Complaining amongst Serpents

A Sermon for the Fourth Sunday in Lent, Year B

Watch the sermon online here.

In today’s assigned Gospel we encounter perhaps the most famous verse in the Bible, John 3:16, “For God so loved the world . . .” If you have any knowledge of Christianity this is of course one of the most iconic verses, and if you hail from the southern United States, as I do, you have probably seen it plastered on billboards and stamped onto the bottom of random items like French fry containers or shopping bags –just in the hopes that someone may look up the verse and have a conversion experience.

That all said, what was new for me as I was going through the texts this week were the verses just before. Had you ever noticed that in the two verses before the famous John 3:16 Jesus is talking about snakes?! I never had!

He is of course referencing today’s Old Testament reading, the story from Numbers in which the people of Israel complain against God, who allows fiery serpents to attack the population before they once again seek God’s forgiveness. God then instructs Moses to put a bronze serpent on a pole and lift it high above the people; whoever looks on the serpent lives, even if they have been bit.

It’s such an odd story to juxtapose with what is happening in the Gospel, and yet of course, Jesus does so because he is making a profound connection between what happened in the desert and what is going to happen to him. It is this “lifting up” that unites the stories. The lifting up of the serpent and the lifting up of the Son of Man.

In both cases the lifting up is for the people, “so that whoever believes” may have life. The Gospel of John’s theology focuses on the cross as a sign of triumph, and the most powerful image of that triumph is this comparison to the bronze serpent in the narrative of the people of Israel.

So what then does this mean for us as we continue our journey through the season of Lent? What does this parallel of God’s salvation through the serpent and through Jesus teach us as we begin to cast our own gaze toward Passion Week and Easter?

In today’s individualised society I think that we are quick to understand verses like John 3:16 and others in purely personal terms. Our concept of salvation, about life and death and eternity, is understood within a framework of personal and private decisions regarding our spirituality and religion.

Sometimes, this is a helpful and motivating perspective. We are forced to reckon with our own mortality, our own life and to ask serious questions about the pursuit of God’s kingdom in our own lives.

However, on the other hand, such an individualised approach does some damage to the passages we encounter today. In Numbers, it is the people who “speak against God and Moses” before God sends the serpents “among the people.” Here the emphasis is always on the community as a whole. Serpents didn’t come out of the ground only for those who were complaining the loudest –both rejecting God and the judgment is understood in the context of community.

I want us to really think about what this means, because just like sometimes as we overemphasise the individual, we can also hide behind the masses. We hear such stories and our thinking turns more toward countries or culture. We perhaps broadly lament the direction of “Western society” or perhaps our own “country.” But what happens if we bring it slightly closer to home, where maybe this story gets a little more personal and a little bit more uncomfortable?

Have we as a church community ever found ourselves speaking out against God, complaining about our situation –the modern equivalent of poor food or desert wanderings? Do we forget the grand story of God’s salvation only to bicker amongst ourselves?

“Why have you brought us out of Egypt to die in the wilderness?” The people demand to know of God. This isn’t an individual asking this question about their own personal life, and neither is this a broad projection of the human condition.

This is specific to a community; to a group of people doing life together.

For me, this is where the story can really sting. What communities are we part of where as a small group we have to take responsibility for losing our way? We can’t just blame society, and neither can we just blame the person next to us –even though we may try. We are each responsible for where the community has ended up, and yet we have ended up here together. I am responsible for complaining when maybe I should have been silent, and perhaps for not speaking when I should have made a statement.

Think about our prayers of confession, or the the Litany we will pray together in a few moments. We pray that the Lord have mercy upon us. Us. Who exactly is the us? Is the us just a nice way of praying together, or maybe we should take that us a little more seriously? The us is dangerously and offensively specific. It names who we are in a particular place and a particular time. It is those of us gathering here as church. It is those of us gathering as families. It is those of us gathering as workplaces, or a group of friends. We are so quick to hide behind the “us” as a generality, when in fact it should be a soul-piercing word that actually calls to mind the realities of what it means to gather, of what it means to be part of a body.

The us should be a stark reminder of what it means when we have complained against God, spoken against our neighbour and allowed sin to enter like serpents into our midst. We can point the fingers all we want, but it is me and you and the person next to you who must face the fiery serpents.

In the story, we can read the fiery serpents as sent by God, but I think we can also understand the serpents as the consequences of what it means within the community when we fail to listen to God and to trust his promises. We start complaining first against God, then against our leaders, and before long we have most likely turned on one another. In today’s language maybe we call it a “toxic” culture, which perhaps is more similar to fiery serpents than we care to admit.

But, the story doesn’t end here.

Lent, as I said in my sermon last week in Villars, is a time of serious examination, but it is not to be a dour season of self-flagellation and condemnation. It is a season of honesty, a springtime of forgiveness, and above all a looking forward to God’s final victory.

The story of the serpents doesn’t end with the death of Israel, and it’s no accident that Jesus picks up on these themes of redemption with Nicodemus.

We see God’s victory amongst the serpents. God gives Moses the tools for salvation, a bronze serpent lifted up and set before the people. All they have to do is gaze upon the bronze serpent and they will live.

Gaze upon the victory of God; whether it be in the bronze serpent or the cross of Christ, and there we can find a new meaning of what it means to be us –an us redeemed. An us made new.

Lord, have mercy upon us. To speak this prayer is not just a condemnation of ourselves, a recognition of our brokenness. Mercy is also a declaration to God; it says, God be yourself to us. Be who you are are to us. As the Gospel of John would argue, God be victorious.

Just as we are not just individuals in our sin and complaining, our redemption also is not alone. We are not just in this as individuals blindly searching for God lifted high; we are in this journey together. We are looking to our neighbour who may be in the grasp of the fiery serpent, and saying, gaze upon this cross. Here is life. Where we once found condemnation and death in the serpent, now we find life and wholeness. We find the anti-venom of God. We find resurrection.

This is the difficult work of Lent. Because I’m sure as you know, gazing upon the cross is in some ways the easiest thing to do –simply turn your eyes. And in another sense, it is the effort of a lifetime.

But here we are then, as the body of Christ, as God’s people redeemed. No longer complaining in the desert, but rejoicing in the kingdom.

Lord have mercy.

Amen.

A Showing Through

Today on the feast of Epiphany we look in the early chapters of the Gospels to examine how God is breaking into the our world through Christ’s incarnation. Epiphany is the “showing through” of the divine into the human, and it is the great bridge over which we move from our celebration of Advent and Christmas toward the rest of our faith journey this year.

We need Epiphany because it draws us as humans into the divine narrative. In Christmas we learn how God became human, but it is through Epiphany that we see how the mystery of Christ is made known to us in a deep, personal and cosmic way.

Recently, I heard messages from two different priests in which one described the “thing-ness” and the other the “this-ness” of our Christian faith. This use of funny and similar non-words make me wonder if the two were sharing notes. However, they each capture an important concept that wed can draw forward into Epiphany. Christianity is not just an idea to which we subscribe. It has both a presence “thing-ness” and an immediacy “this-ness” that we are called to experience and to share.

“Thing-ness” illustrates the bearing of physical reality on our spiritual journeys, something that is especially true in the Anglican tradition. Our faith is sacramental. We bless and sanctify real and every day objects to accomplish spiritual tasks, not because we believe in spells and magic tricks, but because we affirm the deep, spiritual reality present in all of us. Christ’s presence, God born as a human, serves as the ultimate example of a God who affirms the goodness of creation and our work to uncover and redeem that goodness through all that we encounter: people, places, things.

Epiphany is our celebration of the pouring out of that spirituality into all the nitty-gritty cracks of our lives. Not to paint over the bad spots, but to reveal Christ’s work through all of it. This “thing-ness” of our faith is illustrated in a favourite Epiphany tradition: the chalking of the doorway. In this sacramental, yet physical act, we remind ourselves of God’s presence in the doorway to our home. It is both a physical action and spiritual reminder. It is both an ancient act reminiscent of God commanding his people to mark their doorposts, and something we renew in our lives each year.

Chalking your doorway is also not just part of a church service. Sometimes it is easy to think of our sacramental life just as the type of things we do in church: take communion, baptism, all the parts of a service. But no, Epiphany is a call to see God bursting forth from our own limited perspective of what we may call holy. This happens in our churches, yes, but also in our homes and our places of work.

Paul reminds us of this in Ephesians, that he was given the grace “to make everyone see what is the plan of the mystery hidden for ages in God who created all things; so that through the church the wisdom of God in its rich variety might now be made known to the rulers and authorities in the heavenly places.”

It is made clear that in Christ all are fellow-heirs of the promises of God. Paul makes this explicit in his ministry to the Gentiles, but we record it too in our Gospel story.

The wise men of the East come to worship the incarnate God. They used the stars, the profane wisdom of human astrology, and they found God! In the scriptures, the East was representative of that which was outside of God’s blessing. Adam and Eve were sent east from Eden. Cain after murdering Abel was sent east. The Epiphany is the profanity of God’s new work: that those beyond our own conceptions of holiness and purity are not only able to find God, but are invited into worship.

If the God of Israel can invite the ancient enemies of his beloved people to worship his Son, then surely we can be a little more hospitable to those we would soon otherwise reject.

If “thing-ness” in Epiphany describes the renewal of the physicality of our spirituality and its opening to all people, then “this-ness” illustrates the immediacy of our faith. Our faith is always happening now. The Kingdom of Heaven is at hand, Jesus says. When we celebrate the sacraments, when we chalk our doors, or when we greet one another, we do this always in the present tense.

“Christ is in our midst,” goes one call to the peace, “He is and ever shall be,” comes the response. Such immediacy is both the gift and challenge of Epiphany. The wise men set out on a long and dangerous journey to seek the Christ. Our own journey forms the foundation of the “this-ness” of Epiphany. Salvation isn’t binary code: it’s not a 1 or 0, on or off. We, like the wise men, are invited on a journey to discover Christ’s presence in our world and in ourselves. We are all invited to examine ourselves in “this” moment of our lives. We are invited to love our neighbour in “this” moment.

Christ’s incarnation is not just a moment of ancient history. “This” child is still present with us, and we are called to account of “this” moment and not some distant one in the future when we are stronger, richer, better or kinder. Epiphany is God’s great throwing-open of the doors of salvation to all people. And he throws open the doors now. In this moment. In today’s messy world. The Gospel is not just for the outcasts back in the day, but for the outcasts of today. That includes yourself, but it also includes all those who would think that they can’t belong, those would think they don’t deserve a seat at the table.

And so as we begin this season of Epiphany, as we step upon this bridge of incarnation, where we begin to learn what this whole strange and beautiful journey is all about, carry within and about you the “thing-ness” and the “this-ness” or our faith.

Then, as Isaiah says, “you shall see and be radiant; your heart shall thrill and rejoice, because the abundance of the sea shall be brought to you . . .”

Amen.

A Sermon for Epiphany

The Mountaintop Experience

A sermon for the Feast of the Transfiguration.

It is a strange tale, the Transfiguration.

On first glance it appears to be emblematic of what we might call a mountaintop experience. In fact, it is possibly where we get the term. This experience, as we commonly interpret it, is that you go away and up a mountain, literal or metaphorical, and experience something extraordinary. In this moment a new reality is opened to you, a new way to frame your experiences and learn from life. You come down from the mountain changed.

In crafting our own personal mythologies we tend to view this as positive. A good, transformative moment that marks a distinctive change in our identity. We begin to understand ourselves through the lens of the mountaintop. If someone says, tell me your life story, most likely the narrative you give would include a reference to your mountaintop experience. That day when everything changed.

Today we commemorate two events that could both be called mountaintop experiences, but in order to use this phrase, we must seriously question what the mountaintop is and what it might actually mean in our lives. I think the top of the mountain might be a more difficult and more dangerous place than we expect.

The first we remember, of course, is the story told in today’s Gospel from Luke, the transfiguration of Jesus on Mount Tabor in front of Peter, John and James. This supernatural moment is written down in and has been passed to us commemorated now as a Christian Feast, that is a principal holiday in church tradition.

The second event we also remember on this 6th of August, is the detonation of the first atomic bomb. The Japanese city of Hiroshima was decimated, killing instantly, at a conservative estimate, over 80,000 people (and over 100,000 by the end of the year). Some have soberly described this convergence of dates as one of the great accidents of history, that the Feast of the Transfiguration and the detonation of the first atomic bomb are on the same day. It’s not fair to compare the Transfiguration to the destruction of Hiroshima, and yet I feel we must. We must acknowledge the mountaintop moment of change that swept the world as a nuclear mushroom cloud.

People have compared the terrible contrast of light in these two events. In the Bible light brings life, light uncovers darkness and reveals more of God to his people. In the transfiguration we see Jesus transformed demonstrating his divine nature as well as his glorified resurrection self. In the detonation of the bomb, survivors from Hiroshima described the power of the light of the explosion, but a light carrying death. A light that uncovers darkness. A light not of divine resurrection.

How can we sit with such a terrible contrast? How can we hold this life-bringing and life-destroying light against one another and expect anything but insanity? It would be naive to think I can offer a neat package of answers here. This is messy.

But, what we can do, is look at each of these critical moments, these moments of unveiling, and try to understand what is happening in us, and what is happening in our world when we encounter the mountaintop. How are we transfigured?

First, it’s important to note that for the disciples the story of the transfiguration is mostly a story of failure. At every turn the disciples are recorded as having done and said the wrong thing at the wrong time.

The gospel writer describes the disciples as hardly able to stay awake. They had come up the mountain with Jesus, but it was he who was praying and they were falling asleep. It seems that Peter, John and James just about missed the event.

Peter then make a mistake in asking if Moses and Elijah should stay a while, seeming to miss the whole meaning of the transcendent experience. The tone of response makes clear that setting up camp is not the point of this encounter. After hearing God’s voice from the cloud affirming the work of his chosen son, their departing emotion is described as terror, not hope; so terrified that they didn’t dare tell anyone what had happened to them. It’s not exactly the mountaintop moment we expect.

Let’s also look where this story of the transfiguration sits in the wider gospel. Just before, Jesus has given a strong message about how those who wish to follow him must take up their crosses daily. Those who hope to keep their lives will lose it, and those who lose their lives will keep them. It’s a difficult message as Jesus really begins to talk to his disciples about the cost of following him, describing his death and resurrection.

Also, immediately following the transfiguration is the story about the demon possessed boy who is brought to Jesus because the disciples could not cast it out. It’s almost as if the entire narrative arc of this story is to reinforce that here is a group of disciples who just keep missing the point. Disciples who, at least at the moment, are not ready for when the kingdom of God fully comes into the world.

And maybe this is a little bit of what was happening. Early Christians expected Jesus’ speedy return. One theme that can be drawn out of Luke’s gospel is trying to make sense of a Christ who has not yet returned at the time of writing. Time is passing since the events of Jesus, and the early certainty of God coming back in victory to finally defeat the Romans and restore Israel might no longer seem so certain. Luke works through what it means to be a Christ follower when the exact meaning of that might not now be so clear as it was on the mountaintop with Jesus.

Maybe this resonates for us as we try to hold together the disappointment of the mountaintop alongside the terror of human destruction? Where is the light that promises life when all we can see is the light of death? What are we to learn in the transfiguration?

In this moment the disciples see just a glimpse of God’s glory, and they don’t know how to handle it. Like you and I in our own lives, if an experience is so transcendent, beautiful or terrible, we risk to take away all the wrong messages and think that maybe we can bottle it all into something we control.

“Let’s get these people into tents. Let’s stay a while,” Peter says. Of course he does! If you have ever had the mountaintop moment where the veil between heaven and earth felt thin and you felt the world in all its light and glory was suddenly clear, of course you want to bottle it up and keep it. Of course you want to pitch a tent.

Peter is both excited and clearly terrified. He is also asking, can’t we just stay in the light and not face what it may bring? Returning to Hiroshima, maybe the question isn’t so different. In one, we stay in the light to hold onto the glory. In the other, when the light fades death flows around us. We see the real misery in the world.

Both are terrifying and both reveal our weakness.

But we can’t stay here on the mountain. Not in the moment of glory and not in the moment of terror. Peter learned that the mountaintop experience doesn’t exclude you from the possibility of failure. More likely, it helps you to walk into it. The mountaintop is the instigator of transformation. Such moments of divine clarity may actually unmask the complexity of life and the depth of work that needs to be done once the light has faded.

The mountaintop gets us going rather then offering all of the answers, and I think the gospel writer offers us these stories precisely to paint this complexity. Jesus in glory, the fulfillment of his role in Jerusalem, yes, we have seen this completed. But the mountaintop doesn’t show us all of what we need to do, it shows us the path.

The death and destruction of Hiroshima also changed the world. In a bright flash, the world was transfigured in a way that could have never been imagined. We continue to grapple with not only the physical and political consequences of that moment, but the spiritual ones. A year later in August 1946, the New Yorker dedicated the entirety of its magazine to the famous 30,000 word essay by John Hersey who used his pages to paint a picture as a Western journalist of what happened.

Maybe for you the mountaintop has been an experience of beauty, of great adventure and hope of change. Or maybe the mountaintop has been an experience of terror and fear, a scary unknown or the pain of loss. But the mountaintop is never the whole story. It is only ever the beginning. Where the transformation begins, where the world is unveiled and a path is laid before us.

We come down the mountain in the hope of Christ. We do God’s work even when the demons can’t be cast out and even when the flash of atomic warfare consumes our lives. Even when the mountaintop experience doesn’t tell the story we want. Even when God doesn’t arrive or doesn’t look as we imagined. Even when death still comes and the difficult questions don’t go away. There is no easy answer on the mountaintop, but there is a voice. “This is my Son, my Chosen; listen to him!”

Christ offers us transfiguration. We come down from the mountain forever changed. We face what comes, in fear and in hope, but we follow in his light, the light of life.

Amen.

God with God. God with Us.

A sermon for Trinity Sunday.

There is a cautionary tale about preaching told to those training for ministry, and it is always about Trinity Sunday. The story tells of a vicar who stands up to preach on this Sunday of Trinity only to promptly inform the congregation that the Trinity is much too complicated a subject, and therefore, he will simply choose an easier theme on which to preach.

You should be reassured, I would hope, that we are taught not to imitate this vicar and to embrace what may look like difficult theology from time to time. In fact, another famous story recalls someone who preached on the Trinity while only using words no more than two syllables just to reinforce the point that you don’t need big words to talk about big ideas about God; I, however, won’t be attempting that.

But if this is a day that supposedly strikes fear into the hearts of preaching vicars and confusion in congregations –what is Trinity Sunday and why do we celebrate it?

Unlike the days we have been marking in recent weeks: Easter, Ascension, Pentecost, Trinity does not recall a specific story in Scripture but rather it is when we focus on God’s very nature and his relationship to us. In many ways this day summarises all that has come before. Through the whole narrative of Christ’s life, death and resurrection we now step back to ask, who is God? On Trinity we mark with special significance what it means to worship God as three-in-one: three persons, one God. Father, Son, and Holy Spirit. 

God as three persons, and yet one, is admittedly a complex and seemingly contradictory idea. And I think that sometimes people are afraid of understanding this theology because we leave it at just that –a piece of theology that we must understand or a belief that we must intellectually accept. In this way the mystical framework we have for entering into an appreciation of God’s nature sadly becomes a limiting, stale belief that has no relationship to our daily lives. So what bearing does God as Trinity have in our lives? This is what I want to explore today.

To understand why the Trinity should matter to our faith let’s enter into this three-in-one as a way to know God, to experience God. What do we learn? For me three key qualities stand out. We see that God is relational; we see that God is embodied; and we see that God is active.

First, God is relational. As part of his very being, God is a relationship. We cannot begin to know God if we do not see Father, Son and Holy Spirit as in relationship with one another; it’s a fundamental part of being. God with God. And already this offers us something practical in our own lives.

We are not made to be alone. We cannot exist as solitary creatures because not even God exists alone. God is with God. We see this in the very first chapters of Genesis in the poetry of creation: God hovering over the formless waters deciding to create from an abundance of self-expression. To breathe the heavens and the earth into existence. And not just the heavens and the earth, but people made in God’s image. God said, “Let us make human beings in our image, make them reflecting our nature.”

So what does this mean for us? Where do we take hope in a God who is relationship? If you have ever felt alone, if you have ever felt isolated, if you feel you can’t be in relationship or community because you don’t have what it takes –God tells us through the very fabric of being that we are meant for one another. We desire community because we reflect the nature of God who is one another. You are good enough to be loved. It is part of who you are and it’s part of who we are as people. The ability to love and to be loved flows within the very essence of what it means to be created in the image of a God who is with God.

Second, God is incarnate. Or put another way, God is embodied. What does this mean? God became human. God in relationship with God also enters into relationship with humanity. Not only do we bear God’s image, but God bears our body. So God with God, is also God with us. We know this in the redemptive story of Jesus. But in becoming human the Trinity also affirms the physicality of the world and the physicality of our bodies and our existence. God isn’t interested in simply some unattached spiritual world. The physical and the spiritual worlds are intimately connected, and while we may experience brokenness in them, God created them good. And God is reshaping them now.

How often have you been hurt or ashamed by your physical body?  So many of us struggle to believe that our bodies can be good. But God created and named us as good. So often we start the story of humanity in the second chapter of Genesis, with the fall and the entrance of sin into the world, and somehow huge swaths of our theology have completely forgotten chapter one. The chapter where God with God said let us make humanity, and when they did God called it good.

The Trinity affirms what it means to be alive and what it means to be human and to have a body. What it means to live and laugh and love and cry and die. God has been through all of what we have been through. God has entered into our physical, lived experiences. The Christian faith isn’t a spiritual belief that we just hang on the door as we go out into the physical “real” world. God is a God who enters time and again into physical reality, who breaks into our lived experience to affirm, to bless, to challenge, to heal and to resurrect.

Third, God acts. The Trinity is God in relationship, is God incarnate and is God who takes action. Each one of these attributes flow into the other. The outpouring of God as relationship is a God who creates and a God who becomes human. This is part of his very character –and this is reflected in us and what it means to be Christian.

Jesus introduces what we know as the “Trinitarian formula” in today’s reading from Matthew’s Gospel. It is part of the Great Commission at the end of his earthly ministry. He is telling his disciples to “go” and to spread the Good news of God’s upside-down, liberating kingdom love to everyone. It’s no accident that this is where we encounter God in the Gospels as three persons. It’s not in a dry textbook or in the dutifully recited creeds, it is in the activity of going out; in the activity of loving. Of going and doing God’s work in the world. And how is this work Trinitarian?

It is the work of inviting people into relationship with a God who is relationship; to see God’s presence in our lives. To encounter a God who acts, a God who breaks into a broken world with grace and love to interrupt our loneliness and show us a new path of love. God as Trinity frees people from the power of empire and bondage, from the powers that say you have to do this on your own, that you have be perfect, that you have to be self-sufficient, that you have to be physically flawless and spiritually capable.

The Trinity reflects and embodies the Gospel message. It is not some distant theological concept that we must struggle to grasp; it is a relationship into which get to participate, a mystery we get to experience. Jesus’ life and ministry exemplify the very nature of God that we are invited to enter. We are freed in body and spirit to participate in the Trinitarian life of love and relationship, and we are empowered to bear God’s image back into the world.

So if you are afraid that you might not understand the Trinity, that you don’t fully grasp the creeds –do not fear. Ours is not a God of making sure you have everything lined up just right and every belief squared away; ours is a God of relationship, a God embodied with us; a God who acts and moves us to love in his name. This Trinity Sunday and in all the days that follow we worship and are loved by one God: Father, Son, and Holy Spirit.

Amen.

Expectant Hope

In speaking this week to a group of students about the Feast of the Ascension I asked them the question: what is heaven?

For an idea that looms so large in the imagination of faith, it is difficult for us to have more than the vaguest understanding of what heaven really is. Of course we have our collection of clichés: sitting on clouds and strumming harps, or maybe a series of jokes about St Peter and who he lets through those pearly white gates.

Or more seriously, perhaps we think and hope of meeting loved ones who have died before us. Maybe we call to mind the beautiful imagery of Revelation and the city of God, the New Jerusalem.

My students didn’t offer any answers that would surprise us: it’s a spiritual place, some said. It’s where we go after we die. One even asked, what happens if you are a Christian but don’t want to exist for all of eternity? I didn’t have a good response to that one.

No matter where we are in our spiritual journey, young student or lifelong Christian, heaven is both a hugely important expectation but also a tantalizingly vague and possibly frightening unknown.

One might expect that in all the Bible, the story of the ascension should offer us a practical guide of following Jesus to heaven. Before he ascends, perhaps we could have a few verses where Jesus offers a step-by-step guide on what comes next in the Christian concerns over life and death? Or maybe we could expect some details about how to get into the heavenly city, or what to expect once there?

But this is not at all what we hear in Jesus’ final meeting with his disciples.

If Christians today have an outsized concern for life in heaven after death, then Jesus’ disciples were concerned with the opposite. They expected action right now. Listen to their question:

“Will you now restore the kingdom to Israel?”

Jesus’ death had been a big challenge to the disciples’ hope in a Messiah who could take on the Roman Empire and finally deliver Israel. Jesus was unconventional the disciples had realised, but at the end of the day, they were hoping for the same political outcome. Jesus’ death, of course, had upset these expectations, but now that he was alive again the disciples were ready. After all that has happened surely now is the time to act!

Have you ever felt this way as a disciple? I know I have. We have a certain expectation about how God is supposed to show up in our life, a deep hope. Perhaps just like the disciples, our hope is noble and righteous. Our hope is for something good.

God, however, upsets our plans. As he tends to do, Things don’t go as we expect and we feel like God has disappeared. But after some searching we encounter him again, and it’s great. Our hope is renewed. Just like the disciples who met Jesus again after his death and resurrection. But along this journey, did we every allow God to really challenge or change our exceptions? Did we ever allow God to truly transform our hope? Or at the end of the day did we hold on to exactly what we want?

I think this is happening with the disciples. They have been on a tumultuous, emotional journey. They are exhilarated to be back with Jesus, but they still haven’t really gotten the message. They have probably asked this question about the restoration of Israel a thousand times. They have journeyed with God, but they have never really allowed God to transform their deep hope.

And so they ask again. Is it time now? Are we there yet?

I’m sure that plenty of us have experience of a long car journey when that fateful question from the back. . .are we there yet? And perhaps we even have a few sarcastic non-answers tucked away: “No, you will never be there, you will always be here.”

It almost feels like Jesus is doing something kind of like this. Offering a vague, noncommittal answer to a tiresome question. He responds, “It is not for you to know the times or the periods that the Father has set by his own authority.”

In short, no. We aren’t there yet, and you can’t know. Only the Father knows. So stop asking.

For me, this is how I always understood Jesus’ response, and it leaves the story with a frustrating conclusion. Jesus gets to disappear into heaven, leaving us. . .where?

Biblical scholar and Anglican bishop N.T. Wright, however, offers helpful insight as to why Jesus responds this way. He argues that Jesus is offering more than a vague noncommittal answer. What Jesus says here is actually incredibly important to unlocking everything else. Right afterwards, Jesus commands the disciples to be his witnesses. But witnesses of what?

Witnesses of his death and resurrection, certainly. But why is that important?

Witnesses of his moral teaching, certainly. But how does that stop the Romans?

Witnesses of his healing ministry, certainly. But what power do they have?

Last year, after the death of the Queen, King Charles ascended the throne. A key part of this transition was the moment the new king was proclaimed from St James’s Palace after the meeting of the Privy Council. A large, ornate document was read aloud so that all of the new King’s subjects would know who reigns. Heralds were then sent around the kingdom to read the same proclamation in Scotland, Northern Ireland and Wales. These witnesses carried the announcement of the new king.

Jesus, in his death and resurrection, has taken his place as the rightful king, and in his ascension, he is enthroned in heaven. Remember that sign that hung above the cross? King of the Jews. It was written in mockery, but Pilate wouldn’t change the text. And it is now fulfilled. The kingdom is here. It is arriving! Jesus is fulfilling the ancient belief in a king who would rule not just Israel, but the whole world.

The disciples want to know, when is this all going to be sorted. When are the earthly powers going to be no more, when is Rome going to be a distant memory? And Jesus rightly says, only God knows that, but the kingdom is here. It is beginning here and now. He says, go. You have the authority to be my heralds. “You will receive power when the Holy Spirit comes upon you.” While the power of earthly kings come with swords and violence, the power of God’s kingdom is different. The power is to heal, the power is to forgive, the power is to bring peace.

How do we need to hear this today? Jesus’ ascension isn’t about us getting a better picture of heaven, it isn’t even supposed to explain our way to heaven. Jesus is being enthroned as king, and we are his witnesses to the new kingdom.

We need to allow Jesus to reshape hope in our own lives. The disciples wanted to see Rome fall and we want to get to heaven. Both are good hopes, but neither is the goal of the Christian life. We need to give God our hope and allow him to transform it.

Does that mean our hope will look the same? Probably not. Does that mean we need to change our expectations? Yes. Some might hear this as resignation. To change the expectation of our hope is nothing but fancy language meaning to give up.

But no –pay attention to what is happening. To where we are in the Bible. This story comes from the very first chapter of Acts. By the time we reach the end of the book, this tiny group of disciples have grown into thousands. Acts ends with Paul in Rome. This band of zealots are now in the very heart of the empire’s power and no army carried them there.

Love did. The new way of the kingdom did. The disciples sought political revolution through power but Jesus is offering a kingdom revolution through love. And this change of expectation didn’t mean giving up. In the power of the kingdom people are healed, the dead are brought back to life, people are given hope again where they had none. The disciples changed their expectations in order to serve as heralds to the newly crowned king and the world has never been the same again.

So we ask this Ascension, where is our hope? What is heaven? After Jesus ascends two angels appear and ask the disciples, why are you still looking up?

That’s a great question. Why are we still looking up? We are witnesses to God’s kingdom and it isn’t in the sky above us. The kingdom of God is here in our midst. On the altar table before us. In the power of the Holy Spirit. The kingdom of God is through those doors and into the streets. Through those doors and into the hearts of the hurting. Into the bodies of the lame. Into the spirit of the troubled.

It is in these places that Rome will fall and heaven will be found!

So go, let us proclaim our King!

Amen.

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A sermon for the Sunday after Ascension.
Text: Acts 1:6-14

The Ark of Salvation

Christ is risen! He is risen indeed, alleluia. I love this Easter greeting. I love that we get to continue echoing this refrain to one another long beyond just one morning.

However, I also know that Easter for many of us has perhaps begun to wear just a bit thin. Where is that line between when our Easter greetings feels sincere and joyous versus when it feels a bit frayed at the edges, a bit like perhaps we should put it all back in the box until next year when it can be all fresh and lovely again.

Is it possible to grow a bit tired of Easter? Is that a very Christian thing to say?

Or if not tired, perhaps a bit more sceptical. We pulled ourselves together for the big day of resurrection, but now, four weeks in, it feels that once again much of the world is where we left it once we got back from the tomb. This resurrection business is certainly exciting, but it doesn’t pay the bills and it didn’t seem to fix everything like we were kind of hoping it might.

But the job is ahead of us —the deeper we push into the wonder of this season, the more honest we need to be with ourselves. What does resurrection mean once all the excitement is behind us? How do we journey alongside the early church when this movement first took root in the hearts and minds of Jesus’ followers? Will we be able to grasp the kingdom like they do?

Four weeks in, our Lectionary offers us the story of Noah and the Great Flood. And at first, I struggled to understand how this story fits in with our Easter season. The story of an ancient apocalypse and the death of most of humanity doesn’t exactly bring joy for the season ahead. No wonder we sometimes tend to omit the Old Testament readings this season. It’s just a bit jarring.

Likewise, I’ve often found that we get distracted by the flood story. Growing up with the Sunday School version, at least in my circles, there was a lot of obsession on how this story could be “real” in our own limited understanding of that word. There were lectures over exactly how high the flood waters could be, the sea creature fossils at high altitudes and just where we might find that old ark —although the Armenians are fairly certain that they have the answer to that one. 

But where in this story do we find resurrection, the resurrection that we need today? 

I want to trace a key thread of this story from Noah all the way to Peter’s testimony that we read in Acts. Framed in the context of Easter and the resurrection, we can begin to understand Noah’s Ark as an icon of our own salvation. As Peter stands in testimony to the saving power of the resurrected Christ, we see Noah’s Ark as a precursor to how God calls and saves his people.

Since the beginning, God’s work of salvation has always been through a calling. God called Abraham out of Ur. He called to Moses from the burning bush. Any story of salvation has always been a movement of God through a specific calling-out and naming of people who then respond to God in faith. The same is true of Jesus calling the Apostles. The same is true of Noah and the same is true of us today. You can consult Hebrews 11 for a long litany of how God has called his people.

But alongside the voice of God’s call, he always provides a method, a vehicle, by which those whom he calls are brought into his saving plan. In this way, God works through both spiritual and physical means. And perhaps the first example of this in scripture is Noah’s Ark. God called Noah out of his place of comfort, out of the old life of the world, and in that calling he gave him the instructions for the vehicle, an Ark that served as the physical representation of his and his family’s salvation as well as the means by which it was enacted.

God didn’t just drop Noah onto a mountain top to save him from the heights of the flood waters. Noah received a blueprint and he was tasked to work out God’s specific instructions —plank by plank and animal by animal. The physicality of this is important because we see this ark again and again.

From Noah onward God continues this imagery of an ark by which his salvation is made manifest. As a child, Moses is saved from the Egyptians and the waters of the Nile through an ark. God instructs the Israelites to build the Ark of the Covenant that God. This ark carries the very presence of God and the salvation of the people of Israel. With this Ark they pass through the waters of the Jordan River and into the promised land.

The Virgin Mary, too, was called by God and fashioned by the Holy Spirit into the ark who would bear the Christ. In the Eastern Church, Mary is called the Theotokos, God-Bearer, the ark who would bring the salvation of the world into the world.

Christ himself is then the ark of our salvation. He both calls and bears his people into a new life. Christ is the vehicle and being of our salvation. He is the meeting of heaven and earth. It is through his incarnation that we are called, like the Apostles on the shore of Galilee, and it is through his death and resurrection that we are given life by him and through him, the ark of our salvation.

We arrive then this way all the way from Noah to our reading in Acts. Filled with the Holy Spirit, Peter stands in testimony to this saving work of Christ. In his defence of healing the sick, he cites Jesus of Nazareth. “The stone that was rejected by you, the builders; it has become the cornerstone.” In this direct reference to Christ’s prophecy regarding the temple, Peter makes it clear that the ark has moved from a place to a person. Heaven no longer meets earth only in a place, but now in a person. And the implications of this, Peter argues, are fundamental to how we should now live.

By taking us up with him, by becoming the ark of our salvation, Christ also fashions us, his own people, into something of an ark. Given the breath of God, we too, bear God. We who respond to the call of the kingdom become a physical representation of the world’s salvation.

We who bear the Holy Spirit bear the life of the world.

So if you are here, four weeks into Easter, wondering how any of this is making a difference —let me encourage you to look up. No, quite literally, look up. The word we use for the central part of a church building, the nave, is the Latin word for ship. Here we are, gathered in the ark that Christ established, a physical representation of Christ’s presence and his salvation. We are the Bride of Christ and as the Church we celebrate the Holy Mysteries. Through physical matter, we encounter heaven. We meet God’s salvation. We are called out of our daily lives and into that place where heaven meets earth.

So as we push deeper and deeper into Easter, we are invited into an even more mature understanding of what the resurrection means. Our faith is not just something that we can intellectually examine, it is someone we encounter. Something we can taste and see. We are not just marking something that has happened in the past, we are creating a kingdom reality that is manifest in us every time we speak and live the kingdom life. We are building God’s ark.

Whenever I find it difficult to explain to non-Christian friends about what it means to be a Christian, I try to step aside from the high-brow philosophy and arguments for or against the existence of God, this is what I come back to —to be a Christian is to bear God into the world. I think of those who have come before, of Mary and of Peter, of Noah, and their testimonies.

When we offer healing in Jesus’ name, when we bless one another and when we break bread in his name, thee aren’t just ritual acts —this is actually how we are bringing God into the world. Fellow Christians, this is a humbling and beautiful authority, to bear this ark of our salvation.

By offering one another the saving presence of God, the covenant established with Noah takes on a meaning more intimate than just a distant story of a rainbow and an ancient boat. We tell the story of Noah as part of our Easter celebrations because we can point back to this moment in our history and say, look, this is how God saves. Here is God’s ark. He has called us through the waters. 

We live today, therefore, in the powerful implications of a paschal reality through which our very presence as a Church is designed to call out to the world, here is the ship of salvation. And it is with that knowledge and power that we are able to rejoice and do God’s work in the world, four weeks after Easter, six weeks after Easter. Easter after Easter and year after year.

Heaven meets earth here: within us and between us. That which is physical has become a holy temple of the spiritual. Every ark is an incarnation, every shelter a reminder of God’s promise. Emmanuel isn’t just a name, but an expression of reality and a position of our lives. God is with us.

Christ is risen! He is risen indeed, alleluia.

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Homily delivered at Christ Church in Lausanne, Switzerland.
25 April 2021, Fourth Sunday of Easter
Readings (Year B): Genesis 7:1-5, 11-18, 8:6-18, 9:8-13 | Acts 4:5-12 | I John 3:16-24 | John 10:11-18

The Via Dolorosa

When I visited Jerusalem a few years ago we spent some time wandering down the Via Dolorosa, known as the Way of Suffering. This is the traditional path Jesus is said to have walked with his cross through the city to the place of crucifixion.

In many respects, it’s a very normal road. To be honest, I hardly even realised it was this special road —perhaps I was expecting something more dramatic or set apart. The streets were filled with plenty of shops, cafés, homes and churches. The only indication of the route is a simple marking of large metal discs engraved with Roman numerals, the numbers of the stations of the cross.

Another indicator, however, were the many pilgrims. Groups or individuals prayerfully making their way down the street. At first, I thought it was kind of funny. While there were plenty of sites I did want to see whilst in Jerusalem, this road hadn’t really stood out to me. Why do we make such a big deal about this road of suffering when we know the outcome?

If we celebrate the empty tomb, why do we walk the stations of the cross?

But of course, we still do suffer. Pain and disappointment didn’t go away after 33 AD —in fact it remains well known to all of us as one of life’s largest most frustrating questions. But what does it mean to identify with Jesus’ suffering in light of the Resurrection? In light of this good news, what role does suffering have in our lives?

I know, not easy questions.

But I couldn’t help but think back to the Via Dolorosa as I approached our readings for this second Sunday of Lent. As we move deeper into this season we are offered two stories in our readings: the first of Abraham and Sarah being given new names and a new promise, and the second of Jesus rebuking Peter and subsequently explaining the cost of what it means to follow him. These stories provide us with an interesting juxtaposition: on one hand a story of blessing, but on the other, a call to suffering. And yet, both stories touch deeply on the Lenten themes of transformation and incarnation.

In one story, Sarah and Abraham are transformed through blessing and in the other Jesus’ followers are called to transformation through suffering. While we typically think of blessing and suffering as incompatible, God seems to present them more closely linked than we perhaps find comfortable in our modern, western world. But I think the season of Lent is precisely the time of year of how we might explore this seemingly paradoxical call.

I think it’s important to note that throughout both of these stories, God is not simply acting or commanding —but he is participating, incarnate, in the lives of those whom he calls his people. When God offers new names to Abraham and Sarah, he not only changes the meaning of their names to impart a generational blessing, from “exalted father” to “father of multitudes” and from “princess” to “noblewoman”, but God is putting something of his very being into their identity.

Hebrew commentators talk about the special significance of the “h” sound in these names. From Abram to Abraham and from Sarai to Sarah. This “h” has to our ears the sensation of breath, and it is linked to God’s own name, Yahweh, the name is the sound of breathing. In this way the name of God is inseparable from his life-giving spirit. It’s not a coincidence, therefore, that Sarah’s womb is opened to bear children after God’s life-imparting Spirit is bestowed as part of her new name.

Through this covenant God himself is also transformed as he prefigures the incarnation. If you read ahead from this point in Genesis, God begins to refer to himself as the “God of Abraham” when he announces who he is, when he is named. In this way God takes something of humanity upon himself just as he has given his own name. God’s Covenant moves in both directions.

Transformation, we see, is how God blesses. We cannot be blessed by God and remain as we were; we are changed. We are given the capability to bear life. We are given a new name, something of God’s own identity is imparted to us as we learn to breathe and live as God’s people.

But what, then, is happening in our Gospel reading? If the story of Abraham and Sarah presents transformation as a promise-filled covenant with new names and new life, Jesus seems to call his disciples to a very different type of transformation. What is happening here?

Peter abashedly anticipates transformation through power and authority. Once Jesus comes into his own, transformation will be of a political nature —but Jesus categorically rejects this type of earthly king-making, using perhaps his strongest language in any of the Gospels. “Get behind me, Satan. For you are setting your mind not on divine things but on human things.” 

The context is bizarre, because in all likelihood Peter was holding to the majority’s viewpoint. This is what a lot of the disciples were about —the possibility of political rebellion against the Romans. Restoring Abraham’s promise to the Jewish people in their sense of place and national identity.

But Jesus articulates a different type of transformation —a call to suffering, and even to death. And while martyrdom wasn’t unheard of,  this certainly isn’t where Jesus’ disciples thought he should be going.  But no, Jesus is turning this national religious movement on its head —instead of embracing the political promises developed out of Abraham’s offspring he is getting back to the true nature of blessing, of the new life-breathing Spirit enshrined in God’s Covenant.

The God who once took on a human name has now become human. And Jesus has begun to recognise that to be human means to walk this way of suffering and death. It isn’t just a theological point about how God saves the world, Jesus is seeking to demonstrate that blessing is born through this transformation from death into new life. The victory of God is along this path; this is the gateway to resurrection. The new life of God is breathed along this way.

As pilgrims, as followers of Jesus, we still walk the Via Dolorosa, the Way of Sorrow, because we identify with the God who became like us. The Covenant moves in both directions. Somehow we know that it’s not just about the end blessing, but the journey itself that allows us to embrace our union and new life in God. 

And this isn’t just pious superstition. When Jesus talks about gaining the world, he doesn’t mean worldly wealth. Jesus seems to be speaking out against the political agenda the disciples have set for him. Even if the cause is just, until you can carry your own suffering, your own cross and be transformed through it —these other causes will always keep slipping away.

The justice you seek will never be achieved if you cannot achieve the kingdom life within yourself.

If you think these are difficult words for the disciples, what about for us? In today’s world we stake so much of our identity alongside the great political causes: the fight to end global poverty, climate change, justice for all, or perhaps even church politics or fairness at work. What if our myriad of just, Gospel-inspired causes still present for us the same stumbling blocks as they did for Jesus’ disciples?

It doesn’t mean that Jesus doesn’t sympathise with his disciples. I doubt Jesus liked the Roman occupation just as I doubt he likes our disregard of the environment —but if you yourself don’t walk the Via Dolorosa, you won’t have what you need in your spirit to wage these just battles.

And I think this is where the transformation begins. Personally, I get upset when things aren’t done properly, when they don’t align with my own sense of right and wrong. This can be in my job, community or at home —but when we simply try to externalise these problems rather than understanding what transformation also needs to happen within us then we become stuck.

For many years Abram and Sarai went without children, but it wasn’t until their suffering encountered God’s new breath and blessing that transformation occurred. How do we hold this paradox in our own lives today? What do we do when God’s transformation comes to us through suffering?

This is why we call Lent holy, a holy intersection, a meeting place where we wrestle to understand the transformation that God is breathing into us. Yes, it is a paradox. The bright sadness as the Orthodox call it, a joyful mourning. But it is along this path of cross-bearing that we encounter Resurrection. New life, new blessing, a new name —through the suffering and through the death. As NT Wright says, it is along this way that “Jesus’ victory is made real again and again in the world”.

So whether you are Sarah, newly named and beaming in the blessing God has bestowed, or whether you are Peter, fighting for what you know  is right but slowly learning that the justice you seek comes at the end of your own journey into death —know that God’s transformation is upon us, breathing new life upon us. Blessing us.

It is in this knowledge that we can all walk the road of bright sadness. Joyful mourning toward the springtime of Resurrection. It is here that we meet our God, carrying a cross, along the Via Dolorosa.

Amen.

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Homily delivered at Christ Church in Lausanne, Switzerland.
28 February 2021, Second Sunday of Lent
Readings (Year B): Genesis 17:1-7,15-16 | Romans 4:13-25 | Mark 8:31-38

Through the windowpane

On the last Monday in March, at 16h52, we would get on the bus. The stop is just down the hill on the main street next to the village church before the large arching bridge. It is about a three-minute walk from our house to the stop, but we will want to be early. I would hope to lock the front door by 16h40. I wouldn’t forget the rubbish. We always bin the rubbish while waiting for the bus.

The bus would take us to Istanbul. Not directly, of course, but I had filled the pages of my leather-bound journal with detailed itineraries for the next sixteen days. From the bus, we would take two connecting trains to Zurich. I would make sure we climb upstairs on the second train to the restaurant car near the middle to sit on the righthand side with lake views. We would both get beers. This way we would arrive one hour and twelve minutes before our scheduled departure on the nightly EN40467 to Vienna, our first stop.

This was not just a normal holiday escape. We would embrace a cross-continental rail journey inspired by the belle époque voyages along the Orient Express, an eastward trek across Europe in the spirit of Paul Theroux. The tumbling Alps would give way to wide fields, rolling hills and the nighttime lights of small villages; we would read and watch silently as old people hang laundry in their homes. We would ride the gently rocking carriages of the old European rail empire passing languages, people and old wars through our window as we embraced an unknown eastern world.

Each week our journey neared with increasing determination. A sense of adventure grew in a trip that was never supposed to be simple, heightened by the suspense of an encroaching pandemic — train travel in the time of coronavirus. A spectre of risk was not enough to dissuade two young people from seeing the backwoods of Romania or the magnificent cathedrals of Hungary. The suspense of shuttering borders and passport control would heighten the game, reminding us of an era in which free and open travel across the continent was but a distant dream.

However, determination slowly gave way to scepticism as the moral imperative to stay home grew, as schools shuttered before borders and soon even increased passport control looked like a foregone luxury of gentler times. The decision was made for us. Our slow train to the gates of the Hagia Sophia and banks of the Bosporus was impassable.

How do you come home from a place you never left?

Our dreams had led us along the foreign tracks of ancient places, our guidebooks underarm, our journals prepared, our imaginations teeming already: a friend would join us in Bucharest and I was persuaded to find at least one Armenian church in the ancient caves of Cappadocia. But so rarely has our modern, mobile society made home the great rallying cry of the collective. But here we are, not just a cry but the moral and legal imperative of our lifetime or of our century: be home.

And so I sit with the sun rising gently over the desk in my spare room. The mountains are glowing as dawn crested hours ago along the high spring ridges. The journal is on the coffee table — do I cross through these unused pages?

But not just our travels, what about the other bits of life — events to hold, meetings to make and places to go? Memories of those things that haven’t even occurred and maybe never will. And so from our living rooms and our bedrooms, our small porches or balconies, from our veranda windows or our small bathroom windows we greet the world again. In our departure from the journey, we learn to see our homes again.

For all our talk of travel and culture, rare is it that we must reckon with the true nature of a place. Instagram accounts and guidebooks and scratch maps tally our destinations like trophies. For us who would call travel a hobby — what do we know of the land beneath our feet? That neighbour down the street? With the time and money to fly and jaunt and drive and buy and escape, what do we know about being?

Travel is easy. In our fleeting, sixteen-day journey through the nightscapes of foreign lands, we can all agree on the sights and sounds and people that lightly brush our lives. What we see and feel is real, and the road beneath our feet is real change. But to be present in our homes, in our own lands, in an unfamiliar and difficult routine, that is a different kind of journey. These four walls and our plot of earth. This is our world. It always has been, wherever you are and wherever you live. But do we really see it?

If we find beauty in the walls, the window outside, a walk around the block, a passing smile in the grocery shop or the dancing light of shadows to end another day — hold it gently. I love my home, but for many, this is not an easy path to walk. It is in brushing against the small details that you truly travel and only then begin to love the world.

We do not abandon the dream of leaving. I’ve been okay to leave the pages of my planning journal unanswered. Pencil sketches can be picked up again, trains rebooked. But now, we have been asked to turn new pages and never has the blankness of empty lines felt so imposing — or if I pause, the silence so fulfilling.

The mornings here are cold. Sometimes over the course of a bright day the sun warms our plateau and our pasture grass is just a little greener. But other days, misty clouds settle around us and flakes of snow filter through clouds like someone lost. We take walks in the evening, once the day’s work has been put away. We wander up through the pine forest and watch gnats swarm above the thawing dirt. I look out through the trees to see our white mountains swathed in a flaming red glow. France is in the distance there, the border shut. I think of the pain and I pray quietly for the dead.

Spring is the season of the bright unknowing, a bridge from darkness to new life. We would do well this year to cling to such a bridge. To breathe deeply of the seasons and to trust this journey through our home. A lengthening light plays in the windowpane as we come to know that place for the very first time. Today is one of the bright days.

Click here to read on Medium.

Divisive Jesus

It’s never easy to speak about divisive Jesus. Passages like today’s reading aren’t comfortable in today’s world, because if your experience is anything like mine, we oftentimes feel that divisive Jesus is used by the “other side” to justify an unpopular stance on the day’s political or social issues.

We like to use divisiveness as a marker of our own justification.

We may use “shepherd Jesus” when helping a friend in need, but we pull out divisive Jesus when it comes to our politics. Are you being mocked for your views? Ah well, Jesus said that would happen. That must mean you are holding the truth.

However, when we use Jesus to justify our viewpoints rather than looking at how Jesus himself confronts our viewpoints, I think we can get a message that reinforces our own shortcomings rather than truly challenging ourselves on our path toward the kingdom.

What is so divisive about Jesus? Why would he use this language of division and fire in speaking to the crowds at the end of a varied series of sermons and parables?

I didn’t frame this around politics in order to say that Jesus isn’t political. Jesus is very political. Politics killed Jesus. Almost all of his actions were strong statements against the established legal and religious powers. He overturned tables in the temple. He continually escaped the traps of the Pharisees. He worked on the Sabbath. He affirms the inherent value of those oppressed and forgotten by Rome.

But the reason he is divisive isn’t just because he’s taking a stand on salient political issues, it is because he proposes a path of holiness that sidesteps those issues –and that angers the power structures more than anything because it undermines them more effectively than simply proposing an opposing policy.

Jesus is divisive because he always refuses to play the game.

Earlier in this chapter, a man calls out from the crowd asking Jesus to settle a financial dispute about inheritance between him and his brother. Jesus responds by asking the man why he should have any business to judge between them before turning to the people and lecturing them about the dangers of greed and encouraging the people that life is not defined by what you have.

He sidesteps the call to judgement with a deeper answer about human flourishing.

We as humans want Jesus to be the judge. We want someone to give us a clear dichotomy between what is right and what is wrong. We seek judgement because it draws an easy line in the sand; we want the winner and the loser. It would be much easier for us if Jesus could just propose a political platform around which we rally and vote, but Jesus makes it clear that this is not his job.

At every turn, at every legal and rhetorical trap, Jesus reveals an alternative inner path, a way of life that asks us to become more than who we are and to move on a path toward living in God’s kingdom.

So when people look at this passage today and say that Jesus told us to be divisive, that he came to start a fire and to carry a sword –it’s not because Jesus is calling us to be violent, obnoxious people who are proud of our self righteous and seemingly godly stances.

No, Jesus is divisive because he proclaims a way out of the vicious cycle of empire.

The way out is by going in — in deep inside of ourselves. This is why the kingdom is so difficult to access. Like passing through the eye of a needle. You can’t just sign onto a new set of political views with Jesus, you have to do deep, transformational work within yourself. You have to be ready, time and again. You have to be dressed, as Jesus says, staying up late in expectation of the master.

You have to say yes and open yourself to the things of God.

Jesus chides the people for being able to tell the weather, but not being able to recognise the fundamental change of season he is bringing. Jesus isn’t just developing a more progressive political party against Rome, which is what the people want and expect, he is bringing us into a whole new God-season, a new creation.

The temptation for us today is that we interpret divisive, fire-making Jesus simply as the Jesus who justifies our own fiercely held beliefs about our own empire. We convince ourselves that we are defending Jesus and people don’t like us because of our faith, even if our own views of the day have little to do with Jesus’ true call toward kingdom living.

Just because your politics are unpopular doesn’t mean you are taking a stand. Jesus continually reinforces that this type of divisiveness isn’t the point. The fire he is lighting, the divisiveness he is bringing is because God is not the God of human systems.

I like the image that priest and writer Richard Rohr provides for Christians. “ Those who agree to carry and love what God loves — which is both the good and the bad — and to pay the price for its reconciliation within themselves, these are the followers of Jesus Christ. They are the leaven, the salt, the mustard seed that God uses to transform the world. The cross, then, is a very dramatic image of what it takes to usable for God. It does not mean you are going to heaven and others are not; rather, it means you have entered into heaven much earlier and can see things in a transcendent, whole, and healing way now.”

Importantly, this doesn’t mean we can or should expect popularity along this path. We are not just going along with the flow to make our faith a trendy lifestyle. The humble way of the cross will never be the dominant way of the world. The empire killed Jesus, and today’s reading from Hebrews is filled with the testimonies of those who took a leap of faith, who said yes to God to move their framework of living beyond the world. And as the writer says, they never got their hands on what was promised, but lived in hope of resurrection.

Divisive Jesus for us should be a marker of that hope. A recognition that life won’t be easy, and we won’t be popular as we turn the world right-side-up, but that true kingdom living continually brings us into ourselves in order to draw us out of ourselves. We participate in a redeeming force that yes, may eventually and hopefully will include our politics, but that no matter what is always much, much larger than any human empire.

Amen.

Homily delivered to the English Church in Villars, Switzerland.
18 August 2019, Ninth Sunday after Trinity
Readings: Luke 12:49-56, Hebrews 11:29-12:2

Relationship with Wisdom

In today’s Old Testament reading we encounter wisdom in the book of Proverbs. Famous for its wise sayings and profound adages that have worked themselves into the fabric of our language and art, this Sunday we meet this book in a different light.

In today’s reading, wisdom herself speaks. The author personifies wisdom in a beautiful poem in which she describes herself as present with God in the process of creation.

As a reading for Trinity Sunday, this personification of Wisdom illustrates for us the presence of the Holy Spirit. As opposed to the similar sounding passage of Job in which God asks his creation, where were you when I laid the foundations of the earth, Wisdom is clear in her response: I was there. I am there.

However, it’s not simply the presence of the Holy Spirit at the creation of the world that is interesting for us today. This poem from Proverbs underscores Wisdom’s relationship with God from the very beginning, and this is the key for us today on Trinity Sunday:

“When he marked out the foundations of the earth, then I was beside him, like a master workman, and I was daily in his delight, rejoicing before him always, rejoicing in his inhabited world and delighting in the children of man.”

Trinity Season marks for us the beginning of Ordinary Time. The time of the year in which we celebrate the age of the Church. It’s not ordinary because it’s boring or unimportant. It’s ordinary because it is counted. As we move beyond the day of Pentecost we count in joy the weeks since we have been empowered by God’s Spirit. The Wisdom that stands alongside God in the creation of the world has descended into our lives as wind and fire. The powers of creation herself heralds the incarnation of the Holy Spirit in us.

Like Wisdom as God’s workman in creation, we too proceed in relationship with God. This is the great mystery of the Trinity. It’s not about solving the mathematical confusion of three in one, its about seeing the power of love on display through relationship. Bishop Kallistos Ware explains the doctrine of the Trinity not as a theological jigsaw puzzle but as a call to mutual love for one another as an icon of the trinitarian relationship.

In short, when we fulfil Christ’s call to love one another, empowered by the great Wisdom of the ages, we are living in God’s relationship. The deep, deep magic that binds all the universe together is at work in our hearts in a daily basis, counting forward toward its completion in the Church and in all the world.

Importantly, this love is not just empowering as an image of the eternal. Like the eternal, it is also creative. It is the trinitarian relationship of God that inspires Creation. With wisdom there, hovering over the waters, God creates everything out of nothing.

Love is infinitely creative, and this is for us the joy of the season of the church.

The possibilities are limitless. No matter the trapping of daily life or the constraints that we perceive due to money, jobs, health. Or even mostly empty churches. The gift we have in God is the creative power of love. We remember those in our life who love freely. It doesn’t matter what they had or didn’t have, or what they had accomplished in their life, the power and impact of another person’s love does not easily depart us.

I remember one of my favourites quotes from an author who just died last month, Rachel Held Evans: “Death is a thing empires worry about, not a thing resurrection people worry about. As long as there’s somebody baptising sinners, breaking the bread, drinking the wine: as long as there’s people confessing their sins, healing, walking with one another through suffering, then the Church is alive, and it’s well.”

As Paul says in Romans, hope does not disappoint us, because God’s love has been poured into our hearts through the Holy Spirit that has been given to us. The power of relational love is eternal, even as so much of this world slips away. Trinity Sunday signals the beginning of the season of the people of God. Empowered by the Wisdom of the Holy Spirit, we mark from here the days of eternity, counting forward the age of the Church to tell the world of the love that has been with God at the beginning and is with us now.

Go now in peace to love and serve the Lord.

Amen.

Homily delivered to the English Church in Villars, Switzerland.
16 June 2019, Trinity Sunday