us that he does not see faith as something we do or hold over a lifetime but is a faithfulness that in doubt in confusion in lack of belief continues to hold one self open to God and God's faithfulness, and receives faith as a gift, and not a possession of one's own. Last Sunday I was attempting to say that according to catholic faith and practice baptism, fasting lent, liturgy etc. are not works but acts that open us to Gods grace, thus properly understood these things are acts of faith. There are many acts of faith, following Christ demands acts of faith, which are not works. To understand this we must explore the nature of faith that is not bound to works of the Law and which does not become a work and Law of its own.The fulcrum here is Paul. As Protestants we know well Paul as that teacher of the nature of faith, the very place we have gone to for the doctrine of "alone by grace through faith." This sumary of the Gospel has had all sorts of misunderstandings to lifting from simple belief completely seperated from any form of life reflecting the Gospel, such that to encourage people to live out their faith it was feard that this was to introduce works into faith. On the other end faith becomes this thing that one manufactures that must be without doubt or question and is shown in a life a near moral perfection or at least keeping to a strict outward moral and ethical code, which can include such things as no smoking, drinking or veiwing or participating in entertainements of varius kinds. At this end of the pedulum swing one must constantly prove ones faith based on various external standards of belief and behavior. The passage before us tonight in Romans is one of the prooftexts of the assertion that it is by faith alone that we are righteous, or to use the theological term Justified. Paul argues that the promise of Abraham was not according to the works of the Law but the righteousness of faith. A key peice of his argument is the assertion that Abraham exhibited great faith. However, in Pauls argument the point isn't simply Abrahams faith, but that Abraham and the promise of God comes before the Law. Paul's claim then is that Abraham lived according to faith and not according to the works of the Law. In faith not his works of the Law was the basis for God reckoning Abraham righteous. To rehetorically drive his point Paul use a seriese of intensifieres concerning the greatness of Abraham's faith, which may give us the impression that the faith he speaks about has no room for doubt, no place for our own individual belief to falter. yet Paul should be read in light of Genesis and Genesis in light of Paul. Let us accpet as true that Abraham was a person of great faith and that God declares him a righteous person not based on his works but upon his faith. Accepting these things as true let us see what such a person full of faith is like. To do so we must turn to Genesis and the stories of Abraham in Genesis speicifically our text in chapter 17.
How does the story of Abraham's life in Genesis match up with Pauls praise of Abraham as the father of faith? We are getting toward the end of the overal story of Abraham. It has been a long time since Abram and Sarai left their home in Ur and travled to canaan based on the word and promise of God. They have endured much and prospered some, but remain semi-nomadic herders of sheep and cattel. God on several occasions after the first call promises Abram that he and Sarai will be the beginning line of a great nation. Yet through it all and despite the repetition of the promise Sarah her self does not bear a child. In their desperatin to have a child (and help God along with the promise, or in an atempt to live into the promise on their own) Hagai becomes suragate to Sarai and Abram has the son Ishmael by Hagar. This brings us to our story today, and again God reiterates God's promise to Abraham. This great person of faith how has he been unwavaring and without doubt? In our passage we see Abraham in responce to Gods promise bring to God his solution, Ishmael. But God's plan includes Sarah who has taken part and walked in faith as well as Abraham. God does not accept Abrahams feeble attempt to live into God's promise. From the first of Abraham's travels from Ur, in responce to God's call, this story of faith includes lying about his relationship to Sarah to save his own life, having a son by Hagar his wife's maidservant as a means to fulfill God's promise, arguing with God about the destruction of Sodom and Gemorah which occurs after this theophany in Genesis 17. Abraham and Sarah struggle with Hagar and Ishmael after Isaac is born. Fear and jealosy drive Abraham and Sarah to send Hagar and Ishmael away to an almost certain death except that God intervenes. The unwavering faith and hoping against hope and steady belief in God was part of a life that included all these false starts, attempts at self preservation and attempting to help God out with God's promise. Faith that Paul is talking about must be something more than always believeing and never doubting and always acting out of belief in God.
What if our fiath, the faith that Paul is talking about has as much to do with God's character as with ourselves? What if faith isn't something we own or posses of ourselves as something earned or naturally posessing? What if faith is a gift recieved through certain acts? Reading Paul and Genesis together suggests to me that faith is larger than our consistency, larger than any presentation of ourselves to the others or to God. In the midst of all Abrahams false starts, failure to trust God and attempts to help God along with God's plans, there is one consistent thread, Abraham is always open to God as God, as the totally other and the very substance of life. This is one side of the faith that leads to the accounting as righteous. This is such a faith because it allows God to work it trust that no matter what God is the faithful one. We like Abraham are inconsistent and faithless, we try to keep up a good image but we are inconsistent, but Abraham trusted God's unfailing love and unwavering faithfulness. God is full of faith and so as Abraham remains open to this faithfulness never claiming any right before God, he becomes a person of great faith through God's faithfulness. Abrahams faith, which God reckons as righteousness is a gift of God's faithfulness to Abraham, not what Abraham earns because of his faithfulness to God. So that the source of Abraham's faith is God, not Abrahams own works.
What then does this life of openness to God look like? How do we know if we are open to God? Jesus tells us: " If any want to become my followers, let them deny themselves and take up their cross and follow me. 8:35 For those who want to save their life will lose it, and those who lose their life for my sake, and for the sake of the gospel, will save it." "Mark 8:34-35) Taking up the cross is an act of faith that is not a work of the Law. This loosing of oneself and taking up the cross is an act of faith but not a work. The act of letting oneself and identity go and taking up the cross is an ongoing activity that perfects. But it doesn't necesarily mean having it all figured out, the disciples and Peter in the text certainly don't! The Life of Abraham and Sarah are examples of taking up the cross and letting go of the self. They travel from their home and become nomads, never settling down after taking up the call of God. In the midst they have their failings, they fail to understand what God is doing and they try to help God out. Their selves still raise their heads and at times they continue to act out of selfishness and mere self-preservation. But in the end when the entire story is told they perservered and they no matter the moments of self, or of doubt or failure of nerve they never gave up on God, they alwasy were open to God's appearing and God's word to them, they never settled down. God had sent them on a journey that lasted their entire life time. They are examples of deing to ourselves letting go of what people tell us should be done when we know God has called us to other things. They lost their selves and found new names, that were more themselves given to them by God.
Faith is not something you drumb up in yourself. Faith is not banishing all doubt and never asking a question. Rather faith is the letting down of ones defenses and the walls of human identity and opening oneself up in trust to the faithfulness of God. This faith does require or should have resultant acts things that could be described metaphorically as taking up ones cross and dying. But the act itself does not make one perfect or righteous. God is not asking that we live perfect lives, but in the messiness of our lives, and even when we know we have sinned and messed up that we do not let those things close us to God, that we in faith await the presence of God in our lives. This is much easier now that Christ has come and fulfilled all righteousness and perfectly fulfilled the Law of God, so that we now can do this in assurance that we are Christs.
Monday, March 2
Sermon First Sunday in Lent
Genesis 9:8-17
Psalm 25:1-10
1 Peter 3:18-22
Mark 1:9-15
Recently when cleaning I came accross an old airline boarding pass stub on the back it said "get the 411 on your 737". At first I thought nothing of it. I knew more or less what it was saying, though I did not know how one was supposed to get the information on the airplane. but then I was struck at how strange this sentence was: being told to get a large number on a much larger number" What would four hundred and eleven have to do with seven hundred and thirty seven. If I didn't know the context that one dials 411 to get informatin and thus the number four hundred and eleven especially if one says "four, one one" communicates "information" and that the number seven hundred and Thirtyseven again when said as "seven, thirtyseven" indicates a type of aircraft, then the message on the back of the boarding pass is either nonsense or cryptic. If for some reason this stub of a boarding pass was passed down from generatin to generation until a time when airplanes and telephone service as we know it had faded completely from memory, the sense of this message that I redily understood would be lost and seen as either non-sense or perhaps some mysterious message in which 411 and 737 would have some mystical meaning. In a sense they do. Only the initiated into phone service and airplanes attach any particular singinficance to those numbers beyond numerical value such that they make sense of the above sentence. When it comes to Lent and Baptism, the liturgy, sacraments in general we as Protestants are often like those in my thought experiment to whom this boarding pass stub has been passed down but for whom the necesary assumptions and context have been lost. For me the work of ecumenism and the vision of this ecumenical congregation is to regain the context of the entire faith of the church. Thus the conjunction today of passages on baptism with the first Sunday in Lent may seem unintelgible to many of us.
On this the first Sunday in Lent we have very similar texts to the Baptism of the Lord. We return to Jesus' Baptism. But now we follow Jesus into the desert and then on to Jesus' proclamation to repent and believe the good-news of the fulfillment and the presence of the Kingdom of God. Peter talks of a baptism that now saves us prefigured by the flood, and we read that God made a Covenant not to destroy the earth in a flood again. Reflecting on baptism at the beginig of Lent places Baptism as a key to the life of discipleship. This suggests that Baptism is a place of beginning of faith. Yet, this is a difficult thing to assert here at Reconciler we have differing emphases on baptism and differing experiences. Some of us have been simply baptized as infants, others as children or adolescents, others as adults. Some of us have not been baptized at all coming from traditions that emphasize the interior experience of faith in Christ over the external sacramental sign. Some of us have been baptized several times. In the season after Epiphany as began our reflections on discipleship I attempted to talk about baptism and its place in Christian faith. We are here again and I feel the need to both assert the centrality of baptism and admit this is adifficult thing to assert in our context. We have a variety of approaches and various understandings of baptism in part are due to perceived and real abuses and misunderstandings concerning baptism and its spiritual reality. Christians have often made the sacraments a magical rite. For Protestants this misunderstanding was often attributed to accretions to the basics of the faith and so Protestants attempted to scrape away the unduly mysterious elements, and at times to the point of finding little or no meaning in the rites, rituals and sacraments of the Church. These external things may be nice but they do not make us Christians, so those who have come before us have said with differing emphases. However, Baptism, the liturgy, communion, Lent, spiritual disciplines are not and were never intended to be things to mark off that one has done to assure one has got the spiritual life under ones own control, rather the forgotten meaning is that all offer us the support of grace and produce in us an openness to God being at work in our lives. They are to use the theological terminology "means of Grace". We are physical creatures what supports our spiritual life is aspects of our physical world infused with spiritual power truth and meaning. This is why Baptism is central to the life of discipleship according to the catholic faith of the Church.
The story of the flood causes us difficulty. We have difficulty assimilating its message. On the face of it God in furry unleashes a great and worldwide devastation. All life except what life can fit on the ark, is destroyed, and then God promises not to do that again. Yet, the story can be read as being about the human capacity to ignore God and life, and the consequences of this and God, seeking to both bring an end to violence and evil and to preserve life. I see such a reading as fitting into our current debate about Global warming. We have an awareness of pollution and debates over how we raise our food, and I think can appreciate that human actions and carelessness can have physical destructive consequences that effect more than just those most directly responsible. However, the overall story of the flood is also about how God has held back the full consequences of humanities collective actions, by preserving a few. Also God puts a reminder in the physical cosmos not only to us but to God's self regarding God's promise not to bring such destruction upon the whole earth. Peter also points out that from the point of view after Jesus Christ we see that God has moved from simply holding back the ultimately destructive consequences of our fallenness and propensity to be forgetful and careless and has offered a solution, and we enter into that solution in faith and Baptism.
So, Peter says that Baptism now saves. Does this not sound strange to us? Have we not lost the ability to hear Peter on this point. I know that I am prone to read that and say Peter didn't really mean what is plainly there before us. And it is easy to do so because Peter does not dwell on this for long the original readers shared Peter's assumptions. Though he does need to explain that "baptism now saves" Peter does need to offer a a corrective: this is not merely an external act of bathing, but of something deeper, and bringing us in connection with the death and resurrection of Christ. Paul in a few of the epistles speaks of it more deliberately and clearly, saying that in baptism we are buried with Christ and raised with him. We are identified with the one who from his own Baptism he was sent into the desert for 40 days to struggle with the devil. so this Baptism is also a place from which we are sent by the Spirit, who is given to us in Baptism, who descends upon us like Jesus Christ. While Baptism is to be something that happens to us once, we are to our remember and return to our baptism recalling its grace and power our entire lives. Once we are Baptized it is a great spiritual resource for us. Baptism is our salvation because it is the vehicle through wihc God unites us with Christ. Due to the presence of the Spirit in the waters of baptism and that through the Spirit we are identified with Christ out of baptism we live out the life of discipleship.
Faith alone is not enough! My faith, all by itself, in as much as it comes from me is weak. My own ability to trust God is poor. Thankfully God does not expect us to drum up continually faith in God and Jesus Christ, rather through the Church we have been given supports of our faith, reminders, spiritual resources of Grace. Holy Communion is where we receive the body and blood of Christ as the spiritual food and the medicine of immortality that gives us the strength to live out the calling of our discipleship and the medicine that heals us of the wound of sin, and thus give us life. Baptism does not replace faith but is the source and foundation of faith. Baptism is the support of faith because it is that which unwaveringly connects us to the objects of our faith, the life death and resurrection of Christ. In baptism we are fully brought into the solution God has provided for human tendency towards destructiveness. In baptism we are made one with Christ and thus can hear the voice that speaks of our deep and abiding connection with God. In baptism the recreation of the world begins, not through destruction, but through rebirth. All that we have in faith in Christ, begins and is grounded in baptism and is gift as the Spirit marks us as Christ's own. And so the waters of baptism now save us.
Lent recalls to us the full impact and reality of our faith, those parts of the faith we individually or corporately have forgotten. In response to this confrontation we can try to focus on the externals, or we can try to force ourselves to be conformed to the image of Christ. We can see Lent as a time of wilderness where we on our own power imitate Christ. And certainly Christians at times have chosen to so see Lent as such: a time to get themselves cleaned up for God. Ironically those who rejected these outward and purely fleshly interpretations of religious observance and sacraments, rejected baptism or that baptism was anything more than a thing we did in obedience to Christ. In rejecting this outward form of faith and the place of physicality as a site of the Grace we failed to see that faith, at least Christian faith, is faith in the creator of all things seen and unseen, material and immaterial, physical and spiritual, and thus we are not caleld to live beyond the physical. Being the creator of the physical world God never intended faith to be internal and "purely spiritual". God never intended that we reject the salvific path found in the stuff of the earth. God puts a visible physical reminder in the sky, not only to remind humans but to remind God's self. God is not disconnected from Creation, never was, and certainly is not now after the coming of the Son in human flesh in Jesus Christ. Our Protestant forbearers were right if our faith is merely external and we think that walking through the correct rituals, saying the right things, getting doused with water, smeared in ash, lighting enough incense, and eating or not eating the right foods means God must accept us, then our faith is empty and idolatrous. However, what many of our protestant forbears failed to realize is that our faith is equally powerless if we turn our struggle into a merely internal and disembodied one. If we make our faith and belief into the key without any physical expression or support then we lock ourselves into the grand swings of faith and doubt, and a life unremitting and merciless self-examination. In such a state for most of us then the freedom and joy of the faith is rarely ours. My sisters and brothers the catholic faith of the Church has always been that mere faith that refuses the physical world is without power and trust in the mere externals of religious ritual is foolishness and an empty shell. The catholic faith has always affirmed that true faith begins in acknowledging that God is creator of all, and as creator brings about our salvation through physical things and by becoming eternaly connected with the physical in joining divinity and humanity in the person and body of Jesus Christ. Baptism and communion, incense and fasting, are not just nice things they are the way God gives us God's grace and the way we remove ourselves from having to do it ourselves. In partaking in the rites, sacraments and spiritual disciplines we allow God to transform us. This is the meaning of these things we Christians often forget and we Protestants especially. Faith is not something we drum up in ourselves or something that comes divorced from our bodies and our physicality. Such a divorced faith has little staying power in the face of doubts, and only in the most fastidious produces a righteousness able to counter sin. However, we in water, in eating blessed bread and wine, in being anointed with holy oil, in hearing words spoken of forgiveness receive from God the gift our our selves being renewed in a world being reborn.
This Lent, remember none of what we do is about getting cleaned up. We can't clean ourselves up. We can't make ourselves right. We cannot image Christ by our own effort. There is no work or ritual any of us can perform no word I can say based in my own wisdom that will cause you and us to reflect Christ and be Christ to the world. But God in baptism makes us new, upholds our faith and gives us Grace. We come to Lent to remind ourselves that we can't do it by our own striving. In whatever we do in Lent, in fasting, in giving alms in returning, to disciplines we let drop, in taking up new ones, we remind ourselves that we are weak and in need of God at all times and in all ways and that without God's grace our own efforts amount to nothing. So, I encourage you if you still have questions about your baptism whether you were baptized as an infant or baptized more than once or never been baptized, maybe this Lent and Easter is time to accept the gift of grace in baptism and find yourself afloat in the waters of new birth. After all we are on the journey to Easter. Perhaps this year Easter will not be about believing in the Risen one but about the Risen one bearing you up and transfiguring you with the uncreated light of God. And may we all remember that what we do, we do so that we may be born up in our life of discipleship by the grace of God offered to us in and through our physicality. Amen
Psalm 25:1-10
1 Peter 3:18-22
Mark 1:9-15
Recently when cleaning I came accross an old airline boarding pass stub on the back it said "get the 411 on your 737". At first I thought nothing of it. I knew more or less what it was saying, though I did not know how one was supposed to get the information on the airplane. but then I was struck at how strange this sentence was: being told to get a large number on a much larger number" What would four hundred and eleven have to do with seven hundred and thirty seven. If I didn't know the context that one dials 411 to get informatin and thus the number four hundred and eleven especially if one says "four, one one" communicates "information" and that the number seven hundred and Thirtyseven again when said as "seven, thirtyseven" indicates a type of aircraft, then the message on the back of the boarding pass is either nonsense or cryptic. If for some reason this stub of a boarding pass was passed down from generatin to generation until a time when airplanes and telephone service as we know it had faded completely from memory, the sense of this message that I redily understood would be lost and seen as either non-sense or perhaps some mysterious message in which 411 and 737 would have some mystical meaning. In a sense they do. Only the initiated into phone service and airplanes attach any particular singinficance to those numbers beyond numerical value such that they make sense of the above sentence. When it comes to Lent and Baptism, the liturgy, sacraments in general we as Protestants are often like those in my thought experiment to whom this boarding pass stub has been passed down but for whom the necesary assumptions and context have been lost. For me the work of ecumenism and the vision of this ecumenical congregation is to regain the context of the entire faith of the church. Thus the conjunction today of passages on baptism with the first Sunday in Lent may seem unintelgible to many of us.
On this the first Sunday in Lent we have very similar texts to the Baptism of the Lord. We return to Jesus' Baptism. But now we follow Jesus into the desert and then on to Jesus' proclamation to repent and believe the good-news of the fulfillment and the presence of the Kingdom of God. Peter talks of a baptism that now saves us prefigured by the flood, and we read that God made a Covenant not to destroy the earth in a flood again. Reflecting on baptism at the beginig of Lent places Baptism as a key to the life of discipleship. This suggests that Baptism is a place of beginning of faith. Yet, this is a difficult thing to assert here at Reconciler we have differing emphases on baptism and differing experiences. Some of us have been simply baptized as infants, others as children or adolescents, others as adults. Some of us have not been baptized at all coming from traditions that emphasize the interior experience of faith in Christ over the external sacramental sign. Some of us have been baptized several times. In the season after Epiphany as began our reflections on discipleship I attempted to talk about baptism and its place in Christian faith. We are here again and I feel the need to both assert the centrality of baptism and admit this is adifficult thing to assert in our context. We have a variety of approaches and various understandings of baptism in part are due to perceived and real abuses and misunderstandings concerning baptism and its spiritual reality. Christians have often made the sacraments a magical rite. For Protestants this misunderstanding was often attributed to accretions to the basics of the faith and so Protestants attempted to scrape away the unduly mysterious elements, and at times to the point of finding little or no meaning in the rites, rituals and sacraments of the Church. These external things may be nice but they do not make us Christians, so those who have come before us have said with differing emphases. However, Baptism, the liturgy, communion, Lent, spiritual disciplines are not and were never intended to be things to mark off that one has done to assure one has got the spiritual life under ones own control, rather the forgotten meaning is that all offer us the support of grace and produce in us an openness to God being at work in our lives. They are to use the theological terminology "means of Grace". We are physical creatures what supports our spiritual life is aspects of our physical world infused with spiritual power truth and meaning. This is why Baptism is central to the life of discipleship according to the catholic faith of the Church.
The story of the flood causes us difficulty. We have difficulty assimilating its message. On the face of it God in furry unleashes a great and worldwide devastation. All life except what life can fit on the ark, is destroyed, and then God promises not to do that again. Yet, the story can be read as being about the human capacity to ignore God and life, and the consequences of this and God, seeking to both bring an end to violence and evil and to preserve life. I see such a reading as fitting into our current debate about Global warming. We have an awareness of pollution and debates over how we raise our food, and I think can appreciate that human actions and carelessness can have physical destructive consequences that effect more than just those most directly responsible. However, the overall story of the flood is also about how God has held back the full consequences of humanities collective actions, by preserving a few. Also God puts a reminder in the physical cosmos not only to us but to God's self regarding God's promise not to bring such destruction upon the whole earth. Peter also points out that from the point of view after Jesus Christ we see that God has moved from simply holding back the ultimately destructive consequences of our fallenness and propensity to be forgetful and careless and has offered a solution, and we enter into that solution in faith and Baptism.
So, Peter says that Baptism now saves. Does this not sound strange to us? Have we not lost the ability to hear Peter on this point. I know that I am prone to read that and say Peter didn't really mean what is plainly there before us. And it is easy to do so because Peter does not dwell on this for long the original readers shared Peter's assumptions. Though he does need to explain that "baptism now saves" Peter does need to offer a a corrective: this is not merely an external act of bathing, but of something deeper, and bringing us in connection with the death and resurrection of Christ. Paul in a few of the epistles speaks of it more deliberately and clearly, saying that in baptism we are buried with Christ and raised with him. We are identified with the one who from his own Baptism he was sent into the desert for 40 days to struggle with the devil. so this Baptism is also a place from which we are sent by the Spirit, who is given to us in Baptism, who descends upon us like Jesus Christ. While Baptism is to be something that happens to us once, we are to our remember and return to our baptism recalling its grace and power our entire lives. Once we are Baptized it is a great spiritual resource for us. Baptism is our salvation because it is the vehicle through wihc God unites us with Christ. Due to the presence of the Spirit in the waters of baptism and that through the Spirit we are identified with Christ out of baptism we live out the life of discipleship.
Faith alone is not enough! My faith, all by itself, in as much as it comes from me is weak. My own ability to trust God is poor. Thankfully God does not expect us to drum up continually faith in God and Jesus Christ, rather through the Church we have been given supports of our faith, reminders, spiritual resources of Grace. Holy Communion is where we receive the body and blood of Christ as the spiritual food and the medicine of immortality that gives us the strength to live out the calling of our discipleship and the medicine that heals us of the wound of sin, and thus give us life. Baptism does not replace faith but is the source and foundation of faith. Baptism is the support of faith because it is that which unwaveringly connects us to the objects of our faith, the life death and resurrection of Christ. In baptism we are fully brought into the solution God has provided for human tendency towards destructiveness. In baptism we are made one with Christ and thus can hear the voice that speaks of our deep and abiding connection with God. In baptism the recreation of the world begins, not through destruction, but through rebirth. All that we have in faith in Christ, begins and is grounded in baptism and is gift as the Spirit marks us as Christ's own. And so the waters of baptism now save us.
Lent recalls to us the full impact and reality of our faith, those parts of the faith we individually or corporately have forgotten. In response to this confrontation we can try to focus on the externals, or we can try to force ourselves to be conformed to the image of Christ. We can see Lent as a time of wilderness where we on our own power imitate Christ. And certainly Christians at times have chosen to so see Lent as such: a time to get themselves cleaned up for God. Ironically those who rejected these outward and purely fleshly interpretations of religious observance and sacraments, rejected baptism or that baptism was anything more than a thing we did in obedience to Christ. In rejecting this outward form of faith and the place of physicality as a site of the Grace we failed to see that faith, at least Christian faith, is faith in the creator of all things seen and unseen, material and immaterial, physical and spiritual, and thus we are not caleld to live beyond the physical. Being the creator of the physical world God never intended faith to be internal and "purely spiritual". God never intended that we reject the salvific path found in the stuff of the earth. God puts a visible physical reminder in the sky, not only to remind humans but to remind God's self. God is not disconnected from Creation, never was, and certainly is not now after the coming of the Son in human flesh in Jesus Christ. Our Protestant forbearers were right if our faith is merely external and we think that walking through the correct rituals, saying the right things, getting doused with water, smeared in ash, lighting enough incense, and eating or not eating the right foods means God must accept us, then our faith is empty and idolatrous. However, what many of our protestant forbears failed to realize is that our faith is equally powerless if we turn our struggle into a merely internal and disembodied one. If we make our faith and belief into the key without any physical expression or support then we lock ourselves into the grand swings of faith and doubt, and a life unremitting and merciless self-examination. In such a state for most of us then the freedom and joy of the faith is rarely ours. My sisters and brothers the catholic faith of the Church has always been that mere faith that refuses the physical world is without power and trust in the mere externals of religious ritual is foolishness and an empty shell. The catholic faith has always affirmed that true faith begins in acknowledging that God is creator of all, and as creator brings about our salvation through physical things and by becoming eternaly connected with the physical in joining divinity and humanity in the person and body of Jesus Christ. Baptism and communion, incense and fasting, are not just nice things they are the way God gives us God's grace and the way we remove ourselves from having to do it ourselves. In partaking in the rites, sacraments and spiritual disciplines we allow God to transform us. This is the meaning of these things we Christians often forget and we Protestants especially. Faith is not something we drum up in ourselves or something that comes divorced from our bodies and our physicality. Such a divorced faith has little staying power in the face of doubts, and only in the most fastidious produces a righteousness able to counter sin. However, we in water, in eating blessed bread and wine, in being anointed with holy oil, in hearing words spoken of forgiveness receive from God the gift our our selves being renewed in a world being reborn.
This Lent, remember none of what we do is about getting cleaned up. We can't clean ourselves up. We can't make ourselves right. We cannot image Christ by our own effort. There is no work or ritual any of us can perform no word I can say based in my own wisdom that will cause you and us to reflect Christ and be Christ to the world. But God in baptism makes us new, upholds our faith and gives us Grace. We come to Lent to remind ourselves that we can't do it by our own striving. In whatever we do in Lent, in fasting, in giving alms in returning, to disciplines we let drop, in taking up new ones, we remind ourselves that we are weak and in need of God at all times and in all ways and that without God's grace our own efforts amount to nothing. So, I encourage you if you still have questions about your baptism whether you were baptized as an infant or baptized more than once or never been baptized, maybe this Lent and Easter is time to accept the gift of grace in baptism and find yourself afloat in the waters of new birth. After all we are on the journey to Easter. Perhaps this year Easter will not be about believing in the Risen one but about the Risen one bearing you up and transfiguring you with the uncreated light of God. And may we all remember that what we do, we do so that we may be born up in our life of discipleship by the grace of God offered to us in and through our physicality. Amen
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