Anniversaries and Debts

In the interest of full disclosure, much of what I’m about to say I said on Sunday, September 11th, 2011. It was impossible to ignore the 10th anniversary of 9/11 when it fell on a Sunday. I suppose I could’ve let the 25th anniversary pass since it was on Friday. But it seemed a little too close for comfort to this 16th Sunday after Pentecost. Not to mention the readings for Proper 19, Year A, with its words of forgiveness, release of debts, and reconciliation. But there is no hidden agenda in our Bible readings for today. I did not pick these readings. This is the Word of God that has always been given to us on the Sunday closest to September 11th, once every three years. So it was 10 years from 9/11; so it is 25 years from 9/11.

So, “Peter said to Jesus, ‘How many times should I forgive my brother or sister who sins against me? Should I forgive as many as seven times?’” There's a biblical reason Peter uses the number seven. Back in the book of Genesis, Cain commits the first murder by killing his brother Abel. When God sentences Cain to wander the earth alone, God promises that anyone who kills Cain will be revenged seven times. So, Peter thinks, God promised Cain a sevenfold vengeance. So is Jesus reversing that cycle of revenge, but stopping the cycle of forgiveness at seven? Well, seven’s not totally unreasonable.

But Peter forgot what happened after Cain in Genesis. Five generations later, Cain’s descendant Lamech inherits that thirst for vengeance. “Lamech said to his wives, ‘I killed a man for wounding me, a boy for striking me; so Cain will be paid back seven times and Lamech seventy-seven times.’” So Jesus is reverse-echoing Lamech when he tells Peter, “Not just seven times, but rather as many as seventy-seven times.” Peter took these stories literally. I think Jesus knew that they were more archetypes than history. I believe that Jesus, as he has before with comments about cutting off a hand to keep it from sinning, is using hyperbole.

Debt-Free Love

The Roman historian Suetonius records that in the 40s the Emperor Claudius got so ticked off at the Jews in Rome that he kicked them all out. All Suetonius could figure out was that it had something to do with arguments over some guy called “Chrestus,” which sounds like a Latinized version of the Greek Christos. It seems that within a decade of his ascension, there was a movement of Jews in Rome acclaiming Jesus of Nazareth as the Christ, the Messiah, God’s Chosen King. After his mother Agrippina poisoned her husband Claudius, Nero permitted the Jews to return to Rome. So by the late 50s, there was once again an active Church in Rome, that is the belly of the beast, to whom Paul was writing this Letter.

For subjects of the Roman Empire, politics was not about deciding who to vote for; politics was about not getting noticed by the Empire, lest that notice turn into a stare. So Paul’s advice at the beginning of today’s reading — Owe no one anything except to love your neighbor as yourself — is actually the conclusion to his advice on how the Christians in Rome could escape the Empire’s notice. That longer advice began — Let every person be subject to the governing authorities; for there is no authority except from God, and those authorities that exist have been instituted by God. These words have often been misinterpreted as a call for blind obedience. They were actually Paul's code for how the Christian in Rome might escape the Empire's stare, but also know when to stare back.

Authority in Rome did not come from “We the People,” but from an Emperor with semi-divine status, at that point. But Paul was not just a subject of Rome, he was a citizen of Rome, and that did confer on him some rights. More than once, invoking his Roman citizenship got him out of danger from Jewish leaders who opposed his message that at least some parts of the Law of Moses should be set aside for Gentiles.

Do It Like Mary

For about 1,400 years, on August 15th, the Catholic Church in the West and Orthodox Church in the East have observed the tradition that at her dying, the Mother of Jesus was taken to Heaven, body and soul. Thus, it is believed, Jesus’s mother became the first of the human race to share in the Resurrection of her Son. The Episcopal Church and its ancestor the Anglican Church, as heirs of both Catholicism and Reformation, state that Holy Scripture contains all things necessary to salvation. So, since the Assumption of Mary is not recorded in the New Testament, our Feast of Saint Mary the Virgin, Mother of Our Lord Jesus Christ, does not explicitly affirm the Assumption as a teaching to which all Episcopalians should assent. So, what I tell you here is my pious opinion.

The New Testament is not an exhaustive biography of Jesus, nor an exhaustive history of the Apostolic Church. It reflects the male bias of the age, which presumed that what the men did to spread the Gospel was what merited recording for posterity. So, we hear no more of Mary after mention of her presence at Pentecost. Nor do we hear any more of Mary Magdalene after she became the “Apostle to the Apostles” on that first Easter Sunday. These are, at the very least, unfortunate omissions. I also note there are many traditions about where various apostles are buried, even as far away as Northern India, where even today there are Christians who trace their founding to St. Thomas. But no one claims a burial site for the Mother of Jesus.

Even The Episcopal Church, in our common prayer of the day, praises God for having “taken to yourself the blessed Virgin Mary,” without specifying the circumstances of that taking. It seems to me that if there is anyone who would have the honor of being the first fruit of the Resurrection, it would be her who shared more intimately than anyone in the Incarnation and Passion of her Son. That is my pious opinion.

What Holy Scripture does give us of Mary is her passionate concern for the poor and oppressed, and her equally passionate faith in the God of her ancestors. Pope Leo concludes his recent encyclical on Safeguarding the Human Person in the Age of Artificial Intelligence with this meditation of the Song of Mary:

The Hearing is in the Acknowledgement

Do any of us really want to come into close contact with God? God’s mercy, absolutely! God’s truth? What links our Old Testament and Gospel readings today are human beings invited to “come,” as Jesus invited Peter on the wind and the waves, come to God, not keep God at a safe distance. For Elijah — and the Twelve in their boat — there is a storm around God that we would wrongly identify as God because of our fear of God. And yet God the Father Son and Holy Spirit keeps inviting us to “come” through the storm to God the Three-In-One, which first requires us to be clear about where God is not.

Poor Elijah thought he had God in his back pocket. He had correctly predicted a three-year drought in Israel at a time when King Ahab’s foreign wife, Jezebel, was converting many Israelites to her pagan gods. After three years he had challenged the prophets of Baal to see whether he or YHWH — Hebrew had no vowels, add them and you get Yahweh — controlled the rain. A fire had come from Yahweh and consumed the altar and offering of the prophets of Baal. Elijah had enlisted the Israelites in slaughtering those prophets, and then the rain had come.

Elijah won the argument, to which Jezebel had responded, “So may the gods do to me if I do not make your life as the life of one of the prophets by this time tomorrow.” That’s why Elijah was at Mount Horeb, where God had given the Ten Commandments to Moses. He was on the run. It didn’t matter that he had won the argument. So maybe God wasn’t in the argument. Nor was God in the wind, or the earthquake, or the fire. We want to see God in earth-shattering power, especially when that power is supposed to be on our side. But that’s not where God is.

It’s a Miracle

Since the 19th century, some biblical interpreters have suggested that the real miracle of today’s Gospel was that when the people saw Jesus’s trust of God, they were inspired to share more of their food than the five loaves and two fish that the first collection had resulted in. To have shared enough food to feed as many as 5,000 husbands, 5,000 wives and their children plus leftovers certainly seems miraculous, that is, a “mighty work” of God. Not to dismiss that interpretation, but some of Jesus’s enemies accused him of working miracles by the power of demons. So, even his enemies saw Jesus do things for which even they could not find a natural explanation.

It’s not coincidence that this more naturalistic explanation of the miracle was first suggested in the 19th century when God seemed to be getting pushed out of our everyday world, only to miraculously swoop down and occasionally override the mechanical laws of physics and biology. In the 21st century, scientists theorize about how a butterfly flapping its wings in Brazil could, under the right chain of cause and effect, cascade into a Texas tornado. It’s called chaos theory. So, perhaps we can trust that God the Creator is quite capable of working within God’s creation to do some mighty things.

That mighty work could certainly apply to a mass feeling of faith, hope, and love that could inspire 10,000 men and women to do things they wouldn’t have imagined themselves doing before, assuming that these men and women working for subsistence wages had more than enough to share. We certainly know that they were starving for justice. As was Jesus, the cousin of John the Baptist, who had just been executed by Rome’s lackey, Herod Antipas. Of course, Jesus wanted to get away and grieve. But so did his fellow Jews, all hungering for justice. So, in his gut-wrenching compassion, Jesus healed the sick of those maladies of the day. And, I personally believe, He gave them the food they needed that day. And perhaps, the people were inspired to share some of their own as well.

In It Together

“Sons of Thunder.” That’s the nickname Jesus gave to James and John, Sons of Zebedee, in Greek, “Bonaerges.” In a very colloquial British paraphrase of the New Testament entitled “Good As New,” Simon Peter is “Rocky,” James is “Thunder,” and John is “Lightning.” If “Lightning” is appropriate for the Apostle to whom is attributed the Gospel of the Light shining through the darkness and coming into the world, then that would leave the “Thunder” which follows the lightning to James. And while the Christians in Jerusalem perhaps made a convenient enemy for King Herod, one can’t help but wonder if “Thunder” made it easy for Herod to pick him out.

And, was “Thunder” always a compliment? Probably not in today’s “Good As New” reading. On the other hand, were the other 10 apostles angry with the brothers’ request mostly because the brothers thought of it first? As far as we can tell from the story of Humanity (or History), until our own time, humans have felt more secure with hierarchy. Democracy was a brief 70 year experiment in a Greek city-state. Israel was originally a confederation of 12 tribes with a series of judges called on when serious issues needed deciding. That’s the distinction that Jesus is partly alluding to when he contrasts the Gentile hierarchies with the restored Israel represented by the 12 apostles. But even they eventually decided they wanted a king.

Even as some Jews in Jesus’s time looked forward to a messianic liberator, their ideal Godly society was also hierarchical. In their vision of the messianic banquet, the Jewish sect of the Essenes envisioned the priest first, then the messiah of Israel, then the heads of the congregation’s clans in a descending order of status. Perhaps, in a world of colliding powers, we want God to be the biggest power, and power must be appeased before any other relationship can be established.

Hospitality and Wisdom for All the Ages

Chapter 13 is Matthew’s greatest hits of Jesus’s parables, not a transcript of a single speech. So he deliberately goes goes back and forth between the crowds and disciples. The first two parables in today’s gospel of the mustard seed and yeast are addressed to the crowds who would have seen the mustard plant Jesus was talking about. Too many scholars have debated whether the mustard seed was really the smallest seed, or the mustard plant the biggest in that area. The point of the parable is the many birds that find shelter in its branches — all from one small seed. And the yeast that was “mixed” (the Greek word is “hid”) in several pounds of flour would make enough bread to feed 100 people.

I think Jesus hoped that the people listening to him would be struck by the abundance of food and shelter and recognize the hospitality of the kingdom of Heaven. Perhaps, Jesus hoped, they might also recognize that their small seeds, their small amount of yeast, together might make that kingdom-hospitality a visible reality. The practical question of how to make the kingdom of Heaven a visible reality seems to have been one that Jesus left hanging with the crowds. But there are still the disciples, to whom Jesus speaks of treasures — treasure hidden in a field, one pearl of great value, a household full of treasures new and old. Treasures so valuable that no-thing was as valuable.

Even the “merchant” — basically a salesman, as mistrusted in the Bible as they often are today — was prepared to dump everything he had tried to sell others for one pearl. No jewels were more valuable than those pearls so rare, only found where a grain of sand had gotten inside an oyster shell and in its suffering the secretions that made the oyster’s shell wrapped around that grain of sand. Even in suffering, the kingdom of Heaven can be found, in relief from suffering but also in the wisdom which as Robert Kennedy quoted the Greek tragedian Aeschylus, comes through the awful grace of God.

Let the Kingdom Bloom

Between “Let anyone with ears listen,” and “Hear then the parable of the sower,” are eight verses that the Lectionary leaves out. In those eight verses Jesus’s audience shifts from the “great crowds” to only his disciples, from the outsiders to the insiders. And while, in the explanation that is in the reading, Jesus refers to “the word of the kingdom,” he does not say the “k” word to the crowds. Those who are already serving kings and wannabe kings are lurking in the crowds. So, Jesus spoke this parable of the kingdom of heaven, the first and foremost among His parables in Matthew, Mark, and Luke. But avoiding slogans and soundbites, Jesus used cryptic images that those who really knew their Law and Prophets would understand. But a cryptic farming story wouldn’t be self-incriminating enough to pin a charge of sedition on him. And we disciples, who are also the seeds He is sowing, still have the ears to listen.

A Jewish scholar among the crowds listening to this parable might well have heard the echo of the prophet Isaiah, who we hear today speaking of the word coming from God’s mouth in heaven like rain and snow watering the soil, giving seed to the sower and bread to the eater. He would have recalled Isaiah delivering this word of the Lord to the exiles of Babylon, encouraging them to go back in peace to their promised land. In his and Jesus’s time, the Jewish people may have been back in their homeland. But under foreign occupation, they were exiled in place. So that scholar might have heard Jesus promising an end to that exile.

But he might also have heard how 3/4ths of the Sower’s seeds would be rejected by their soils, and wondered who the soils might stand for. The Roman Empire? What about the local king, Herod Antipas, handpicked by Rome but perhaps waiting for the opportune time to claim the succession of the House of David? The Temple priesthood, offering the appointed sacrifices in the hope that God might be appeased enough to unleash his heavenly hosts on the occupiers? The moral reformers of their time, the Pharisees, practicing all 600 plus commands of the Law so that God might decide that his people were ready to judge the nations by his might? Or the Zealots, the revolutionaries who had decided to stop waiting for God and take matters into their own hands?

Perfectibility in Love

Yesterday was the Semiquincentennial (“halfway to 500”) of our Declaration of Independence, which is also a major Feast in our Book of Common Prayer. Given that this is the weekend of the 250th anniversary of our Independence, it is proper that we observe this major feast in The Episcopal Church. And what better way to commemorate our independence than a quote from that great observer of America, Alexis De Tocqueville: Not until I went into the churches of America and heard her pulpits flame with righteousness did I understand the secret of her genius and power. America is great because she is good, and if America ever ceases to be good, she will cease to be great. (Not Tocqueville)

But Tocqueville did write the following from the chapter entitled The Principle Of Equality Suggests To The Americans The Idea Of The Indefinite Perfectibility Of Man: “Continual changes are then every instant occurring under the observation of every man … the condition of others is improved; whence he infers that man is endowed with an indefinite faculty of improvement … Thus, forever seeking — forever falling, to rise again — often disappointed, but not discouraged — he tends unceasingly towards that unmeasured greatness so indistinctly visible at the end of the long track which humanity has yet to tread.”

I suspect that most of the uncivil rhetoric and behavior we have witnessed over the last few decades is rooted in the fear that we are losing our belief in the indefinite perfectibility of the human race. This reminds me of the Irish playwright Brendan Behan’s quip that America will be a great country once it’s finished. It sounds like Tocqueville believed that American greatness was largely due to it’s not being finished. But are we now finished? Are we no longer perfectible? Or do we need to redefine perfectibility as Jesus defines it in today’s Gospel?

Rewards

To recap the last two Sundays of Jesus talking to his disciples then and now about mission: He calls us to cure the sick, raise the dead, cleanse the lepers, and exorcise the demons. We too can cure the sick, or even dead in spirit, because they lack direction, meaning, purpose, maybe by just listening to them. In Jesus’s time, “lepers” included those with skin diseases of any kind, and thus were cut off from the community. So, “cleansing” lepers also meant ending their ostracism, perhaps more important than being cured of the disease itself. Certainly, we can seek out the ostracized today and “cleanse” them from their isolation. And given that “Satan” means accuser, whenever we can defuse the demons of bitterness, suspicion and accusation, we are doing as Jesus and the Twelve did.

And when we are opposed, Jesus doesn’t promise that we will always win or succeed by the standards of this world. It is enough for us to acknowledge Jesus as our Lord even in the face of loss or defeat, and to trust that he measures success by a spiritual standard that no enemy in this world can match. And at the end of his teaching on Christian mission today, Jesus hammers home that promise of success by other-worldly standards:

“Anyone who welcomes a prophet as a prophet will have a prophet’s reward; and anyone who welcomes a righteous person as a righteous person will have the reward of a righteous person. Anyone who gives so much as a cup of cold water to one of these little ones as a disciple, Amen I say to you, will most certainly not go without the reward.”

Acknowledge What’s Real

Last Sunday, I amplified Jesus’s call to his apostles to cure the sick, raise the dad, cleanse the lepers, and exorcise the demons. We too can cure the sick, or even dead in spirit, because they lack direction, meaning, purpose, maybe by just listening to them. In Jesus’s time, “lepers” included skin diseases of any kind, and such kinds of skin discoloration meant isolation from the community. So, “cleansing” lepers also meant ending their ostracism, perhaps more important than being cured of the disease itself. Certainly, we can seek out the ostracized today and “cleanse” them from their isolation. And given that “Satan” means accuser, whenever we can defuse the demons of bitterness, suspicion and accusation, we are doing as Jesus and the Twelve did.

So, what’s not to like about curing, raising, cleansing, and exorcising? Why is Jesus telling his disciples then, and now, that we might be rejected, accused ourselves of being demonic, even killed? I would group the possible reactions as cynicism, insecurity, and hypocrisy.

Some may have been so beaten down by others and the world that the healing Jesus promises doesn’t seem possible and they don’t want anyone else to get their hopes up only to be beaten down. Perhaps some have “learned” from the beatings of this world that God is a harsh judge. So, they feel more secure with God if they can clearly see others as objects of divine judgement while they’re safely ensconced in God’s corral. And having had nearly two millennia to get it right — or wrong — too many of Jesus’s disciples have been poor ambassadors of Jesus’s kingdom. So, how do we get our message right? How do we avoid rejection, accusation, death, or perhaps even worse, hypocrisy? How do we succeed?

Two Communities, One Mission

Now, as then, we can go about our city, meeting the harassed and the helpless without a shepherd. Perhaps now, as then, we can see a potential harvest that just needs a few more laborers. So, what do we do now? Appoint twelve people for twelve tribes and send them back to Israel … Or we might renew our understanding of ourselves as adopted children of the God of Abraham. We might renew our faith that our struggles for justice and freedom are not futile because they are part of the story of Israel’s wrestling for those same things. Then we might hear Israel’s Chosen King calling us to be mediators of infinite love and eternal life to the harassed and the helpless.

To recap: Jacob, later named Israel meaning, “one who wrestles with God,” had twelve sons, who became twelve tribes, whom God liberated from Egyptian enslavement through Moses, and led them to Mt Sinai: where today we hear their one unseen God say to them, “For me you shall be a kingdom of priests, a holy nation.” Those are two separate things in divine tension. God doesn’t say that Israel will be kingdom with priests, but a kingdom of priests. The whole nation will be a priest, mediating between God and who? The priests set apart within Israel will mediate between God and the people of Israel.

But with whom will the nation of Israel mediate with God? Other nations. This is the next step of the promise God made to Jacob’s grandfather, Abraham — In you all the nations of Earth shall be blessed. Israel’s call has always been to bring all the peoples who God created in God’s image to the knowledge and love of the one God in whom all are one.

But, to also be a “holy” nation means to be a nation set apart from the nations, who at this point still assume that there are lots of gods and goddesses, all with their own territories: stars, seas, lands, seasons. So, in order to bring the nations into unity with Israel and Israel’s God, Israel must stand apart from the nations. Far too often, the nations have so resented their standing apart that they have dehumanized the people of Israel. At other times, the leaders of Israel have so insisted on standing apart that they have forgotten their God-given mission of restoring all nations to unity with themselves and God. But, they remain God’s first chosen people, and Jesus’s people.

One Body, with Feeling

In a small church group at my sponsoring parish, before I discerned God’s call to the priesthood, I and the rest of the group were asked to come up with a metaphor for our spiritual lives. Back then, I chose a boomerang. You know something of how I went from Baptist to Episcopal, from a spirituality based solely on the Bible to one based equally on the Holy Eucharist. That became for me the “Blessed Assurance, Jesus is mine” that Holy Scripture alone couldn’t give me. Though I doubt the that the Baptist Fanny Crosby intended that when she wrote the hymn. But she’s the one who added, “O, what foretaste of glory divine.” That’s one turn of the boomerang.

The second turn happened while I was worshiping here at what was then St. James, reveling in the new found glories of Anglo-Catholicism. But back then my Jungian personality type was INTP, emphasis on the “Thinking” as opposed to “Feeling.” I wanted truth, I wanted certainty. And not for the first time, an Anglo-Catholic decided that Episcopal ambiguity was too discomfiting and decided to “swim the Tiber.” That’s a boomerang for sure.

So Laura and I, along with our newborn son, navigated between Blessed Sacrament and Grace, both in Alexandria where we had moved in 1990. One Sunday when I slept in, Laura came home with John from Grace, got him lunch, and then asked him to tell me what he’d had in church. After a little rewinding of the tape in his brain, John’s eyes lit up, and he said, “I had Jesus Christ!” That’s what he called it, and that’s as good an understanding coming from a toddler as I’ve heard from any adult. Over a year later, Laura wasn’t able to go to church one Sunday, and so I took John with me to Blessed Sacrament. When it came time for communion, I told John that in this church you had to be “older” to have Jesus Christ. Several weeks later, it was me and John again in the Roman Catholic church. This time, as I picked him up take with me so that he could at least get a blessing, he looked up at me and said, “I’m older now.”

Knowing God as Love in All

It’s no guarantee, but perhaps I might avoid preaching heresy by reminding all of us what The Episcopal Church teaches in its “Outline” about the Trinity:

Q. What do we learn about God as creator from the revelation to Israel?

A. We learn that there is one God, the Father Almighty, creator of heaven and earth, of all that

is, seen and unseen.

Q. What does this mean?

A. This means that the universe is good, that it is the work of a single loving God who creates, sustains, and directs it…

Q. How was this revelation handed down to us?

A. This revelation was handed down to us through a community created by a covenant with God. (p. 846)

Whatever we know about the Trinitarian God begins with God the Creator's revealed relationship (or Covenant) with the people of Israel. From that Covenant, we learn that all things, “seen and unseen,” reflect the goodness of their Creator, who is good. And we must respect that divine goodness, regardless of all the ways in which we attempt to tribalize God the Creator, and monopolize the goodness of our Father. But goodness isn’t enough.

Q. What do we mean when we say that Jesus is the only Son of God?

A. We mean that Jesus is the only perfect image of the Father, and shows us the nature of God.

Q. What is the nature of God revealed in Jesus?

A. God is love. (p. 849)

Dreams of the Spirit

On this day at least, Pentecost isn’t just for Pentecostals. The Holy Spirit isn’t just for Pentecostals this day or any day. Every Sunday, we call the Holy Spirit our “Lord, the giver of life.” Whatever life this church has comes from her. And if this Church is to live, we must pray for the Gifts of the Spirit, which aren’t just for Pentecostals. Traditional Catholic theology gives us seven of them: Wisdom, Understanding, Counsel, Fortitude, Knowledge, Piety and Holy Fear, or reverence.

And rightly understood, the kinds of gifts that those first disciples received on Pentecost are included in the Sevenfold gifts I just mentioned.. Take the gift of tongues. They weren’t speaking some unrecognizable language. Just as today, when some people having suffered a brain injury are able to speak a foreign accent or even a foreign language, those Galilean disciples were able to communicate the Good News of God’s love in Christ Jesus in whatever language the pilgrims to Jerusalem needed to understand. A few years ago, former Presiding Bishop Kathleen Jefferts Schori spoke of “evangelistic listening” as a kind of pentecostal language. You can say a lot by just listening to people, how they have been loved and hurt, how they have loved and hurt. That takes wisdom, understanding, counsel, all gifts of the Holy Spirit. And she has given these gifts to all Christians, not just the ordained.

About the only time we directly invoke the Holy Spirit on a person is at ordinations. But notice in today’s Gospel that Jesus says to the “disciples…receive the Holy Spirit,” not to a select group of “apostles” — John never uses that word — but to all the disciples, all to whom are given the power to forgive and the power to retain. As far as the Disciple Whom Jesus Loved was concerned, all of Jesus’s disciples had the ability to speak and listen to each other in love and truth, and to forgive each other. The reserving of that power to declare pardon in the name of God to the ordained is, by the Beloved Disciple’s measure, a concession to the Church’s failure to fully breathe in the Spirit of peace, truth, and mercy.

One Prayer

Of the nine-hour “prayer festival” taking place on the Mall today, I remind you that when Jesus’s first disciples asked him how to pray, it didn’t take nine hours. On the other hand, if we actually started to unpack the meaning of each word and phrase in our Lord’s Prayer, we might have been here for nine hours. Indeed, the entire 17th chapter of John’s Gospel, of which we heard only the first 11 of 26 verses is, as we heard Jesus say, his prayer to God his “Father.” And while John doesn’t include the more pithy version that we crib from Matthew, this 17th chapter is Jesus’s own majestic meditation on that prayer. And we who have been allowed to eavesdrop on this prayerful conversion between Father and Son can learn from it how to pray as one.

“Glorify your Son that the Son may glorify you.” Even God’s Only Begotten, the Word who is with God and is God, prays that the name of the One who sent him may be “hallowed,” always spoken in reverence of the One God who is the sole Creator of our life and of all that we are and have, Would that all who consider themselves “self-made” would give credit where credit is due.

“I glorified you on earth by finishing the work that you gave me to do.” Jesus worked to proclaim the kingdom of God hiding in plain sight, in seeds, trees, weeds, and everyday interactions where grace infiltrated. And he accepted the will of God, Father, Son, and Holy Spirit, that nothing should separate God from humanity, not even death. That’s part of what it means to pray, “your kingdom come, your will be done, on earth as in heaven.”

Ascension is Resurrection

We were warned forty days ago. “Do not cling to me,” Jesus said to Mary Magdalene, ‘for I have not yet ascended to the Father. But go to my brothers and sisters, and tell them that I am ascending to my Father and your Father, to my God and your God.” Even on that first Easter Sunday, Jesus’s “message” to Mary the Magdalene, His “message” to his disciples then, and his disciples now, is Ascension, even more so than Resurrection.

The message is Ascension, even more so than Resurrection, because Jesus’s Ascension is the completion of his Resurrection. For the rest of us, there comes a time; sooner or later, expectedly or unexpectedly, prepared or unprepared, but inevitably the soul and the body must separate, and the soul return to that dimension of existence that is purely spiritual, return to the one Spirit who created the soul and to whom the soul must return.

But not Jesus; he too has gone back to the Father of whom he the Word has always been begotten. But now the Word has a physical body in that dimension of existence that before was exclusively spiritual. And where the resurrected Christ has gone, we can trust that someday we too, resurrected, shall be with him in the fullness of resurrection, body and soul reunited, never again to suffer and die. That is how Ascension completes the resurrection. By ascending with his resurrected body, Jesus opens the way for us to follow him in God’s good time.

Atoms and Anastasis

Paul knew about atoms. Before today’s reading from Acts, we read that Paul was in Athens by himself while his companions, Timothy and Silas, went to Thessalonica to check on their fellow Christians. And of course, Paul got into trouble. He started arguing with two groups of philosophers, Stoics, and Epicureans who had reasoned their way to understanding that big things must be made of small things that they called atoms. So what we hear Paul talking about today is the basic nature of reality, which reason gets us a lot of the way to understanding. What Paul brought to this continuing philosophical argument was the revelation of God’s love in Christ Jesus, which is still more real than that what our highest reason can attain.

To set the scene, Paul had gotten into trouble when he started talking about Jesus and the Resurrection, or in Greek Anastasis, a feminine as opposed to a masculine noun. To some hearing half of what Paul said, they likely thought that Paul was talking about a god and a goddess, Jesus and his consort Anastasis. These were deities that the Athenians had not heard of, as it’s translated in the NRSV, “foreign divinities.” Who else in ancient Greece had been accused of “promoting foreign divinities?” Socrates. So, we are told, Paul was taken to the top of the hill next to the Acropolis and faced the Areopagus, which was responsible for trying serious offenses. Paul was not just engaging in an academic debate. He was on trial.

So, in today’s reading, Paul cleverly dismisses the charge of foreign divinities by pointing out that the Athenians had built an altar to a god whose name they didn’t know! Then he basically shows how the Stoics and Epicureans are both right, and both wrong, the emphasis on the latter. At the risk of over-simplification, when it came to God, the Epicureans were deist: There might have been a God who started this creation ball, but has had nothing to do with it since. And all bodily forms eventually dissolve back into atoms. The Stoics were more pantheistic, believing that the Universe itself was divine, and that all things shared in that divinity. Important to Paul’s argument, they also believed that history was a cycle, which if true, could feel like one damn thing all over again, until the current universe was destroyed and a new one born.

Holy Tenacity

It helps to have two patron saints. Any local church can use all the prayer they can get! So we get to have two patronal feasts on a Sunday, Saint Monica’s on May 4th, and Saint James the Great, Son of Zebedee, on July 25th. At the same time, Monica’s feast falls within Eastertide. So, this Sunday at St. Monica and St. James is a blended Sunday, with both collects and half our scriptures (Old Testament and psalm) from St. Monica, and half (Epistle and Gospel) from 5th Easter. Far too often, people directly quote Jesus describing himself as the “Way” to our Creator and Parent, and miss that’s Jesus isn’t calling himself the final destination, but as the journey there. So, Monica at the end of her physical life far from her final destination in this world trusted that Jesus was with her wherever she was in her and Jesus’ journey together.

Monica may well have been the most tenacious and patient mother in all Christendom. She followed her talented son from their home on the North African coast (modern day Algeria) to Italy, where she made her life’s work, convincing her son to be baptized. When Augustine said things like, “Lord give me continence but not yet,” Monica’s patience was tried. But by her patience and prayer, the mentoring of Saint Ambrose the Bishop of Milan, and the groaning Spirit within restless Augustine himself, he was finally baptized. That combination of faithful tenacity and patience made Monica a saint, before her son went on to become one of the most famous saints in the Church, which is why we know of Monica’s sanctity.

Happy Sheep

"I came that they may have life, life beyond measure" (John 10:10b)

Clap along if you feel like a room without a roof

Clap along if you feel like happiness is the truth

Clap along if you know what happiness is to you

Clap along if you feel like that's what you wanna do.

Are you happy? I hope so. Why else did you get up on a Sunday morning, but to hear the one we call our Lord saying, "I came that they may have life, life beyond measure"? What could make one happier than a life overflowing with friends and the beauty of holiness that spills over into the rest of your life, overflowing into our laps so much that we just have to share it? So for Jesus to speak of abundant life beyond measure is another way of saying that Jesus wants us to be happy, in this life and the next. So, Jesus wouldn't disagree with Williams that "Happiness is the truth." I do suspect that Jesus would then ask where one's happiness comes from. Does it come solely from within each individual? That would imply that there is no one right way to happiness. Some might decide that whatever makes them happy is right for them regardless of the consequences to anyone else. At the other extreme, certain people or institutions would have the power to dictate to people what they must do to be happy.

Then I suppose we'd be like sheep, with sheepdogs barking at us and nipping at our tails to keep us in line. Some shepherd. Which bring us to the Gospel for today. At least one view of sheep is that they not the brightest bulbs in the world and have to be led around. But sheep are good at some things. Their hearing and their memory are much sharper than most city folk know. They learn very quickly the voice of their shepherd. In Jesus' time, shepherds would bring their sheep into the village and lead them into a corral that was actually connected to the house by a wall for the night. If the sheep saw someone climbing over the wall instead of coming through the gate, they would know that wasn't their shepherd, and would bleat accordingly. Even if an imposter got in through the gate and called them, they would remember their shepherd's voice and would not follow the imposter.

As Jesus says, the sheep know their shepherd's voice. They know the name their shepherd has given them. They don't follow their shepherd because they're scared of him, or crave his approval. They follow their shepherd because they are happy to hear the shepherd's voice. That voice comes from the outside. But it strikes the most pleasant chords in their hearts, and they are happy to follow their shepherd.