Our Journey of the Wise Men

The Rev’d Stephen C. Holton
Christ Church, New Haven, Conn.
Eve of Epiphany
The 171st Anniversary of the Founding of the Parish
January 5, 2025

In the name of God: Father, Son, & Holy Spirit. Amen.

Have you travelled any for the holidays?  Have you visited friends or family?  Or maybe they’ve come to visit you.  Or maybe you just went somewhere special, somewhere different, in these quiet days between Christmas and the new year.

So many people were travelling this Christmas that almost half the folks at our Christmas services were visitors!  It was a great chance to welcome people, to be together, and to celebrate the birth of Jesus—God’s breaking into the world with hope and joy and peace.

When I was a child we’d travel every Christmas eve to visit my great grandmother.  It wasn’t a long drive, but we’d go in the evening, when it was dark.  We knew what we’d find there—a turkey, some dressing, casseroles, a twelve-layer chocolate cake, oyster stew with oysters from a can, and dozens of cousins and family members to see. 

We’d gather around the space aged aluminum Christmas tree with lights reflected in its boughs and exchange small gifts—flashlights, small toys, or other tokens of gift giving—along with envelopes of cash from my great grandmother.  Five dollars for great grandchildren, twenty for grandchildren, and fifty for children.  There were denominations for each generation.  There was a system.

We knew what to expect when we travelled to my great grandmother’s.  It was predictable, expected, comforting.  It was a wonderful night. 

And when we left we’d scan the night sky for anything that looked like it might be the red nose of a reindeer headed towards our town.  Any moving light was suspect.  And we’d watch until we fell asleep and had to be carried inside to await the coming of Christmas morning.

We knew what to expect.  We knew why we were traveling.  We knew what we’d meet when we got to my great grandmother’s house. 

We hear today about a different kind of journey—the one made by the three kings, following a star.  What were the three kings looking for? 

What a time they must have had of it!  They weren’t certain of where they were going, of what they would find.  They had no idea of what was in store.  But they knew that something important was happening—and they wanted to be there.  They wanted to know more.

They sought out the temporal authorities, the rulers of the area, to ask them about the birth of a king.  And they journeyed onward.  And they found, in the most unlikely place, Jesus, the King of kings.  They found that God had broken into the world.

Did they understand what they were seeing?  Did they know what it would mean for their own lives? For the lives of those around them? 

T. S. Eliot writes about their journey.  It’s never a bad idea to read Eliot’s “Journey of the Magi” on Epiphany, so bear with me as we listen to this journey, not unlike our own:

A cold coming we had of it,

Just the worst time of the year

For a journey, and such a long journey:

The ways deep and the weather sharp,

The very dead of winter.'

And the camels galled, sorefooted, refractory,

Lying down in the melting snow.

There were times we regretted

The summer palaces on slopes, the terraces,

And the silken girls bringing sherbet.

Then the camel men cursing and grumbling

and running away, and wanting their liquor and women,

And the night-fires going out, and the lack of shelters,

And the cities hostile and the towns unfriendly

And the villages dirty and charging high prices:

A hard time we had of it.

At the end we preferred to travel all night,

Sleeping in snatches,

With the voices singing in our ears, saying

That this was all folly.

Then at dawn we came down to a temperate valley,

Wet, below the snow line, smelling of vegetation;

With a running stream and a water-mill beating the darkness,

And three trees on the low sky,

And an old white horse galloped away in the meadow.

Then we came to a tavern with vine-leaves over the lintel,

Six hands at an open door dicing for pieces of silver,

And feet kicking the empty wine-skins.

But there was no information, and so we continued

And arriving at evening, not a moment too soon

Finding the place; it was (you might say) satisfactory.

All this was a long time ago, I remember,

And I would do it again, but set down

This set down

This: were we led all that way for

Birth or Death? There was a Birth, certainly

We had evidence and no doubt. I had seen birth and death,

But had thought they were different; this Birth was

Hard and bitter agony for us, like Death, our death.

We returned to our places, these Kingdoms,

But no longer at ease here, in the old dispensation,

With an alien people clutching their gods.

I should be glad of another death.

I should be glad of another death.

They made the hard journey, not knowing what to expect.  But what they found changed the world.  What they found was the death, the ending, of everything that they thought was important.  Everything that told them how the world worked.  Everything was new.

A birth and also a death.

As sure as the infant Jesus is born, as sure as Jesus the messiah is executed and dies, as sure as the savior rises, everything is changed. 

Love conquers death. Hope conquers despair.  Power is for the meek, not the violent.  Respect conquers oppression.  Life and love and hope reign.  For in this birth, and in this death, God has redeemed and restored all things.

That’s what the three kings found at the crib.  That’s what we find at this altar. 

And even when the journey is hard, even when we are tired, the camels refractory, when it feels like all the old things are falling down around us, all that is dying is what we thought we knew.  For life will prevail.  Love will reign.  And God will gather all things to God’s own self.

I should be glad of another death, the king says.

If you are tired on the journey, know that the three kings journey with you in this space that Wystan Auden calls “for the time being.”  Know that Jesus walks with you.  Know that all has been and is being redeemed.

Because we, like the wise men, have seen Jesus.  We now know what to expect.  We know what the kingdom of God looks like—and we know that it has come near and is coming.

So hold on.  Do not be afraid.  Hold on to hope.  Love has conquered even death.  God will reign.

We’re lucky that we know what to expect.  We know how the journey ends.

Scripture doesn’t tell us more about the wise men—about what they do once they return home.  Eliot’s poem speaks of an uneasiness, living amongst the gods of the old dispensation.  A discomfort—perhaps even a hope—in knowing what they know among a world that has not yet come to know, has not yet come to believe, in the values of the kingdom of God. 

What did they do?  Did they tell the good news they’d received? 

And I’d ask us the same question, in our journey.  In this 171st year of the foundation of Christ Church Parish, how will we use that knowledge?  How will we proclaim what the wise men have seen?  How will we use what we know, that the kingdom of God has come near and will come?

Be not afraid.  Hold onto hope.  And let’s ask ourselves this year, this 2025, how will we tell what the wise men have seen?  How will we show people Jesus?

Are You Ready for Christmas?

The Rev’d Stephen C. Holton
Christ Church, New Haven, Conn.
Christmas Eve
December 24, 2024

In the name of God: Father, Son, & Holy Spirit. Amen.

Are you ready for Christmas?

That’s a phrase I’ve heard so much over the past few days.  Are you ready for Christmas? the nurse at my doctor’s office for my annual visit asked me. 

Are you ready for Christmas? Friends asked in text messages and phone calls.

Are you ready?

After all, the entire season of Advent we’ve been preparing, we’ve been proclaiming, be alert!  Watch!  Wait!  Get ready! 

How about you?  Are you ready for Christmas? 

I don’t know about you, but I don’t feel ready at all! 

There was so much to get ready—the last minute bills to pay, the people to visit, the cards to send, the errands to run, the tree to decorate, the house to clean (that did NOT get done), the groceries bought, food prepped, and of course the gifts to buy!  All the gifts!

Are you ready? 

Or are you feeling overwhelmed with the sheer volume of it all?  Was it a mad rush to get your family together and get in the car and get to church tonight?  Will it be a rush to get to the next place? 

Mary and Joseph must have felt something of that same unease, that same anxiety, that perhaps we may be feeling tonight.  After all, they weren’t traveling for pleasure or to see family—they were traveling because they’d been told to, by an emperor far away, to register to be taxed.

These taxes were not the sort that were for the public good—the kinds of taxes we pay, for roads, infrastructure, transportation, governance.  These taxes were to fill the coffers of the empire, the same force that was oppressing them.  They weren’t levied according to a progressive, planned payment structure.  There was no Internal Revenue Service—there were tax collectors, citizens of the Herodian government, that took what they could get—that extorted money from local people—and then paid what they owed to the Emperor—and kept the rest to line their own pockets. 

And there was the matter of Mary’s pregnancy.  Not an ideal time to be travelling.  And how was Joseph feeling about this child to be born—a child that was not his?!  So much anxiety.  Maybe even so much fear.

Not unlike our world today.  We worry about money, we worry about safety, we worry about our families and friends and loved ones.  We worry about what the neighbors will think.  We worry about our government and those of the nations of the world.

Just like Mary and Joseph. 

I love that line in the Christmas proclamation—that in the 42nd year of the reign of Octavius Augustus, the whole world is at peace!  It wasn’t of course in Jerusalem—the peace was uneasy, oppressive, and even violent; Josephus tells us that blood ran in the streets! 

Not unlike the violence and conflict in our own world.

Just like Mary and Joseph, we might be anxious, and even with good cause.  And Christmas preparations may have added to your joy—or they may have added to your anxiety!  It’s an anxious time.

It is precisely into that anxious moment that God breaks in.  That Jesus is born.  That the very Word of God is made flesh.  And what do the angels say?

Be not afraid!  Behold, I bring you good tidings of great joy which shall be to all people!

It is precisely into that place of fear, that world of uncertainty, that human existence plagued by violence and death, that Jesus enters. 

Be not afraid.

And to whom are the angels speaking?  It’s to the shepherds, right?  The lowliest, the most vulnerable, the ones on the edge of society, sleeping rough, outside the town, in the field, in the quiet, where God breaks in.

Be not afraid.

That’s a good word for us today, too, isn’t it.  In the rush of our holiday preparations—or in our more weighty anxieties about the state of the economay, the state of the nation, the state of the world.  Be not afraid.

Because whether or not you are ready for Christmas, whether or not your preparations are done, whether or not you are at peace or anxious or worried or even fearful, God is giving God’s own self to you.  To us.  To all of creation.

Freely.  To all of us. 

That’s something we’ve gotten wrong about giving.  Santa keeps a list and checks it twice and knows who’s been naughty or nice, right?  The elf on the shelf is a surveillance agent, that snitch that’s telling Santa what we’re up to!  Children, tell your parents that no matter what the song says, Santa is not a Calvinist.  He’s not a judge. 

In fact, did you know that the earliest gifts that Saint Nicholas gave out were sacks of gold coins that he tossed in the windows of a home with three unmarried girls—so that they’d have enough money for a dowry?  So that they could get married?  So that they could participate in the economic systems of their day? 

Saint Nicholas, that Bishop of Myra who now shows up in his suit of red with white trimmed fur, is a generous giver—reflecting the way that God gives to us.

Giving.  It’s something we don’t really get right, isn’t it?  We tie ourselves in knots to get the perfect gift.  To gift the perfect thing.  That’s the neologism, right?  Gifting!  Brands gift couture to influencers in order to get featured in Tik Toks and Instagram reels.  Retailers have curated gifting catalogues—Amazon wants to put together a list of things I can buy for my family and friends.  Make it a gerund, and suddenly we are all gifting things to one another.

I realize that language changes, but I wonder what subtle shift is under the new use of the word “gifting.”  It seems transactional.  Like I expect something in return, or you expect something of me, when you “gift” me something. 

Giving, however, involves myself, involves a relationship.  Giving something to someone else is a part of participating in one another’s very existence.  Giving part of myself away.  Like caritas, agape—the giver pours out part of their own self in the act of giving.

Gift away, friends; do it for the gram, all the things. 

But also practice receiving.  For God’s giving is different. 

Into this world of fear, of anxiety, of existential dread, God is breaking in—Jesus is born—just because God desires to be with you.  Just because God loves you.  Just so that God can give God’s own self to you. To me.  To all of creation.

That’s what God wants.  To be with you.  To love you.  To fold you into God’s sacred heart. 

In and amongst all the anxiety of the world, all the hustle and bustle of the season, can we get quiet and still like the shepherds?  Can we hear the rustle of the angels’ wings?  Can we for just a moment put down our fear? Our worry? 

BE NOT AFRAID!  The angels call out. 

Let God give God’s own self to you—in the infant in the manger.  In the teacher who heals.  In the savior who dies.  In the Christ who rises and eats with us. 

Let God draw you into God’s sacred embrace.  Let God love you.

Merry Christmas.  Come, let us adore Him.

Hope is a Christian Virtue

The Rev’d Stephen C. Holton
Christ Church, New Haven, Conn.
Twenty-Sixth Sunday after Pentecost
November 17, 2024

In the name of God: Father, Son, & Holy Spirit. Amen.

What are your Saturday mornings like? Do you go out for coffee and breakfast? Tie up some loose ends from the week? Begin your weekend chores?

My Saturday mornings usually involve some time with the dogs, some time with laundry, some time with the Wordle and NYTimes puzzles, and a general procrastination for the work that the rest of the day brings. Replying to emails. Finishing the sermon. Making sure everything is set up for Sunday.

Yesterday was a little different, however. Yesterday, this past Saturday, I got a text message from an observant vestry member. She said, “Someone is cutting some wires that go into a box on the side of the church building at Elm and Park streets. She says she was told to cut the wires.” And sure enough, the vestry member sent me a photo of the box, and the wires, and they were cut. It was a phone box, with phone wires that ran into the church. The wires, I was afraid, that connected the dialer for the fire alarm in the undercroft.

Now thankfully, because this vestry member gave me some really good information, I was able to find the spot – and I was able to trace down the wires that had been cut into the undercroft—and I was able to realize that they in fact were not active. They weren’t attached to anything any longer. They were old, unused, obsolete wires that had been replaced decades ago. Thanks be to God! Everything was still connected and running as it should be. Our life safety systems were still in place. The mischief our neighborhood friend had been “told” to cause was just mere mischief, and it had no effect in the grand scheme of things.

If this sounds unusual to you, perhaps you don’t live downtown. This was just another Saturday in the life of downtown New Haven—pretty unremarkable if definitely odd. Always vigilant, and always amused, those of us who live on the close are astonished every day at the ingenuity of God’s beloved people—and the strangeness that we encounter—along with the beauty, the transcendent, and the sublime. That’s the mix that is the world we live in. It’s wonderful and wild, just like West Virginia’s state motto.

You might be forgiven with all the weirdness going on around us for thinking that the end is drawing nigh! A supermoon these past few days with the highest tides I’ve seen. A drought across our state. Wildfires in Connecticut and New York—even in Prospect Park and Inwood. Wars and rumors of wars. And you may have been surprised in the last election to realize how divided our country is. How angry people are on both sides of the aisle. Perhaps you’re feeling unmoored, anxious, even frightened.

Things were just the same in Jesus’s day. Factions fought, blood ran in the streets, Josephus says. Jerusalem was occupied by Roman armies and its government a puppet to the Roman governor. People were anxious. They were worried. They were afraid.

It felt like everything was falling apart.

And I want to suggest to you that that’s probably okay. That everything is actually always falling apart. And that that’s not the end of the story.

This morning’s gospel is an uncomfortable look at entropy. At change. At destruction, really. What does Jesus have to teach us in this moment of discomfort?

In this passage from Mark Jesus has been in the temple in Jerusalem, and as he walks out of that magnificent building, one of his disciples exclaims, "Look, Teacher, what large stones and what large buildings!"

You’d think Jesus would agree. After all, Jesus shows up in synagogues and in the Temple. I’ll bet if he were traveling he’d even join via livestream from wherever he was for prayers. Jesus is a faithful churchgoer. I’m a faithful churchgoer. And I like beautiful church buildings! In fact, whenever someone remarks on the beauty of the church building here at Christ Church, I usually reply in agreement and then ramble on a little about the history of the building, the architect Henry Vaughan's pedigree, or the remarkable CE Kempe glass in our windows--the largest collection of Kempe outside of England. It's a beautiful building and a real resource for ministry.

But Jesus doesn’t have any kind words for the building. In fact, his reply isn't to praise the buildings at all; he’s clearly not in the middle of a capital campaign! What he says instead is shocking: "Do you see these great buildings? Not one stone will be left here upon another; all will be thrown down."

Jesus is, of course, right. The Temple was destroyed once before when the Babylonians took Jerusalem by siege and dragged the ruling class of Judea off to Babylon. This second Temple, rebuilt by Cyrus of Persia, was a grand thing, greatly enlarged, a tremendous space, that Jesus would have known—on whose steps Jesus was standing. And within forty years of Jesus's words on the steps of that building, the Romans would in fact desecrate and destroy this second Temple, pulling it down.

Physics and history teach us that nothing in our world that seems permanent really is; everything is always changing. And sometimes that change can look like decay--maybe even disaster.

But God's perspective is longer than our own.

In these shorter, darker days of autumn, one might be understandably concerned about change, about disruption, about loss and decay. After all, we're still in the end days of a worldwide pandemic, a plague, that's taken over five million lives worldwide. Our country is torn apart by political disagreement, anger, and sometimes even hatred. Human lives are broken by greed, addiction, racism, violence, and even illness--here in our city, in our own families, in our own homes.

There is change and decay all around us.

Where, then, do we find hope? Why do we even try? Why do we bother to gather here on Sunday, to stream in virtually, to put new roofs on buildings or go to work or cook dinner or visit with friends or family? How can any of it have meaning in the face of such decay—such despair?

Immediately following Jesus's words, he continues to predict chaos and disorder: "Nation will rise against nation... there will be earthquakes...[and] famines. This is but the beginning of the birth pangs."

This prediction of chaos, of destruction, seems like disaster from the perspective of the moment. If the Temple falls, how can there still be a covenant with God? How can God's people be in relationship with God with no place to pray?

Are we seeing chaos and destruction in the world around us? In the Church even? Will there be enough to sustain the mission and ministry we share with God in this place? Will there ever be peace? Will there ever be justice? Will things ever get back to normal?

I'm reminded that, every time the Temple was sacked or desecrated, every time God's chosen people wandered away from God or were dragged into exile or sent out into the wilderness, each and every time God came to them again--reached out in relationship and love. They couldn't escape God's love.

God reaches out to us coming in the human and divine incarnate one, Jesus Christ, son of Mary, walking with us, suffering, loving, feeding, and healing. God is with us even in the midst of what seems like chaos and destruction.

What if chaos, what if destruction, was not an end but rather a waypoint? What if, instead of destruction, we are experiencing change?

What if, rather than hatred, we're feeling the last gasp of a dying dragon thrown down by St Michael and his warrior angels? What if our political life and our global affairs are teaching us something about good and evil? About how we can live in the face of evil—and how we can work for the good?

What if God is doing something--reconciling creation even now in the midst of what seems like disorder?!

Because friends, that's what I believe is happening.

Hope is a uniquely Christian virtue. Expecting the Kingdom of God is a uniquely Christian command. Jesus invites us to be unafraid, to see change as the beginning of new birth, of reconciliation, of wholeness.

And Jesus asks us to invite one another into this moment of hope. As the writer of the letter to the Hebrews says, “Let us hold fast to the confession of our hope without wavering, for he who has promised is faithful. And let us consider how to provoke one another to love and good deeds, not neglecting to meet together…but encouraging one another, and all the more as you see the Day approaching.”

God is faithful. We are invited to PROVOKE one another to love and good deeds. To encourage one another. To meet together in love, in the fullness of the sacraments. To walk with Jesus in hope.

The truth is that there is lots of destruction, lots of decay. Lots of change. Because there is lots of evil. And it will be burned away.

But there is lots and lots of good, and God’s love will prevail.

Look around you. Look around at this little glimpse of the breaking in of the kingdom of God that is this part of the Body of Christ.

We’ve celebrated baptisms of new Christians together. We keep praying the daily office, and praying the mass together—mostly with young folks in their 20’s and 30’s. We’ve buried two good and faithful priests together. We’ve celebrated families and children and visited folks who can’t get out of their homes in person and on livestream. We’ve fed people—75,000 meals this calendar year. And if you were at the Soup Kitchen benefit Thursday evening you felt the joy present in that community as folks come together to help one another and celebrate God’s love made present.

If you're feeling the chaos and confusion of the present time, you are not alone. History is with you. Commentators are writing about it. I am feeling it with you. God is there with you.

But in the midst of all of it, God is working. Sometimes change feels like chaos, and that's ok. God didn't abandon God's people. Christ has not left the Church, which is his Body.

And that's why we're gathering. And going to work. And fighting against war and violence. Why we move forward even in the midst of change. Because God is there. Because the kingdom of God is breaking in. And people are longing for God, even as God is drawing the whole world to God’s own self.

I'm profoundly hopeful about what God is doing here at Christ Church. And I’d submit to you that this is the most important thing—being a part of the Body of Christ—that we can do with our lives, with all that God has given us.

At the end of mass I and the Consecration Sunday task force will ask you to consider how you will participate spiritually with all that God has given you—with the financial blessings God has bestowed on you—in the work and witness and ministry we share in God’s name in this place.

Pray about what you will give. Pray about how this will be a spiritual discipline in you own life. See if, as Alinda Stanley invited us to, you can take one step up—another percentage. And give joyfully, with hope, as a spiritual practice – part of your relationship with God.

This is but the beginning. But it's birthpangs, not pains of death. God is faithful. God is good. And the kingdom of God will prevail. Let’s have hope. Let’s join in that good work. Let’s look for the coming of the kingdom of God.

Funeral Homily for Fr Kenneth Thomas

Funeral Homily for Fr Kenneth Thomas
September 26, 2024
The Rt. Rev’d Mark Beckwith
Christ Church, New Haven, Conn.

I am humbled and honored to be here this afternoon, to offer a homily at Kenneth Dana Thomas’ requiem service, a homily he didn’t want, but is going to get – because while the liturgy carries us from grief to promise, pain to hope, it doesn’t directly lift up the life of the one who has died.  And there is a lot to lift up about Kenneth, and stories that need to be told – particularly as his life connects with the Gospel.

Martha, Lazarus’ sister, is grieving.  Her brother Lazarus has just died.  Her grief manifests itself as anger, which she directs at Jesus:  “If you had been here, my brother would not have died.”   Jesus honors her grief, acknowledges her anger – and offers an extraordinary message of hope:  “I am the Resurrection and life – those who believe in me – even though they die – will live; and everyone who lives and believes in me will never die.  Do you believe this?”

In my nearly 50 years of friendship with Kenneth there were many times when I either avoided Jesus’ question – do you believe this?  Or couldn’t answer it positively, because of loss, disappointment, grief, anger, or whatever.  I would bring these incidents to Kenneth during the many meals we had together – and he would listen, nod his head – and move on.

What was clear to me in my rather frequent moments of lament – and is even clearer to me now, was that he believed in the Resurrection – down to the marrow in his bones.  He didn’t speak of it – well, he did, from this pulpit and the other pulpits he ascended over 69 years of ordained ministry, delivering extraordinary sermons filled with insight, depth, eloquence – and faith.  He lived that faith – in a style that and method that came right out of a Jane Austen novel.  It was solid, grounded, authentic – and part and parcel of who he was. I – and so many of us, came to trust it, and count on it.

He had a rule of life – fashioned by his early years at St. John’s in Bridgeport, at Trinity College, GTS – and his 70 plus years as an associate of the Order of the Holy Cross – a rule of life that would not – could not, be broken.  He told me several times over the years that he resolutely read the daily office – every day without fail, even if the water was up to his neck.  He sometimes shared the regret of missing his daily routine – once, many years ago, while in the hospital for surgery, the water wasn’t up to his neck – but the pre-op IV was firmly implanted in his arm, and a nurse grabbed his prayer book out of his hands as she wheeled him into the operating room.

A rule of life is often depicted as a railing – something to hold onto – as we navigate the bumps, peaks and valleys – if not chasms, of life’s journey.  Kenneth’s railing was forged in trust, commitment and spiritual discipline.  Many of us would tease him over the tenacity of the grip he had on the railing – and his near obsession with his daily routine, which he relaxed – somewhat, over the years.  But his devotion, his faith, his discipline made an indelible impact in so many of our lives.  It certainly did on me.

As I continue to work through my grief over Kenneth’s death, a realization that I have come to – is that in a wonderful and ironic way, Kenneth himself – his humor, his brilliance, his quirks, but more particularly his unyielding devotion to the promise of the resurrection, all of that – he has been my railing.  His fierce but understated spiritual commitment was contagious.   Life wasn’t always easy for him, but he held on.   I have held on to his steadfastness as he has held on to me.  There are no doubt hundreds of people for whom Kenneth was their living railing.  I am not alone in that regard.

Many years ago, after my then fiancée met Kennth for the first time, after he charmed her with stories (always the stories) and his excitement for us, she said that she didn’t think she would be able to love me as fiercely as Kenneth did.  Few people can.  His love was refracted from God.  God’s love came through him.  And people cherished it – and remembered it.

Among the many stories he would tell  – oh sweet Jesus, were there stories (he called them monologues, some of which went on for awhile, and many of them were told more than once – but I never got tired of hearing them) – were memories of acolytes from his time at St. Paul’s in Hartford (this was sixty years ago) seeking him out to meet their grandchildren.  There were kids from his seminary days, when he had a ministry on the Lower East side, who generations later, asked him to officiate at their children’s weddings. Former acolytes would show up years later with kids and spouses in tow, filled with memories of his care, humor and wisdom.

When I think of Kenneth’s love for so many of us, I am reminded of words from an Emily Dickinson poem – tell all the truth but tell it slant.  Kenneth’s love wasn’t overly effusive or sentimental.  It came slant.  And it was God’s love, yes, and he passed it on.  Eagerly and easily, and from a pre-Victorian angle.

There was a time in Kenneth’s life when love was occluded and hidden.  He felt confined, if not trapped, in his hidden identity.  It was suggested that he try worshipping at the Metropolitan Community Church in New Haven, which he did, a bit reluctantly, because at that time his railing really didn’t  extend beyond the Episcopal Church.  He reported to me – with his classic shaking of the head, that the liturgy was dreadful.  But the community, the community, was transforming for him.  It opened him up.  He loosened his grip.  Many from that community are here today.  He called you his children.  You became was his chosen family.  His love – God’s love – had a new opening.  What a gift.  I could see it.  It often heard about.  The loving care given to him by his growing number of children and the grace and gratitude with which he received it has become my image of the beloved community.  He would regale me about his many trips to Provincetown, and his excitement over attending the daily tea dances – the picture of which I can’t easily conjure up.   The slant angle of love became more direct.

I was last here at Christ Church in 2005 for Kenneth’s 50th anniversary of ordination.  What was implicitly said then, in deep and sincere gratitude, was that Kennth was a railing for the congregation during a rather difficult time.  People held on to his consistency, his wit, his care – all of which were manifestations of his faith.   It was a wonderful celebration of his ministry – and the exchange of love was so powerful.  He told me afterward that he really didn’t do anything to warrant the congregation’s praise.   Oh, yes you did, I said in response.  You were yourself, in your consistent slant loving way.  You were – and are, an exemplar of God’s love.

I think the most important thing that can be said about a person in life is that they loved and were loved in return.  Kenneth was richly blessed with this.  As he awaited death – and he was a bit miffed at God for taking his sweet time of it, he spoke of gratitude for his family, his friends – even for his stints in the Army – the first at the end of WWII, and the second in Korea.    There were seasons in his 97 years  when the fullness of love had a hard time penetrating Kenneth’s  need for self-protection.  But his faith was so deep that instead of retreating into himself he faithfully  continued to be a priest of God’s love – extending that love to his family, his friends, his parishioners – and over time the slant of love became easier to give and receive.

Human life is a gift, a gift to be honored and a gift to be treasured.  We are here to honor the gift of Kenneth’s life, and all that it has given us.  And we are here to claim the promise –  as we continue to work at letting go, that we can hold onto the promise that Kenneth will continue to receive the love of those gathered here, and those many people who are not here but are nevertheless remembering him at this moment with their thoughts and prayers; and the promise that he will continue to receive the love of God, who is the author of life itself.  And the ultimate promise – that love is stronger than death. He believed that.  He lived it.  He lives it still.

Well done, good and faithful servant.

I Shall Fear No Evil

You may have heard of the phenomenon of “doomscrolling”—the practice of reading excessive amounts of news, particularly on the internet or social media—particularly negative news—reading post after post, or article after article, scrolling through them endlessly on your phone or tablet.  The word “doomscrolling” seems to have come into existence during 2020—a year of hard news if ever there was one—and I first heard it, actually, on January 6, 2021.  Some psychologists hypothesize that the practice comes out of a need we have to find some sort of control in out-of-control situations—things like a global pandemic or an insurrection at the Capitol.  Perhaps not surprisingly, though, psychologists also warn that the overconsumption of negative news hour after hour, day after day, exacerbates mental health issues like anxiety or depression.

 I don’t know about you, but I’ve found myself anxiously consuming more news than usual over the past few weeks—for me, it takes the form of podcasts that I can listen to in the car or if I want to stress myself out while I’m cooking dinner—news analysis podcasts that endlessly dissect the smallest nuances of public opinion polls, statements made to the press by our leaders, the countless permutations of what may or may not happen in our nation over the next few months.

 There’s a lot of anxiety out there right now.  People from across the political spectrum have expressed it.  Folks from the political right and the political left have shared with me recently that they don’t recognize the country they’re living in.  Tensions are high.  The stakes seem even higher.

 As Christians—as followers of Jesus Christ—we may be tempted to despair in the present environment, a society that sometimes seems to be moving in directions divergent from the values of love, compassion, forgiveness and reconciliation that Jesus teaches us.  We might feel anger when we hear the name of Jesus invoked to motivate fear and division rather than hope and charity.  As we follow the news—maybe a little bit too closely—we might find ourselves caught up in the anxiety and fear that’s coursing through our civic life. 

 But friends, when I hear a text like Psalm 23—a text that’s so familiar to many of us, so close to our hearts—I am reminded that we do not have to submit to anxiety or fear.  “Yea, though I walk through the valley of the shadow of death, I shall fear no evil—for thou art with me; thy rod and thy staff, they comfort me.”

 I shall fear no evil.

 The psalm reminds us that we are cared for—not in the way that political parties or elected leaders promise to improve things for our benefit—but that we are truly and deeply cared for, well and truly held, by God—the God who made us and whose kingdom draws near to us in Jesus Christ.  As seekers of God, as the people of God, we follow a shepherd who offers us true abundance, the true nourishment of our souls, even in unquiet times—a shepherd who, the psalmist says, “spreads a table before us in the presence of those who trouble us.”

We follow a shepherd who not only leads us but joins us—even in the valley of the shadow of death I shall fear no evil, for thou art with me.  God joins us in human history as Jesus of Nazareth—Jesus’s own time and place being full of political turmoil and turbulence.  God joins us in the Holy Spirit, moving and breathing in the Church week after week, year after year, century after century, “guiding us along right pathways for his Name’s sake.”  God joins us in this place, in our gathered community, as we come together in our rounds of prayer and thanksgiving, making us the body of Christ called to love one another and to go out proclaiming God’s love for the world.

A friend of mine asked me the other day what we’re supposed to do—how are we supposed to move forward when everything seems to topsy-turvy all around us.

Friends, whatever your politics, and whatever directions our society moves in, our vocation as Christians is clear—love God, and love your neighbor as yourself.  We may or may not be able to move the needle on national affairs, but we can—we must—continue to follow our true shepherd, to follow Christ, in own lives, in our own homes and communities.  We can—we must—be kind to one another and compassionate to those we meet.  We can—we must—be agents of forgiveness and reconciliation—in our families, in our workplaces, in our social groups. 

St Paul writes in his letter to the Romans that nothing will separate us from the love of Christ—“neither death, nor life, nor angels, nor rulers, nor things present, nor things to come, nor power, nor heigh, nor depth, nor anything else in all creation will be able to separate us from the love of God in Christ Jesus our Lord.”  This is good news, friends—in the love of God, we have nothing to fear—our shepherd will let nothing in all creation separate us from God.  God will be with us even—and especially—when the world seems darkest.  Surely God’s goodness and mercy shall follow us all the days of our life, and we will dwell in the house of the Lord forever.

Two Kingdoms

The story of the beheading of John the Baptist has captured the artistic imagination—Herod’s feast, his daughter (or step-daughter, or niece, depending on who you ask), her dance (the “dance of the seven veils” being not a Scriptural description of this event, but popularized in English by none other than Oscar Wilde), and the Baptizer’s head being delivered on a platter are all depicted in countless paintings, in plays and operas—set in the American visual imagination perhaps by Rita Hayworth’s 1953 performance in the film Salome—the young girl’s name, again, not taken from Scripture, but this time from the historian Josephus.

However this story is depicted, though, let’s call it what it is—it’s a horrible story, a really gruesome series of events.  A feckless ruler living in blatant violation of law and tradition—having married his brother’s wife, not, it seems, out of deep love or to protect a vulnerable person left alone after her spouse’s death—but rather to satisfy an appetite.  A spineless king who knows that John is a righteous and holy man, but arrests him anyway for political expediency.  A foolish king who does what the powerful should never do—promise to give someone anything they ask for. 

Herod’s banquet shows us the workings of a kingdom where human life is cheap—where the pinnacle of existence, at least for the privileged, is the fulfillment of cheap desires, and where those on the wrong side of power can find their lives snuffed out for no reason other than a weak leader trying to save face at a birthday party.

It’s hard to see the good news here.

It’s important to note, though, that Mark gives us this account of Herod’s banquet and John’s murder as a flashback—and, like all flashbacks, this moment of retrospection tells us a great deal about where we are in the present part of the story.

Jesus, you’ll remember, has launched a particularly successful ministry of teaching and healing throughout Galilee and the regions surrounding it.  Last week we heard about him sending out his disciples two by two into the region, and next week we’ll hear about what happens when they come back together and report on their activity.  Mark puts this flashback in between those two bits—a way of saying “meanwhile, elsewhere…”—a way of showing how word of Jesus’s message has reached even the centers of power.

We know that John the Baptist has proclaimed this Jesus of Nazareth as the one who will baptize with the Holy Spirit, the one whose sandals John is not worthy to stoop down and untie.  But Herod doesn’t know this.  When he hears about this itinerant rabbi, this Galilean carpenter who has come seemingly out of nowhere with astounding teachings and miraculous power, Herod’s guilty conscience kicks in—he thinks that he’s hearing stories about the prophet he executed, that John the Baptist has come back from the dead—that the threat John posed to his power is still there.

Because Jesus is a threat to Herod, just like John was.  Jesus and John are threats to Herod’s kingship—not just because they decry his illicit marriage to Herodias—but because they challenge the very worldview he represents:  the worldview that says that power exists for its own sake; that privilege permits any excess, any cruelty; that nothing matters more than position, possessions, reputation.  Jesus threatens Herod because he shows—not just in teaching but in his deeds, in his acts of healing—that every person’s life is sacred, that no person—not the woman with the 12-year hemorrhage, not Jairus’s daughter, neither you nor me—that no person is beyond God’s reach.  That we are all, each of us, beloved children of God.

This truth—that God loves you, fully, recklessly, unconditionally—turns on its head the logic of this world, the logic that quantifies human value in terms of economic potential or labor output, the logic that says the powerful can reorder the world to fulfill their own desires.

The alternative Jesus offers to Herod’s version of kingship is perhaps most visible in the banquet scene where Jesus is host—where Jesus brings his disciples together for a sacred meal on the night before his death.  Herod offers his daughter as an unseemly entertainment; Jesus offers his very self as the bread of life and cup of salvation.  Herod will do anything to protect his reputation and his power; Jesus will lay down his life so that we may have abundant life.  Herod’s story is full of manipulations and cunning and intrigue; in Jesus’s story, God’s love for humankind and Jesus’s perfect obedience to his Father’s will lead to resurrection, new life, forgiveness—the world reconciled to God.

And friends, Jesus’s story is ongoing.  It’s a story that you and I are invited into again and again, every time we gather before the altar—a story that’s been told for 100,000 Sundays—the story in which God’s love for you, for me, for all of us, is strong enough to overcome death, strong enough to overcome our weaknesses and our sin, strong enough to overcome our death-dealing world and our self-serving pretensions.  Jesus invites you, even now, to meet him here, to receive the bread and the wine that is his body and blood—to be loved by God, and to live now and forever in that kingdom of grace, abundance, and blessing.

Jesus's Hometown Dilemma

A couple weeks ago, an old friend of mine posted a picture on social media.  It was scanned from, of all things, one of our high school yearbooks. It showed the two of us—we must have been sixteen or seventeen—at the movie theatre where we both worked after school—awkwardly smiling in front of this huge movie-theatre-sized popcorn maker, wearing our uniforms complete with very unfortunate clip-on bow-ties. 

I don’t remember this picture ever being taken or that it was printed in the yearbook.  My friend didn’t either.  I told my friend that I almost didn’t recognize myself.  She said she had felt the same way when she first saw it.  We remarked on the time that had passed between then and now, the experiences we’ve both had in the years since, the distance traveled.  We both realized that neither of us would have ever predicted that we’d be living where we live now, working the jobs we have.  But our memories of that job—right down to the smell of the popcorn—were crystal clear.

Many of you, like me, came to New Haven from somewhere else.  And one of the things about hometowns is, when you go back to them, even in memory, there’s a sense in which you pick back up some part of yourself that you left behind.  Seeing that old picture and talking to my friend took me right back to that after-school job in the 1990s.  However we craft our lives as adults, our formative years are still always with us—and the people we grew up with and around will always us, in some way, in that light.  Whoever I might be now, in that yearbook photo, I’ll always be a geeky teenager in a bow-tie.

This “hometown dilemma” is something Jesus experiences in our reading this morning.  The first few chapters of Mark narrate Jesus’s baptism and the beginning of his ministry—a ministry marked by remarkable acts of power—calming storms, healing the sick, even bringing back to life a young girl apparently dead.  And after much activity he comes back to Nazareth, to his hometown.  This return doesn’t seem to be for the purposes of rest or recreation; we’re not told that he’s gone to spend time with his family or attend a celebration of some kind—it just seems that the ordinary course of Jesus’s business takes him back—and he does pretty much what he’s been doing all along.  On the sabbath, he goes to the synagogue to teach.

The reception he gets is very different that what he’s gotten used to.  In previous scenes, the crowds have listened with rapt attention; they’ve followed him even as he’s tried to get away.  In the Gentile countries, people have been astounded with Jesus’s powers to command demons; in the Jewish regions, people have come from far and wide to hear him.  But here, at Nazareth, they question.  “Where did this man get all this? What is this wisdom that has been given to him? Is not this the carpenter, the son of Mary?”

Didn’t we know this guy when he was a teenager?  Didn’t we watch him grow up?  Isn’t he just a carpenter, an ordinary tradesman?  Isn’t this just a normal person from Nazareth, just like all of us?

In one sense, the answer to all these questions is “yes”—a corollary of the doctrine of the Incarnation is that as a fully fledged human being, Jesus would have grown up—like all of us he would have been a child, an adolescent, a teenager—and people would have seen him in these phases—and sure, the people who knew him best would probably be surprised when he begins teaching astounding things in the synagogue.

The problem for the people of Nazareth was not that they knew Jesus too well.  The problem was that they let what they knew of Jesus block out the greater truth about who he was and what he came to do.

This is something that can happen to any of us, right, being limited by other people’s expectations or preconceptions of us?  If opinions people form about us in one point in our lives become fixed, this can be bad for us—we are all, for example, much more than might be captured in a high school yearbook photo.

The people of Nazareth see, in a very real and up-close way, Jesus’s humanity—but their view of his humanity is so strong that they’re unable to recognize the divinity beginning to reveal itself as he teaches.  Their expectations about who Jesus is, or who he should be, cloud their ability to see who he really is.

This isn’t the only time in Scripture that human expectations limit our ability to see God at work in the world.  The prophet Elijah expected God to be in a fire or whirlwind, not in a sheer silence.  As a Pharisee, Paul looked for God in a rigorous traditionalist application of the Jewish Torah—and was unable to see God moving in the small band of disciples who follow the teachings of Christ. 

After the people of Nazareth take offense at Jesus’s astounding—perhaps seemingly presumptuous—teachings, Mark tells us that Jesus “could do no deed of power there”—except for still curing a few people by laying on his hands, which still seems to me like nothing to turn your nose up at.  Jesus, Mark tells us, was “amazed at their unbelief.”  Coming as it does just a few lines after Jesus heals a woman of her hemorrhage, saying “Your faith has made you well,” this is particularly striking.  I don’t think Mark is suggesting that God is somehow stripped of divine power if we don’t believe—but rather that God’s actions in our lives invite some manner of our participation—at least, at the most basic level, some amount of trust in God on our own part.  We cannot be healed by God if we do not trust God, and our trust in God will be hindered if we try to put our own limitations on who God is or how God will show up in our lives.

How often do we let our expectations put limits on God?  How often do we imagine God as a figure sitting in judgment, full of wrath and anger—and mistakenly put ourselves beyond the reach of God’s healing embrace?  Or do we conceive of an infinitely permissive God, whose love for us is such that we never need to take stock of our own wrongdoing or grow towards the holiness God desires for us?  Perhaps we, like the people of Nazareth, don’t recognize Jesus when he shows up in front of us—when we fail to see the image of God in our neighbor, in the vulnerable, in the stranger, in someone whose behavior or way of life violates our expectations.

The Good News, friends, in all these possible failures, is that God keeps showing up—that God keeps reaching out to us in new and unexpected ways.  Even with the people of Nazareth taking offense, Jesus is still there, healing the sick, and sending out the disciples to witness to the Kingdom of God drawing near.  Even if our preconceptions would put limits on how God would look or act, God will not be limited—God will continue to surprise, to astound, to challenge us.  And in keeping our hearts and minds open to God’s presence, to God’s invitation to trust him, to God’s call to join in sharing that Good News—in being open to God’s unexpected presence, we will be made whole.

Trust in the Face of Despair

The Rev’d Stephen C. Holton
Christ Church, New Haven, Conn.
The Fifth Sunday after Pentecost
June 23, 2024

In the name of God: Father, Son, & Holy Spirit. Amen.

About fifteen years ago a friend invited me to come to see a film with him.  “It’s by the Coen brothers,” he said.  “It’s a comedy,” he said.  “It’s about religion.  You’ll love it,” he said.  My friend is a writer and has studied the intersection of film and theology, so I figured he knew what he was talking about.  So in the middle of December, in the cold and snow, we made our way one afternoon to the theater to take  in a matinee of Joel and Ethan Coen’s new film, A Serious Man.  The film’s run time is 106 minutes.[1]  As I said to my friend as we left the theater, that’s one hundred and six minutes that I will never get back.   I was simultaneously furious that I’d spent an afternoon watching such a morbidly depressing film.  And also delighted that it was so very good.  And, on some level, wickedly funny—funny in the way that one might say, You have to laugh to keep from crying.  It was sad, it was great, it was funny—a lot like life.

If you’ve not seen the film, permit a brief outline of the plot.  The film’s main character, Larry, a physics professor at the local college, has been asked for a divorce by his wife Judith so that she can marry their friend Sy, with whom she’s been having an affair.  Judith and Sy throw Larry and his brother Arthur out of the house and drain his bank account.  His brother gets in trouble with the law and has a fatal car accident.  His daughter is stealing from him.  His son is failing his way through Hebrew School.  A student is blackmailing him for a passing grade.  And the rumor is that the faculty committee is recommending he be denied tenure.

He’s losing his wife, his family, his house, his livelihood.  How could things go worse for Larry?  And yet they do.

At the very end of the film, Larry receives a phone call from his doctor to come in to discuss the results of a chest x-ray; the implication is of course lung cancer.  And, in the final frame, at Danny’s school, we see a tornado moving towards the foreground—a line of yellow school busses in its wake—as students and children run for shelter.  The screen goes black.

The film asks all the time-honored questions of theodicy—Why is there evil in the world?  What has Larry done to deserve all this misfortune?  And, as though speaking for us, Larry himself asks this “why” question over and over again.  His constant refrain is, “I haven’t done anything!”[2]

Of course, given today’s reading, you may already have made the connection.  Larry is a type for Job in the book of the same name.  You remember that story—“There was once a man in the land of Uz whose name was Job. That man was blameless and upright, one who feared God and turned away from evil.”  (Job 1.1)

Job is a wealthy man, with livestock and property and a large family.  And Job loses his family, his livestock, and his health—he is afflicted by sores and boils—his cattle die, and his children perish.  Everything is taken from him. 

His wife and friends offer suggestions about how Job should think about his misfortune—theories of evil and suffering.  Explanations.  But Job continually maintains his innocence.  He cries out to God,

Teach me, and I will be silent;

   make me understand how I have gone wrong…

Is there any wrong on my tongue?

   Cannot my taste discern calamity?  (Job 6.24, 30)

Hearing only his friends’ voices, he finally demands a hearing, an accounting before God.  What have I done to deserve this?  we can almost hear Job cry.  And then God answers Job out of the whirlwind:

 “Who is this that darkens counsel by words without knowledge?

Gird up your loins like a man,

   I will question you, and you shall declare to me.

Where were you when I laid the foundation of the earth?

   Tell me, if you have understanding.”   (Job 38.1-4)

How is that for a non-answer!  Job just wants to know why this evil, why all this suffering, has been visited on him.  He hasn’t done anything, as Larry, the character in A Serious Man, says. 

Why is there suffering?   Why is there evil in the world? 

One way to read the voice from the whirlwind is that we aren’t to question why.  All that happens is a part of God’s inscrutable plan for the universe.  God has a plan for everything that happens to Job; Job just doesn’t know what it is yet. 

I’ve heard that sort of logic far too often, and I have to tell you, I’m just not sure it holds water.  I don’t think that’s how the continually emanating goodness of God’s creative will works.  Just as an example, what if we look at Larry.  Does God have some sort of purpose that requires that Judith, his wife, leaves him for their friend Sy?  I don’t think so.  That’s not to say that God can’t create something good out of a bad situation.  But I don’t think God has split up Judith and Larry.  And God doesn’t visit these plagues, these tragedies, on Job.  Satan, the accuser, does that.

But there is another way to read the voice from the whirlwind.  “Where were you when I laid the foundation of the earth?”  God asks Job.  Job has been protesting his innocence—that he is a good person—that he hasn’t done anything to deserve these plagues.  Job has demanded an accounting from God—why has this happened to me?  And maybe this is Job’s mistake—maybe this is Job’s sin—thinking that he is good enough to avoid suffering—thinking that he above all people can avoid the reality of suffering and evil.  That his goodness is sufficient to warrant some sort of alternative reality that belongs only to the kingdom of God.

Where were you when I laid the foundation of the earth?

   Tell me, if you have understanding.

Who determined its measurements—surely you know!

For me, the story of Job—his demands for God’s accountability, and God’s sarcastic reply from the whirlwind—this turns the question from “Why does God allow suffering and evil?” to an allowance that suffering, that evil, does exist—so that the question becomes, “How do we deal with suffering and evil?  And what is it that we have done to perpetuate evil in the world? What have others done?  And what suffering is just a result of the brokenness of our own bodies—of our own lives?”

If as our Buddhist friends would remind us we take suffering as a given in life, and certainly in holy scripture we see plenty of suffering—even and especially in the life of Christ himself—if suffering is a given, then how do we as Christians respond to it? What are we to do?

Consider the situation of the apostles in the boat in our gospel lesson today.  They are Jesus’s closest companions on earth.  He has spent months, years, with them at his side.  He’s been out all day teaching beside the Sea of Galilee and the crowds who have gathered are so large he’s had to get into a boat to keep from being crushed by their numbers.  At the end of a long day, he wants to sail to another point on the lake, to get away from the crowds perhaps, and so his friends do what he asks. They sail across the lake—only 7 miles wide at its widest point—and they encounter a storm—and they are afraid.

Now I am sympathetic with the disciples’ fear.  A friend of mine and I sailed just three years ago from New Haven to Black Rock, in Bridgeport, on a stormy day.  The air was unpredictable and blustery, and the skies were overcast and the wind was chilly; we donned our crew jackets, dropped the sails, and motored forward, trying as best as we could to avoid the roll of the waves.  My friend swears the seas were 6 or 8 feet.  All I know is that, in an hour or two, we were safe in the harbor, tied to our mooring, on a launch to a dock with food and drinks and friends and level, steady ground.  But the time on the rolling waters of the Sound was not pleasant.  In fact, my friend was green.  He was afraid, sick, terrified.  Mathematically I knew the swells were not high enough to come close to swamping our vessel, but the feeling itself was enough to be overwhelming.  Thankfully the next day was sunny and warm with fair winds and gentle seas, and I think he forgave me.

The disciples have it much worse than I did.  Water is actually coming into the boat, over the gunwales.  Jesus is asleep at the stern.  And the crew, Jesus’s friends, are afraid that they are going to sink, and drown, and die.  So I don’t blame them for crying out, “Teacher, do you not care that we are perishing?”

We know the ending of the story: Jesus calms the waves, stills the winds, and they are amazed at how nature bends to Jesus’s very will. 

They are not wrong to be afraid.  But (as a vestry member in our bible study this week pointed out) Jesus trusts them.  Jesus trusts them to weather the storm, to keep the ship seaworthy, to hold fast through the waves and the wind—to come out on the other side.  “Why are you afraid?  Do you still have no faith?”  Jesus asks.

It sounds like a rebuke.  But perhaps it’s an invitation.  Perhaps it’s an invitation to that most Christian virtue, the virtue of Hope.  Of faith.  Of trust.  Of belief that God is with us in the boat.  That not even the worst storm can stop the kingdom of God.  That we are held in the strong arms of Jesus.

Larry, the Coen brothers’ type for Job, is asking the wrong question:  Why me?  Job is asking the wrong thing: why did something bad happen to me, a good person?  It’s not that Job is good enough to avoid suffering.  It’s not that God allows suffering and evil—it’s that we perpetuate it.  Evil is real.  Murderous violence happens.  Racism is real.  Jesus, do you not care that we’re perishing?  Not only does our Lord care.  He is doing something about it.  He is saving us.  The kingdom of God is real, and it’s more of a reality than all the lies the devil tells us.  It’s more true than even what we observe with our own eyes, more real than what we feel or believe.  It involves us, and it is bigger than we ourselves are.  It is God, God’s own will, God’s own creative, life-giving, loving power, that cannot be stopped.  We are invited to have hope—to persevere. And we are invited to trust God—to trust in God’s kingdom—just as God is trusting us.

Where were you when I laid the foundations of the world? God asks Job.

Why are you afraid? Jesus asks his friends.

Evil is real.  We see it in the world around us.  We see it in the history of chattel slavery in this nation.  We see it in the delay of justice, of freedom denied, in the Civil War when the Emancipation Proclamation ended slavery January 1 1863, and Lee surrendered to Grant at Appomatox in April 9 1865, but it wasn’t until June 19, 1865, that General Granger arrived in Galveston Texas to issue General Order #3 that enslaved persons in Galveston were actually freed. For two full months enslaved Black people in Galveston were technically free, but because the evil of slavery persisted they did not know it

Evil persists.  Evil is real.  But God’s freedom is greater.  God’s love is greater.  And God’s love wins, every time.

Jesus, do you not care that we are perishing?  Jesus does care, and he’s in the boat with us.  But he is unafraid because he knows the war has already been won.  And he trusts us, his brothers and sisters, to persist in the face of evil, to rebuke it, to act in love and work for justice.

The disciples that saw Jesus’s crucifixion had no reason to believe anything other than that he had died.  But Mary Magdalene saw the empty tomb—and told us about it.  Jesus has given us the evidence that there is more than we can imagine.  That the truth is full of hope, of possibility, and that all we need do is persevere, have hope, and trust. 

I invite you today to come to this altar to be filled up again with the presence of Christ, to be fueled for the hope and perseverance and trust Jesus invites us into.  Even as we lament at the foot of the cross may we not lose sight of the empty tomb. Come and draw near to the kingdom of God.  And go out and tell of God’s trust in us. Go out and practice hope.  Go out and look for the coming of the kingdom of God.

+ + +

[1] Film statistics from IMBD.com at http://www.imdb.com/title/tt1019452/?ref_=ttpl_pl_tt, accessed 6/20/15

[2] Juliet Lapidos in “What’s going on?”, Slate, March 2, 2010.  Online at http://www.slate.com/articles/arts/the_oscars/2010/03/whats_going_on.html (accessed 6/20/15)

NB—The treatment of Job in this text was first used in a sermon preached June 21, 2015, at Grace Church in New York.

Sharing the Spirit

The Rev’d Stephen C. Holton
Christ Church, New Haven, Conn.
Pentecost
May 19, 2024

In the name of God: Father, Son, & Holy Spirit. Amen.

I had the great fortune recently to hear the Metropolitan Opera's inaugural presentation of John Adams's opera El Nino.  The opera is the story of the Holy Child, Jesus, but really it's the story of Mary, his mother.  It tracks Mary's story through the announcement of the angel Gabriel through Joseph's anxiety over her inexplicable pregnancy to the childhood of Jesus himself.  Invoking fantastical apocryphal sources, the libretto tells of Jesus's kindness and gentleness to dragons--and how even these fierce beasts bowed before him.  Three wise men arrive to honor Jesus's birth, bringing gold, frankincense, and myrrh, and the king Herod, portrayed as an exploitative despot in the developing 2/3 world, tries to commandeer their mission to seize and destroy the infant Jesus.  Joseph and his family flee to Egypt, and the slaughtered infants of Jerusalem bring the constant driving machine of Adams's musical heartbeat to a slow resolution.

The sounds were intensive, rhythmic, relentless.  The colors were intense--of a palate of pantone colors only seen in the tropics, foreign to anything New England could ever imagine.  The images of Mary were saturating--Maris Stella, star of the sea; Regina Caelorum, queen of the heavens; a Mary of the islands, with a girl child Jesus; and a Mary of the Central Americas, with the boy Jesus at her breast. 

My friends who had heard staged performances before during the previous 20 year life of the work were quick to claim their prior knowledge of Adams's work; but the Met staging was a spectacle—bigger, grander, wilder than anything in the opera’s past two decades.  This fantastic production is John Adams as maximalist, not minimalist.  It was beautiful.  It was thrilling.  It was overwhelming.

After two and a half hours of driving rhythms, sonorous harmonies, color saturation, and joyful and sorrowful mysteries, the music began to slow; the Holy Innocents sang and brought the work to its conclusion; and the whole crowd leapt to its feet in thunderous applause.

We had shared an experience together; our hearts had been beating as one; we were hearing and seeing the same things.  We’d become a community on an adventure—entering into Mary’s story, the story of Jesus, God’s own story of breaking through again into God’s beloved Creation.

We’d shared an experience. We’d become a community.  We went away, into the night, talking about the spectacle we’d been a part of—the wonder we had witnessed.  We went away talking about it.

Friends, that feeling of a shared experience—of becoming a community together—is something like what the Apostles experienced.  Forty days after Jesus’s resurrection, Jesus’s apostles had seen him ascend, and they’d returned home, with no little trepidation, to the room where they were staying in Jerusalem, and they prayed.  And on this day, as Jesus promised, fifty days after Passover, Jewish people from all over had gathered in Jerusalem for the Festival of Weeks, Shavuot.  And in that place, in that city, in that moment, the Holy Spirit swept through town—and they had a shared experience—a common adventure.  The apostles spoke, Peter preached, and everyone, no matter where they were from, understood what they were saying—they understood the urgency of Peter’s preaching, the words he was saying, the truth he was telling—the truth that God had come in the person of Jesus Christ, and that Jesus was risen from the dead.

In that moment, in that shared experience, the community expanded from that band of twelve to so many more of those that heard the story in Jerusalem.  The listeners asked Peter what to do, and he replied, repent and be baptized.  And three thousand people were baptized and added to the community of followers of Jesus on that day.

A shared experience.  An expanded community.

And a shift—a shift in the narrative.  Consider this:

Fifty days after Passover, Pentecost, is the Festival of Weeks, or Shavuot.  If Passover is the celebration of the deliverance of the Israelites out of bondage in Egypt, then Shavout marks not only the wheat harvest but also the giving of the Torah, the law, to Moses at Mount Sinai.  There’s a shift at Shavuot.  God has done something.  At Passover in Egypt, God has done the delivering.  But at Sinai, God has invited the Israelites to do something--to join in relationship with God, through the gift of the Law.  The Torah is God’s gift, God’s revelation to Israel, a description of what relationship with God looks like.  And it invites a response--a relationship in return--a relationship with God.

There’s a turn, a shift, from Easter to Pentecost, as well.  If Easter is about God’s triumph over death--about the empty tomb, about life conquering death, about the incarnate Son of God dying and rising and ascending to sit at the right hand of God--to fill the whole world--then Pentecost is about our response to that news, that knowledge, that great gift of resurrection, of life, of hope.  Before Pentecost, Jesus is the primary storyteller.  He invites his followers into relationship.  He heals the sick and raises the dead--he shows them what the kingdom of God looks like--he shows us that the kingdom of God has come near. 

But after the ascension, in our passage in Acts--even after the resurrection, in our gospel passage from John--the Johannine timeline is a little different--Jesus sends the Holy Spirit to be with his followers.  And things change.  Instead of Jesus doing the talking, suddenly his followers--his disciples--his apostles--start talking about Jesus as a revelation of God--as the messiah, the anointed one.

At Passover the community, the followers of Jesus, are empowered by the Holy Spirit to take up the testimony—to tell the story themselves, by the power of the Holy Spirit.  God is speaking through them.  And God is speaking through us.

And what is it that God is saying? What is it that God is speaking, through the Holy Spirit, through Peter, through the gathered community, through you and through me?  God is speaking Hope.

All creation is groaning, Paul says, to hear that word of hope.  To hear that life triumphs over death, that love is stronger than hate, that the ruler of this world has been judged and found wanting, as Jesus points out in John’s gospel today.  All of creation is groaning to hear that Jesus is raised—and that he has ascended to fill all things. 

And it is now the job of this gathered body, this Body of Christ, through the power of the Holy Spirit, to tell that story.

 In fact, Andrew McGowan suggests, it is exactly the behavior of that gathered community that the world is judged against.  Because we know Christ’s resurrection, because we have known him, because we know that the Holy Spirit, the advocate, has judged the ruler of this world and found him wrong, we know what the kingdom of God looks like—and we can live, together, in that new life of resurrection.

            Folks, the world should be able to look at the Church and discern something different—something of the kingdom of God—in the way that we live, the way that we love, the way that we treat one another and all of Creation.  The world is groaning to see that hope.

 We are sharing an experience together; we are in the auditorium, in the arena, in the world itself together. We have known Jesus, and now it’s time to tell the world about Jesus’s resurrection, with our words—and with our deeds.

Come to the altar today to be filled up with the presence of Christ.

 Remember you are sealed by the Holy Spirit in your baptism and marked as Christ’s own forever.

 And empowered by the Holy Spirit, go out into the world to share the story of that love—but also dare to live differently, collectively, together.

We are that crowd gathered in Jerusalem. We are the baptized.  We have received the Holy Spirit.  Empowered, comforted, assured, supported, and convicted by that same Holy Spirit, let’s go out and tell the world.

In the Between Times

From the Acts of the Apostles:  “Then they prayed and said, ‘Lord, you know everyone’s heart.’”

In the name of the Father, and of the Son, and of the Holy Ghost.

I got to spend a lot of time in airports this week.  In my experience, going through an airport is a perfect example of the phenomenon of “hurry up and wait.”  No matter how early I arrive, I have this unconquerable urge to get through security as fast as I possibly can, and then, on the other side… the waiting begins.  I don’t know about you, but again, no matter how much time I have in the airport, I get anxious about straying too far from my departure gate—what if I don’t get back in time?  I always feel like I ought to do something, even if I can’t quite figure out what that something is. 

Waiting at an airport can feel like a liminal time, an in-between time—after the frantic rush of packing and getting to the airport and making it through security, but before the actual event—getting on the plane.  And everyone who has flown enough in their lives probably has a story about how that wait can grow longer and longer as the scheduled departure time passes and delays make the in-between time not only longer but open-ended, indeterminate. 

Waiting can be hard—even in, maybe especially in, those in-between times.  Especially when our emotions are heightened, when we’re not really sure what’s coming, waiting, the in-between time, can be fraught with anxieties.

Think about the time between, say, the end of finals and graduation—the excitement of an accomplishment coupled with excitement—and maybe trepidation—about what comes next.

Or the hard waiting, the blend of fear and hope, that comes between learning about a serious diagnosis and waiting for treatment to begin.

Or the long in-between time we collectively waited through during the pandemic, as rumors gave way to news stories, as lockdowns stretched through weeks and months…

It’s in one of those in-between times of enforced waiting—the anxious time of knowing something will happen, but not knowing exactly what, not knowing exactly when—that the apostles find themselves in in our story from Acts this morning.

Our Lord has ascended into heaven—a glorious event, certainly—Jesus returning to the Father, assuming his throne of glory in heaven, taking with him our human nature in its resurrected form—the joining of earth to heaven complementing and completing the joining of heaven to earth accomplished in the Incarnation. 

 A glorious event, but surely for the apostles a little bit troubling, a little bit anxiety-provoking—after all the drama, the whiplash, of the Triumphal Entry into Jerusalem on Palm Sunday, the inexorable slide into the tragedy of the Crucifixion, the bewildered joy of Eater Day and the strangeness of Christ’s appearance in the Resurrected Body—after all that, their Lord and Teacher, their Rabbi and Friend, is gone again, at least physically, and they are left to ask themselves, “Now what?”

On one level, they know the answer to this question.  Now what?  Now go out and share the Good News of the Kingdom of God, making disciples of all nations and baptizing in the name of the Father, and of the Son, and of the Holy Spirit.  They’ve been given their marching orders.  Jesus has promised to send them a Comforter, an Advocate—the gift of the Holy Spirit… but they don’t know yet when this will happen, or how. 

In these few days between the Ascension and the coming of the Holy Spirit at Pentecost, the apostles have, it would seem, been left to their own devices.

And in that anxiety of waiting, in that space of “Now what?” Peter does the best he can—he finds something to do.  “In those days,” Luke tells us in the book of Acts, “Peter stood up among the believers (together the crowd numbered about one hundred twenty persons).”  Peter gathers together the entire believing community, the entire church—in a time and place where virtually all of the followers of Jesus could fit in a room about the size of this one.  It’s a good reminder that already the Church, the Body of Christ, was so much more than that band of 12 disciples. 

And like any good manager calling a meeting, Peter has a plan—he wants to replace Judas, the disciple who had betrayed Jesus, so that the number of apostles will be twelve again. Twelve isn’t a magic number—in a community of 120 there’s no intrinsic reason to have 12 apostles—but it’s a number with deep symbolic resonance—12 tribes of Israel.

This strikes me as a deeply human solution—in the midst of uncertainty and change, stick to what you know—do what you can to put things back as they were.  Peter doesn’t know yet how, just a few days later, how God will again defy and explode all expectations as the Holy Spirit descends upon the community at Pentecost—for now, it seems that replacing Judas is the best way to go.

Peter asks for someone who has been with Jesus and the other disciples all along, throughout their years together—“beginning from the baptism of John,” Peter says, “until the day when Jesus was taken up from us—one of these must become a witness with us to his resurrection.”  Two candidates are put forward, Justus and Matthias.  And the community prays together:  “Lord, you know everyone’s heart.  Show us which one of these two you have chosen…”. Lord, you know everyone’s heart.

And then they cast lots. There are no speeches or debates, there’s no review of resumés or questionnaires, there’s no vote.  They elect Matthias, essentially, by flipping a coin.

Can you imagine what it would be like to choose our leaders like that? 

It may seem like folly—but think about the deep trust this community has, the deep faith they have that God will raise up the leader they need, that God will make sure that the leader—and by extension, the whole community—is equipped for the ministries they are all called to—and the faith that God will show them, will communicate with them, about how they are to proceed.

We don’t know anything, really, about Justus and Matthias.  If the pattern holds, they are, like the other apostles, faithful followers of Jesus, faithful—but ordinary.  They’re called by virtue of what they have seen, what they’ve experienced—what they knew about Jesus from their own journeys with him.

This is why I think this story isn’t really about who wins or loses an election for a position as a new apostle.  This story isn’t really about Justus or Matthias—neither of whom, by the way, we hear about after this!  This story is about trust—about how, even in times of uncertainty or anxiety, even in the times of waiting, we can trust that God will be right there with us.

Just like Justus or Matthias, we can trust God to equip us—to take us for who and where we are, to put us where we need to be to advance the God’s Kingdom—to empower us to share God’s love with our families and friends and neighbors—to care for one another and for the needy, the hungry, the vulnerable, the mourning, the anxious among us.  And just like Justus and Matthias, we are qualified for this not because of our accomplishments or our achievements but because of our own encounters with Jesus, the experiences we have of receiving God’s love, of knowing God’s forgiveness—because, like Justus and Matthias, we are witnesses of Christ’s resurrection.

Just like those early apostles gathered together, we are, you and I, all of us, still in an in-between time—between the already of God’s Kingdom breaking into this world and the not yet of the New Heaven and New Earth when we and all of creation will be given fulfillment and consummation.  It can certainly feel like we live in uncertain times—you probably don’t me to tell you that—and our individual and corporate lives may be marked by anxious waiting in any number of ways.  May we cling fast to what we know, to what we have known:  the abundant love of God, the gift of new life in Jesus Christ, the good news—the hope of everlasting life—that we are called to bear witness to in an anxious, waiting world. 

What is to prevent us?

From the Acts of the Apostles:  The eunuch said, “Look, here is water! What is to prevent me from being baptized?”

In the name of the Father, and of the Son, and of the Holy Ghost.

I have a confession to make. 

I can, sometimes, be a bit of a procrastinator.

There are just so many great things to do—so many great books to read, or music to listen to, or museum shows to see, or movies to watch—and then there are so many things that just have to get done—clothes that need to be washed, rooms that need to be tidied up, sermons that need to be written… I have to confess that sometimes I just put all of it off, thinking I’ll get things done sooner or later, somehow…. Which, it turns out, is not always the best approach.

And so it’s with no small amount of admiration that I hear this story of Philip and the Ethiopian eunuch from the book of Acts today.  If there are any patron saints for procrastinators, I think it must be Philip and this unnamed eunuch—they waste no time.

When an angel of Lord appears to Philip and says, “Get up and go”—“get up and go toward the south to the road that goes down to Gaza”—Philip doesn’t ask any questions; he doesn’t await further instruction or seek clarity about what he’s been told to do, or why.  He very simply “got up and went,” Luke tells us. 

We learn that the road Philip is sent to is a wilderness road, a desert road.  This byway through a treacherous and empty land may remind you of other desert moments—Moses meeting God in the desert of Sinai; Christ being tempted by Satan in the desert.  We are outside of the safe confines of the city and town, alone and vulnerable to the elements—we are far from the centers of learning and worship—a liminal space—but nevertheless a space where God brings together these two figures.

The meeting is most unexpected. 

We don’t know much about Philip, but we know he was appointed as one of the seven deacons in the Church in Jerusalem, part of the group made sure that food was distributed fairly to widows and others in need of it.  Presumably he was, like so many of the earliest followers of Jesus, a fairly ordinary person—a more or less devout Jew, trying to make a life for himself in an economically challenged, socially complex, and politically troubled part of the Roman Empire.

We also don’t know much about the Ethiopian eunuch—we don’t even know his name—but we know enough to see how unlikely and how surprising this chance meeting really is.  The eunuch is anything but ordinary.  He’s an official in the royal court of Ethiopia, the steward of the queen’s treasury.  He’s cosmopolitan, privileged, able to travel all the way from Ethiopia to Jerusalem in order to worship at the Temple.  He probably isn’t Jewish himself—as a eunuch and a foreigner he would already doubly marginalized from what might have been ordinarily accepted within the Jewish community—and yet he was worshipping in Jerusalem, perhaps as a so-called “god-fearer,” a Gentile who sought to worship the God of Israel even as an outsider.  As the head of the royal treasury he’s probably educated and likely speaks at least two or three languages—his native Ethiopic and Greek, at least, and perhaps some Aramaic.

When Philip—modest, ordinary Philip—sees this magnificent foreign official, a leader in a wealthy foreign government, mounted in a chariot, on the wilderness road, the Holy Spirit again gives him instruction—“Go over to this chariot and join it.”  Philip, again, wastes no time.  He runs, not walks, up to the chariot, and hears the eunuch reading from the prophet Isaiah.  (It’s an interesting little detail that the eunuch is reading aloud.  It was the common practice in the ancient world to read aloud; there’s a famous moment in Augustine’s Confessions, a few centuries after this, when Augustine is amazed when he sees St. Ambrose reading silently!  But this detail also tells us that the Ethiopian official is reading probably not in his first language but in a language Philip can understand.)

Philip joins the Ethiopian official in his chariot and they begin to go through this biblical text together.  The passage they’re reading from Isaiah is one that we hear on Good Friday—“Like a sheep he was led to the slaughter, and like a lamb silent before its shearer, so he does not open his mouth.”  It’s from a poem that Christians have read, from the very earliest days of the church, as prefiguring Jesus Christ as the servant whose suffering redeems God’s people.  But the official doesn’t know this yet!  He has to ask Philip, “Who is this prophet talking about?  Himself or someone else?”

Maybe he’s heard about this Jesus, this itinerant rabbi who was crucified, the same one whom some people have been saying was raised from the dead.  Maybe he’d heard about those events—and maybe he hadn’t.  He clearly has a yearning to encounter God, to worship and follow God, to know God—he’s been on essentially a long pilgrimage, and now on his way back he’s still poring over the scriptures.  But it’s not until Philip shows up that he can start to put it all together.  It’s not until he’s alongside Philip, the two of them seeking God together, that he begins to encounter the Good News of the risen Lord.

And when Philip proclaims this risen Lord to the official, the response is, again, immediate. “Look, here is water!  What is to prevent me from being baptized?”  You’ve told me about Jesus, you’ve told me about the resurrected Christ and how these events promise to bring salvation and restoration to Israel and to the whole of creation—what’s to stop me, here and now, from signing up, from joining the body of Christ, from having my sins washed away?  What’s to prevent me?

Philip probably could have found some reasons, some things that would prevent him from baptizing this man. Philip could have said, “Oh, but you’re a Gentile” (it wasn’t clear quite yet that Gentiles were welcome).  Philip could have said, “Oh, but you’re a eunuch”—a status that, scripturally, could have kept him from converting.  But Philip doesn’t think twice—they go down to the water and Philip baptizes him.  The Ethiopian eunuch becomes a member of the body of Christ—the one who asked to be included in included—even before the fledgling church back in Jerusalem has had a chance to work out its rules and regulations, its creeds and formularies, before it’s even started to argue about who can be in and who must be out.

 Philip and the Ethiopian official don’t waste any time.  “Get up and go,” the angel says.  And “What is to prevent me from being baptized?” the eunuch asks.

Where are we in this story?  Where do you imagine yourself?  Perhaps you’re like Philip, trying to go where God is calling you to go—but not quite sure what will happen when you get there.  Perhaps you’re like the Ethiopian official, yearning to meet God, seeking God as best you know how.  Maybe you are on a wilderness road, not sure where it is leading. 

The good news, friends, is that wherever we find ourselves in this story, God is there to meet us—God has a purpose for us.  Even on that wilderness road, God offers the eunuch the grace of holy baptism.  Even when we imagine ourselves to be unreachable, not good enough, not worthy of God’s embrace—and even when our human institutions might tell us that we aren’t deserving of God’s love—even then, there is God, the crucified and risen Lord, whose saving love for us invites us even from the wilderness road.

And even on that wilderness road, God gives Philip the chance to share the story—to share the good news of Jesus Christ and the creative, forgiving, healing love that is stronger than death.  Even in an unexpected place, with an unexpected person, Philip can share that story. And he does it without hesitating, without second-guessing himself, without worrying about how he’ll be perceived.

Friends, this is evangelism—receiving that good news for what it is, which is nothing more or less than the gift of new and abundant life in Jesus Christ—and sharing that good news with those whom God has put in our paths.  Evangelism might be an uncomfortable word for some of us—but it’s what we’re called to—each in our own way.  As followers of Jesus Christ we are all called to share the good news—in our words, in our actions, in the joy and hope with which we greet the world, and—yes, in telling the story of God’s magnificent love for us and for creation—the love that became incarnate and laid down its life for us.  May we, like Philip, hear God’s invitation—“Get up and go,”—and may we, like the Ethiopian eunuch, ask, “What’s to prevent me?”

Ospreys and Easter

The Rev’d Stephen C. Holton
Christ Church, New Haven, Conn.
Easter Day
March 31, 2024

In the name of God: Father, Son, & Holy Spirit. Amen.

Yesterday dozens of folks were gathered all day long to prepare the church for our Easter celebrations.  The Flower Guild, the Altar Guild, the Linen Guild, the Acolyte Guild, the Guild of Ushers, the Guild of Intercessors, the Guild of Saint Clare, the choir, the musicians, and yes, the clergy, have all been preparing for this joyful celebration!

The earth itself is preparing for new life, for resurrection.  Bulbs are springing up in the garden.  Seeds that were planted are sprouting.  Trees are bursting with buds and fresh foliage.  Even the squirrels have come out of their dens to play in the spring sunlight.  Some of them even beat the children of the parish to the eggs that were hidden in the garden yesterday.  Who knew that squirrels liked Reese’s Peanut Butter Cups?  Turns out they do, and they’re willing to chew through a plastic egg to get to that tasty treat, as well.

I saw a sign outside a shop downtown this week that asked, “Are you ready for Easter?  We can help!  Come inside for Easter savings.”  Everything points towards today, it would seem!  Everything is preparing!

And so have you, I’d venture to guess!  Perhaps you’ve bought a new Easter outfit or prepared a feast to share with loved ones and family.  Maybe you’ve made a reservation for Easter brunch, or sent a card to someone you care about.  At least one of you has baked a bunny cake—I know because I’ve seen the pictures.  Congratulations and well done; I am envious of your culinary talents. 

And so many of you have set aside time for prayer—have taken time to come to the hours and hours of rounds of prayer of the Triduum—those days of preparation as we’ve walked together the way of the Cross with our Lord.

We sat with Jesus and his friends at supper as he washed their feet—and had ours washed too.  We heard again his assurances, “This is my Body, for you.”  “This is my blood.”  We walked with him to the foot of the cross, heard his last breath, and his cry to God, “Why have you forsaken me?” 

We went with Joseph of Arimathea to the tomb and saw his lifeless body laid there, and a stone rolled over the entrance.  We heard in readings and prayers that even in death Jesus was saving—raising souls from Hades into new and eternal life in God.

And today, this morning, we have come with Mary Magdalene to the tomb.  We’ve found the stone rolled away and the tomb empty.  With Peter and John, we’ve peered into the tomb.  We’ve seen the burial cloths lying there, and the cloth covering his face rolled up and put away to the side.  We know his body is not there.

John & Peter go home.  But Mary stays there by the tomb, in the garden.

Why does Mary stay?  She already knows the tomb is empty.  She already knows Jesus’s body is gone.  Indeed, we hear her say it, “They have taken away my Lord, and I do not know where they have laid him.”  Why doesn’t she just go home, like John and Peter?  Why does she stay?  Is she paralyzed in her grief, so stricken that, in the midst of her tears she cannot think of what to do next?  In the midst of her despair, she keeps looking, keeps expecting, keeps longing… And so she turns to the gardener and demands, more insistently this time, “If you have carried him away, tell me where you have laid him, aand I will take him away.”

And Jesus calls her name:  “Mary!” and she recognizes him.  And everything changes.

I love this image of Mary in the garden with Jesus.  I prefer it sanitized and beautiful, more like the Pre Raphaelite picture in the south trancept window in Kempe’s glass—the image of Mary, turning towards Jesus, his hand stretched out to her. 

I like the idea of Mary there amongst flowers, in the cool of the morning, in the freshness of the crisp air, maybe a little humidity hanging on from the night.  I like thinking of bulbs and seeds springing up around her.  She could be in the garden right here at Christ Church as it comes back to life.

There’s no dirt grinding into her garments as she kneels on the ground.  There’s no pressure or pain in her knee as she leans towards Jesus.  There’s a fragrance in the air, not unlike the fragrance of our Angelus incense we just used at the gospel a few moments ago.  That’s what the garden smells like in my imagination.

Wouldn’t that be a lovely scene.  Isn’t that beautiful.  Mary meeting Jesus, knowing he’s alive, risen, there in the garden with her.

And that, friends, is exactly what it is—a scene, an imagination, a little bit of chemistry in my brain cooked up by some beautiful stained glass, some fragrant smoke, and some gorgeous springtime memories.   That’s a nice view of the garden, of Mary’s time there, in retrospect, from a fine historical distance of two millennia.  But that’s not at all what’s happening to Mary, or to us.

That’s the image I want to live in, that I’d like to tell you about this morning.  But it’s not truth.  Not the whole truth. 

There’s another image I wanted to tell you about, one my friend posted on social media about a week ago—an image of springtime, an image of new life about to burst forth.

Do you know the osprey? That strange, awkward looking, powerful bird that inhabits our coastline?  The one that builds the big nests of sticks and comes back year after year, wintering as far south as the Amazon, and flying all the way back to the Long Island shore to sit its nest and hatch its eggs?  My friend has an ongoing relationship with this osprey couple in Milford.  He spends lots of time out in the marsh in his kayak, in the river fishing, and in the harbor and in the sound in his sailboat.  And he notices when the ospreys come back.

And there they were.  In all their strange wonderfulness.  In their constant faithfulness.  Back at their nest, getting ready to lay eggs and hatch some newborns.

The ospreys, like the eagles, are wonderful images of new life, of hope.  Remember when just fifty years ago their numbers had plummeted because of toxic pesticides?  The insecticide DDT made their eggshells too soft and they cracked as the mothers were sitting their nests, destroying the embryos and leading to plummeting birth rates—and a real danger of extinction.  Turns out DDT was fantastic for killing the mosquitos that were vectors for typhus and malaria—but terrible for these birds.  Unintended consequences—the perils and dangers of our complex world.

But thanks to a ban in the 70’s, finally birth rates are up again for these marvelous apex predators, and I’ve seen eagles and ospreys and all kinds of birds thriving that I was afraid we might lose.

I wanted to preach about this osprey couple as a sign of new life.  And they are. 

But they aren’t a sign of resurrection. 

The story of the osprey, like the story of spring breaking out, of seeds sprouting, of new life, is a wonderful story of hope.  If you’ve had seasonal affective depression this past winter, go out and look at the new growth.  See if you can spot some ospreys out at the Sound.  This stuff is just full of hope and joy and new life!

But that’s the wonder and beauty of creation. It points towards the creator, but it is not the thing itself!

Resurrection is something entirely different.  Entirely other.  It’s not a process of re-emergence, of springing forth, of new life.  It is not a product of or participant in the created order.  In fact, it stands the created order on its head! 

Why does Mary stay?  Why does she stay there at the tomb?

Is it perhaps that, even in her grief, she hasn’t given up hope? 

Is it perhaps that, even through her tears, she is looking for more? Looking for something that the world cannot promise or produce or provide?  Hope beyond hope?  Life beyond death? Love that cannot be stopped!

For in that moment, when Jesus calls her name, the world is indeed turned upside down—and she immediately recognizes that Jesus is alive! That he is there with her!  That he is calling to her!

Resurrection, friends, is not springtime, though we’re lucky in the northern hemisphere to enjoy that springtime coincides with this resurrection story.  It surely does help to remind us, to show us, what God is up to.

But resurrection is so much more.

Resurrection is what Mary is looking for, what she’s hoping and longing for, what she finds in that moment:  Mary! Jesus calls out.

Resurrection is the sure and certain knowledge, the prima facie evidence, the proof positive that no matter how dark things are, that no matter how desparate the world seems, that no matter the death and destruction that surrounds us, that God will not be stopped.  That life will not be ended.  That death cannot prevail.  That love is the ultimate truth.

What is truth?  Pilate asks.  As Fr Jett pointed out on Good Friday, Pilate has given up.  Is he cynical?  Is he too tired?  Is he overwhelmed?  What is truth, he asks?

And Jesus answers and shows it to Mary:  for this is truth.  That God loves us – you and me and all of creation – Judas and the thieves beside the cross and the soldiers and John and Peter and Mary and you and me –God loves us all so much that God will not be stopped in that love.  That God will not let go.  That death has no power over us.  That love has the final word.

Friends, I don’t know what John and Peter were thinking as they left the tomb.  Did they leave knowing that Jesus was alive?  Or were they perplexed?  Or just too tired to make sense of it all?  The gospel doesn’t tell us.  But it spends considerable ink on Mary’s journey.

She stays there at the tomb.  She looks in, but she doesn’t give up.  She keeps searching.  And Jesus meets her there, in the rocky ground of that burial garden, and calls out to her: Mary!

And what does he tell her to do?  To go and tell the others.

And she does.

And so now John and Peter and all the rest, and hundreds and thousands and billions more, over the course of a hundred thousand Sundays of resurrection, over these two millennia, all those folks know the truth:  that Jesus lives, that death is conquered, that life in the love of God is real. And eternal. And for you and for me.

That’s the truth.  And we know it because Mary told us so.  Because she saw it first.  And she shared.

There is so much hope to be had—hope in spades.  The return of spring, the resurgence of the ospreys, the hope I feel spending time with you in this space, in this moment, in this mass—all of that hope points to the truth.  The truth that Mary was waiting for.  The truth that you and I are longing for.

Can you believe Jesus?  Can you believe Mary?  She’s seen it first hand and she’s telling you.

Jesus is alive.  And he is calling to you!

Alleuia.  Christ is risen! The Lord is risen indeed. Alleluia.

The Shock of Resurrection

Alleluia, Christ is risen!  The Lord is risen indeed!  Alleluia!

There’s always a moment during Holy Week or Easter Vigil when I start to wonder whether we’re really going to get to the end—where I start to feel like the somberness of Good Friday or the quiet darkness of the Vigil we gathered for this evening will actually be the whole event.  Of course, rationally, I know that Easter is coming, I know that we will joyfully proclaim the Lord’s resurrection with all the attendant fanfare—but somehow as it draws close it feels like it might not happen.  And so there’s always a kind of surprise for me when the lights all come up and the Great Noise is played on the organ—there’s a feeling of newness and freshness as the first Mass of Easter proceeds in all this brightness and cheer.

I wonder if you ever feel something like that as we journey through Lent and Holy Week together—if, during those 40 days, it’s ever hard to see to the other side of the Cross to the Empty Tomb.  I think this uncertainty is a good thing—not only because it intensifies the joys of this new season and the new life of the risen Lord that we celebrate tonight—but because it puts in touch with the reality of how surprising—how absolutely mind-blowing—the resurrection is.

We gathered for our vigil tonight under the cover of darkness—just as the disciples huddled together in that upper room in the night after Christ’s death.  The disciples were mourning.  They were in shock.  They were afraid.  They had been following their beloved teacher for three years and things seemed so promising—how could their time together come to such a quick and violent end?  The disciples were faithful followers of Christ, but they didn’t understand what was happening.  They didn’t know if they were going to be okay, or if anything was ever going to be okay again.  They didn’t understand quite yet that Christ’s resurrection was just around the corner.

We gather for our vigil tonight under the cover of darkness—just as the ancient Israelites did on the night of that first Passover in Egypt, as they huddled around their dinner tables, eating hastily the lambs they had prepared, their sandals on and their loins girded—ready to flee at any moment—as the angel of death passed over their houses.  They were God’s chosen people—and they were faithful—they prepared their feasts as Moses had told them to do, and marked their doors with lamb’s blood as instructed.  But think of the fear, think of the anxiety they must have felt—they didn’t know, after all they had been through, if this would really be the night they would gain their freedom, if this would really be the night that pharaoh would finally let them go—and they couldn’t be sure that they’d be safe from all the terror going on around them.  But God kept them safe; God brought them into freedom.

When Mary Magdalene and Mary, the mother of James, and Salome return to Jesus’s tomb on the first day, they’re not expecting what they find.  Like the disciples still gathered in that upper room in Jerusalem they are in shock, in deep and acute mourning.  They’re expecting to have trouble getting into the tomb, that they’ll need some help rolling away the stone at the entrance.  When they find the stone already rolled away, they see a young man inside, and Mark tells us that the women “were alarmed.”  Even when the young man tells them that they needn’t be alarmed, that Jesus “has been raised,” that Jesus is not there at the tomb but will be waiting for them in Galilee—the women aren’t able to process it.  The women “went out and fled from the tomb, for terror and amazement had seized them; and they said nothing to anyone, for they were afraid.”

 For they were afraid!  Can you imagine?  These three women are the first witnesses to this most amazing moment—Jesus’s rising to life again on the third day, the resurrection which brings all of us into new life, the resurrection which offers restoration and healing and hope to a fallen world, the resurrection that defeats death and offers us a share in the eternal life of God’s heavenly kingdom—and they’re afraid!

That’s how radical, how unexpected, how beyond human comprehension this event is. 

It makes me feel a little better about my own moments of doubt, my own fears and anxieties.  Even Mary Magdalene, Mary the mother of James, and Salome—these three women who were the first to testify to the resurrected Lord, the apostles to the apostles—even they feared and doubted; even they were, at first, speechless.

But God is faithful.

Friends, I wonder if we can let ourselves be shocked by resurrection, just as these three women were.  I wonder if faith asks us to greet the risen Christ not only with the joy and jubilation of this magnificent celebration of Easter, but with our whole selves—with all the questions and doubts and fears and anxieties that we carry, just as the disciples did, just as the people of ancient Israel did.  I wonder if, in a way, that’s the whole point—that we can bring our vulnerabilities to God because we can trust God to handle them—we can trust God to be with us, we can trust God to free us from our burdens, we can trust God to be with us even at the gate of death, we can trust God to lead us into new life—God is faithful.

“If we have been united with Christ in a death like his,” Paul writes to the Romans, “we will certainly be united with him in a resurrection like his.”  When we join with Christ in the way of the Cross—when we, with Jesus, face those darkest moments—God, the faithful God who brought Israel out of bondage in Egypt, the faithful God whose Son rose to new life on the third day—that same faithful God will raise us also into the newness of life. 

Alleluia, Christ is risen!  The Lord is risen indeed!  Alleluia!

Palm Sunday: How Quickly Things Change

In the name of the Father, and of the Son, and of the Holy Ghost.

How quickly things change.

In our first reading this morning, Jesus rides towards Jerusalem to the sound of the crowd’s acclamations—“Blessed is the one who comes in the name of the Lord!  Blessed is the coming kingdom of our ancestor David!”  This so-called “triumphal entry” takes the features of a grand imperial procession and turns them on their head—in place of a magnificent steed, Jesus rides a colt; the crowds are not the privileged citizens ensconced at the centers of power, but villagers and laborers eking out a living on the edges of empire. Though today we carry palms, used in the ancient world to herald kings and conquerors, in Mark’s account the bystanders spread onto the road branches they’ve cut from their fields—while some lay down their cloaks—surely, for some, their only cloaks—on the road.

The kingdom whose coming the crowds are proclaiming—“the coming of our ancestor David”—is at once very old, promised by God centuries before, and very new—a kingdom organized not around military might or commercial profit—not even organized around laws and rules and regulations—but a kingdom that emerges from God’s love for humankind and of all creation, of God’s promise, from the prophet Ezekiel, to dwell with us and walk among us.

But how quickly things change.

As we hear Mark’s account of our Lord’s Passion—just a few days after his triumphal entry—we see this kingdom mocked and derided, dressed up in cruel parody.  “And they clothed him in a purple cloak,” Mark tells us, “and after twisting some thorns into a crown, they put it on him.”  In place of royal palms, “They struck his head with a reed.”  The crowd’s acclamations are replaced by the soldiers’ spitting; the heartfelt praise of “Hosanna in the highest heaven” is replaced by the soldiers’ kneeling in false homage.

Within just a few days in Jerusalem, within just a few minutes of our time together this morning, our joyous and triumphal recognition of God’s presence among us gives way to human cruelty, to human sinfulness—to our tendency to reject God’s love and twist it into something false.

What the soldiers mocking Jesus don’t realize, though, is that it is precisely in these moments—in these moments of degradation and suffering, in the indignity of torture and the pain of crucifixion—that God’s kingdom draws nearer and nearer—as God joins humankind most fully.  In his suffering and death, Jesus, the Son of God, passes through the darkest reaches of our human experience.  And in doing so, he shows us that God is always with us, that there is no place God’s love cannot reach, that there is no experience of suffering we can have that is beyond God’s power to reach us, to heal us, to bring us into new life.

Because for God is to dwell with us and walk among us, to truly take on our human nature, means that God can hurt with us, weep with us, mourn with us—and die with us.

Perhaps citing one of the earliest hymns of the followers of Jesus, St. Paul writes in the letter to the Philippians that Jesus “humbled himself, and became obedient the point of death—even death on a cross.”  It’s in this perfect self-emptying, this perfect humility and obedience, that Jesus fulfills God’s desire to be with humankind—to walk among us and to be in relationship with us no matter the cost.  And it’s through this suffering and death that Jesus will accomplish his victory over death itself—rising on the third day into a new life that will never end.

Friends, just as God in Christ walked among us, we are invited today and in the days to come to walk with Christ.  Over the course of this week we will gather in this place to remember Christ’s betrayal, death, and resurrection; the new commandment he gives us in the Last Supper, to love one another as he has loved us.  We will pray with him in the Garden and we will stand before the Cross the next morning.  We will gather, on Holy Saturday, under cover of darkness as a new fire is lit and the light of Christ is proclaimed again.  And, as we are always called to do, we will go out into the world to share the good news of a risen Lord—a Lord whose kingdom has drawn near even as we have mocked it; a Lord who has walked with us even through the valley of the shadow of death; a Lord who through death has driven away the sting of death.

In the name of the Father, and of the Son, and of the Holy Ghost.

Sir, We Would See Jesus

The Rev’d Stephen C. Holton
Christ Church, New Haven, Conn.
The Fifth Sunday in Lent
March 17, 2024

In the name of God: Father, Son, & Holy Spirit. Amen.

A few years ago I had the great privilege to make a pilgrimage with a group of colleagues to Canterbury Cathedral in Southeast England, the see of the bishops of Canterbury, the place where Gregory I sent Augustin of Canterbury to Christianize the English—really re-Christianize—the gospel wasn’t entirely new to them in the 5th Century.  It is the foundational location, the beacon light, of the English Church, just fifty miles from Calais by ferry or tunnel and a fast train ride to London.  It’s a pastoral part of England, beautiful countryside and farm land, pastures and gardens, and it was a joy to be there for Ash Wednesday—to read the psalms at Morning Prayer and to hear the choir sing the canticles at Evensong, to celebrate the Eucharist daily in the crypt, and, on Ash Wednesday, to receive ashes in that sacred place—to worship as the Church has for two millennia, in a place where people have prayed for over fourteen hundred years.  Justin Welby, whom we pray for each Sunday, is the Archbishop of that See, the 105th since Augustine.  Robert Willis was at the time the dean, the priest in charge of the Cathedral, the Rector of the Cathedral if you will.  Dean Willis had our group in for dinner one evening and then took us on a candlelight tour of the Cathedral, followed by drinks and coffee.  One thing that he really wanted to discuss with us was the mission of the Cathedral.  What is it for?  What goes on there? 

It seems like an easy enough question, doesn’t it?  What goes on at a church?  What goes on at Christ Church, for example?  We have a list of things in our bulletin today and an electronic newsletter that comes out each week.  We have a posted service schedule of Sunday and weekday services—every day except Saturday we pray in this place.  We have a website and a livestream that seek to invite people into the life of this Christian community.  The guilds and the staff work tirelessly to facilitate our offering of prayer and praise to God.  All of these things are going on every day, every week, here at Broadway and Elm. 

And then, like Canterbury, the doors are open, six days a week.  Folks come in and pray.  They come and visit.  They come and rest, or pray, or argue with God.  They light candles or read the prayer book or, sometimes, take a nap.  All of them are coming for something.  All looking for something. 

Robert Willis was asked, “What is the purpose of the Cathedral at Canterbury?  What do you do here?”  His response was brief, short, clear.  “What is the mission of Canterbury Cathedral?  What do you do here, Dean Willis?”  The dean’s response:  “We show people Jesus.”

That’s what we’re doing as the Church, friends.  We are being the Body of Christ.  We show people Jesus.  In a world where there is so much visual stimulation, where there is so much competing for our time and attention, where we can barely catch a breath much less manage to take an hour or two out of our busy lives even on a Sunday, what are we doing here?  Could it be that we are looking for Jesus?  Could it be that we are being invited to show people Jesus?  Can it be that we are invited to see Jesus ourselves?

It’s so tempting to think that the people of first Century Palestine somehow enjoyed simpler, less sophisticated lives than we do—they had so much more time for everything than we busy New Englanders.  I just don’t think that’s true at all.  Jesus’s world was one of sophisticated political power and control—the Romans governed the land using a puppet government of Jewish kings, the Herods, and tolerated the Jewish religion alongside the cult of the Emperor.  Everything was fine as long as the taxes got paid and the peace got kept.  People traveled and knew something of the world around them—witness these Greek speaking visitors that have shown up in Jerusalem.  Are they Jewish converts who have come to make ritual preparations, rites of purification and sacrifice, prior to the Passover?  Or are they Jewish people from out in the diaspora, the far flung community of folks outside Jerusalem?  Or are they god-fearers, gentiles interested in the God of Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob, Sarah, Rachel, Rebecca, and Leah—or are they just curious because they’ve heard the stories about this Jesus fellow—the crowd that greeted him with palm branches when he entered Jerusalem, the crowds that always seem to gather around him when he preaches, the promise of a new way of being in the world, a different set of values—something he talks about as the kingdom of God—and maybe they’ve even heard the fantastic stories of his friend Lazarus, who people said was dead but now is alive.  Maybe they’ve even heard the rumors that Jesus will be taken into custody by the governmental authorities.  The tension, the excitement around Jesus is so palpable—and so this Passover they’ve come to Jerusalem, and they seek out Jesus’s group of friends, they find Philip, and they say to him, “Sir, we wish to see Jesus.”  The Greek idein implies more than just seeing, gazing upon—they want to see Jesus, to perceive him, to come to know him.[1]  They want to get to know what it is that Jesus is about—what it is that Jesus is showing.  They are seeking Jesus.

And what does Jesus say to them? 

“Very truly, I tell you, unless a grain of wheat falls into the earth and dies, it remains just a single grain; but if it dies, it bears much fruit.  Those who love their life lose it, and those who hate their life in this world will keep it for eternal life.”  (Jn 12.24-25)  Part of what the Johannine writer is saying here is pointing us to the inevitable death of Jesus in just a few days on the cross.  These words of Jesus prefigure his own death, his own murder, his own crucifixion. 

But, if the Greeks made it to see him, and he is speaking to them in this discourse, and I think the implication is that he is speaking to them, then the words have some meaning for them as well beyond the predictive foreshadowing, the veiled prophecy.  The words have implication for the Greeks—and for us as well.

If we look carefully at the text the Greek word for “life”—the life we wish either to save or to lose--is psuché, or soul, or self—the thing that makes us a distinct person, our will, the way we live in the world.  And the Greek word for world, kosmo, implies the ordering of the universe—more than just the created natural order, it is the way we live in that order—the rules and systems we exist within.  And finally, the second usage of “life,” the “eternal life” that Jesus refers to, is the word “zóé”—a different word implying both physical and spiritual living.[2]  Jesus is not just being puzzling or difficult to understand; he is giving—and the Johannine writer is transmitting—particular nuance in this strange verse to the Greek visitors:  Something about Jesus’s answer to those Greeks tells us something about how we are to live as resurrected people.  “Those who love their life lose it, and those who hate their life in this world will keep it for eternal life.”  If we take some liberties with the English and try and flesh out the nuance of the Greek—after all, our visitors are Greek speakers, aren’t they!—I find myself convicted by what our Lord says to them. 

This is what I hear Jesus saying to those Greek visitors to Jerusalem: Be attentive!  I will die, and my death and resurrection will change the world.  But your life—the way you live your life every day, the way you order it, your will, your actions, your relationships—if you keep living the same way, will be as death to you.  But if your soul, your will, your way of being—if the way you participate in the systems of this existence changes because of me, you will have a whole new reality, a whole new spiritual life, a whole new physical reality.  The way you live is about to change.  The kingdom of God is here.

The Jews of the exile—the ones in Babylon and the ones that escaped to Egypt, like our Jeremiah, whom we’ve been reading in the daily Lenten devotionals, those folks longed for a new way of being in the world.  They longed for God’s promise to be fulfilled.  The covenant was broken, it seemed.  But God promised through Jeremiah the prophet a new covenant:  “I will put my law within them, and I will write it on their hearts; and I will be their God, and they shall be my people…they shall all know me, from the least of them to the greatest, says the LORD; for I will forgive their iniquity, and remember their sin no more.”  (Jeremiah 31:33b, 34b)    

God promises in Christ that we will know him, that we will know his kingdom in a different way.  That our wills, that our lives, by his grace, will be changed.  That there is a different reality than the chaos of the world that we know.  That we can see Jesus.

Jean Vanier[3], the late founder of the L’Arch communities, told a story of a friend who had completed his PhD and just gotten a promising job when he was diagnosed with a brain tumor.  The operation that saved his life also impacted his brain functioning; he was no longer able to read.  It took several years of anger and several years of processing this new way of being, but eventually his friend found that he had another gift—being with people—listening to them—and he became a counselor.  Vanier writes,  “Instead of books and ideas, he began to discover the beauty of people.  His life was transformed as he entered into a new life of openness to others.”[4] 

What needs to die in your life today?  What is holding you back from being the full creature that God in Christ intends?  What feels stuck, restrictive, separating you from God and one another?

To ask the question another way, what are you looking for today?  What are you longing for?  What are you seeking?  Are you willing to take a chance on a different life, a different will, a different set of priorities?  Are you willing to walk with Jesus in the shadow of the cross?  Are you willing to see Jesus?

Everything in the world will tell you how to live—what’s important—what matters.  But our Lord offers us something radically different—a different way of living, of being, of existing in the world, in relationship with one another, in covenant with God.   A life redeemed, restored, whole.  It looks different from the life that the systems of this world promise.  And it is beautiful.

Sir, we would see Jesus.

He is there, on the cross.

He is there, in the resurrection.

He is there, in his Holy Spirit.

He gives himself to you.

Give him your life.

Give him your love.

Give him your all.

Come and see Jesus.

Portions of this material were used in sermons at Grace Church in New York on March 22, 2015, and at Christ Church New Haven on March 21, 2021.

[1] Jean Vanier, Drawn Into the Mystery of Jesus Through the Gospel of John: Paulist Press, 2004, pp 210-212.

[2] Ibid 211.

[3] In quoting Vanier’s insights into theology and the message of the gospel of John, I also must acknowledge his problematic and damaging behavior as a person who abused pastoral relationships and sexually assaulted and otherwise caused damage to fellow Christians who walked alongside him in the mission and ministry of L’Arche. Kyrie eleison.

[4] Ibid 211-212.

Snakes and Salvation

The Rev’d Stephen C. Holton
Christ Church, New Haven, Conn.
The Fourth Sunday in Lent
March 10, 2024

In the name of God: Father, Son, & Holy Spirit. Amen.

The only thing the fictional explorer hero Indiana Jones and I have in common is fear of snakes. His comes from likely being in situations where the reptiles inhabit ancient ruins—tombs and the like—and hiss and seem ornery and give the impression that they’d like to bite. I also am not fond of things that bite—of things that can kill with just a bite—but my fear is a little less romantic, a little closer to home.

My mother remembers, as a child, enjoying scaring herself by opening up an illustrated reference book—a large dictionary of sorts, kept on a stand in her grandparents’ home, to the article about snakes, and looking at the drawings and color plates of the snakes. I guess it’s like the “jump scare” of watching a horror film. You know what’s coming, but it’s still fun to be scared in the moment.

And she grew up, as I did, in places where there were lots of snakes. In fact, at that same grandparents’ home, there were pecan trees whose ancient limbs overhung the tin roof of the dining room of the house. And inevitably at Sunday lunch in the summer, when it was hot, and the windows were open, and the meal was always always fried chicken—inevitably halfway through dinner there would be a loud THUD on the tin roof and then a BLUM BLUM BLUM BLUM as something fell out of the pecan boughs and then rolled its way down the steep pitch of the roof—that something being, of course, a diamondback rattlesnake!

Now, as an adult, I have to say I’ve never actually seen a rattlesnake in a tree. I suspect they stay close to the ground. I’m guessing that loud noise was a squirrel that had fallen asleep, or a green pecan itself that fell off the tree out of season, or any other sort of thing that might fall and roll… But the story of the snakes falling out of trees can’t be discounted simply because, sometimes, fiction is truer than fact… There were indeed rattlesnakes on that farm, and they were big and old and ornery. And they were indeed dangerous. It was wise to steer clear of them, and to be aware that they might be under a log, or in a corn row, or just underfoot. And, truth be told, it made an entertaining tale to tell to school friends on Monday mornings or to children in general. Like a horror film when we know what’s going to happen, the snakes are definitely coming to get you! It was a fun way to be afraid—a safe way to talk about risk and danger and to get a little adrenaline going.

I don’t know as anyone ever got bitten, and certainly no one died of a snake bite at that house.

But the desert, as some of the Australians and some of the Southwesterners in the parish can testify, is a much more dangerous place in terms of flora and fauna than the Southeast. Plants can sting you, and reptiles and arachnids can bite and kill you!

So I, along with those folks, have some respect for the snakes that make a cameo appearance in the first lesson today. In fact, I’m quite fond of them.

You see, those snakes are, for me, a measure of retribution. Of justice. Of enforcement. Those snakes are payback for bad, bad behavior on the part of God’s holy people.

Now, before you think I’m petty, let me remind you of what I wrote in this week’s Chronicle, our parish newsletter, about the antisocial behavior around campus this week.

On Friday as I was doing some gardening I watched someone throw a bag of trash out the window of his car—McDonald’s food wrappers and cups and the whole lot, just there on the pavement, with everyone and anyone watching. Picking up trash could consume a lifetime here at Broadway and Elm, but I digress.

And then later in the afternoon I went into the church to notice that someone had taken the welcome notebook—that same one at the back of the Elm Street aisle--where I ask newcomers to enter their contact information. And to add insult to injury, it was the second time the notebook had been stolen in as many weeks. I mean, I’m used to the pencil being taken, but the whole notebook? Really.

And then, as though there weren’t enough to bemoan, as I walked out of the church building through the Elm Street porch, I realized that yet another beloved child of God had uprooted and taken the lovely miniature boxwoods that the flower guild had planted outside the church doors. In their place they left a pile of matches, a hole, and a mess of scattered potting soil.

People are, quite simply, impossible. There's a never-ending stream of stories like this of bizarre, antisocial, and just annoyingly wicked behavior around the church.

And thus has it ever been so. In the reading this morning, God’s people have been delivered from slavery in Egypt and are on the way to the promised land. And yet they complain. There’s not enough to eat. There’s not what we want to eat. There was better food in Egypt, for goodness’ sake! They’re angry and complaining and acting out.

And what does God do?

God sends snakes to bite them! (Numbers 21:4-9)

I have to confess that I am somewhat delighted in this idea of retribution. You don't like that I saved you from slavery in Egypt? You don't like how I've cared for you? You're complaining again? Well here are some bitey snakes to show you how bad things could be! Or at least that's what I imagine a vengeful, petty sort of God Almighty thinking.

I'd have liked some snakes to fence the church doors today, to create some retribution, to share the annoyance and sting of theft, of degradation of our community space, and all the annoying things that grind at us each day.

But that's not actually how God leaves things. Of course the people complain again about the snake bites, and what does God do? God tells Moses to make a sculpture--an emblem of a snake on a staff. And if people will look at it, they'll be cured of their snakebites. And they'll live.

It would be easy to think of this snake-on-a-stick as a salvific emblem. A totem. A cure, even. I mean, isn't that how it's working?! And in fact God's beloved people do just that. When the reformer king Hezekiah comes along (2 Kings 18:4) he destroys the bronze serpent of Moses because the people have been making offerings to it, worshipping it as a god!

And herein lies our Lenten tale. The snake, the thing that might provide retribution, correction, punishment, or even deterrence, is a false idol. Sure, it might serve a purpose or make a point. Stop your complaining, you foolish people! But it also causes pain. And it doesn't really solve anything. And in the wrong hands--HUMAN hands--it can become an idol--a god that gets in our way of seeing the one who is really acting, the one who is merciful, the only one who can save.

When we place our trust in mechanisms of vengeance, of even what we sometimes call justice, things go quickly awry. What are our own bronze snakes? The law? Justice? SEC regulations? Immigration enforcement, border fences? Rules, mandates, requirements? It’s easy to confuse those things—even when they work—things of our own making—with the actions of God. To forget what God has done for us—and is doing. To forget whose we are.

The mistake God's people in the wilderness make is in thinking the emblem is what heals them. It's just God. It's always only God. It's not us. It's not our policies or laws or best efforts or trying or anything else but God. God's mercy. God's love.

And so we hear in our gospel message this week that "just as Moses lifted up the serpent in the wilderness, so must the Son of Man be lifted up, that whoever believes in him may have eternal life." (John 3:14) In looking upon Jesus, raised up on the cross, we learn how God loves us--sacrificially, completely, without bounds. And in looking to Jesus we learn how we too can love. Not with retribution, or judgment, or vengeance, but just with love. Only with love. That's how God saves us--through love.

The media personality Ira Glass replayed on his radio show this week an episode from the mid two thousands about the Pentecostal minister and bishop Carleton Pearson. Pearson led a thriving evangelical, Pentecostal, interracial Christian community in Tulsa, Oklahoma, for years. Oral Roberts was his mentor. Over five thousand people attended each Sunday. Offerings were around $100,000 each week. Pearson preached of God’s love, and also of God’s mercy, and also about hell—how one could fall outside of God’s grace.

But one day God spoke to him, and the message Bishop Pearson heard was this: I will save all. I will not lose one soul. No one is going to hell.

And convicted of God’s all-powerful love and mercy, Pearson began to preach this message of universal salvation—the gospel of inclusion, he called it.

God’s love was for everyone. God’s salvation was for everyone. For the blood of Jesus had covered all of creation.

Well, pretty soon the normative elements of American evangelicalism caught wind of what was going on. Pretty soon Oral Roberts and his son, the Falwells, and the Grahams of the Christian right denounced him. And soon enough a conference of Pentecostal bishops labeled Pearson a heretic.

Numbers plummeted, donations dried up, and Pearson lost his ministry, his wife, and his community standing. Turns out it’s easier to follow God when God is angry, apparently.

But Pearson found a home in the United Church of Christ and continued preaching this gospel of inclusion.

He tells a story of feeling love from the Christian community once again when, at the invitation of a another bishop, a woman in a same-sex marriage, to preach to a conference of charismatic Pentecostal Christians, he found a home where people believed that God loved them—and they loved in turn Bishop Pearson. After he came down from the pulpit he was embraced, held, prayed and wept over. And then, out of the congregation, a young man began a dance, choreographed with beautiful music, as he approached the inviting Bishop. His eyes were focused on her the entire time. And as he drew closer, he came right alongside her and whispered something in her ear.

Pearson says at that moment the Spirit spoke to him, and he heard, “She saved his life.”

Later that evening the Bishop phoned Pearson to see how his time in her community was. And he asked her about the young man, the dancer.

Turns out the dancer was the son of an African-American Pentecostal preacher. When the son came out as gay and HIV positive, the father would no longer speak to him. But he found a home there, in church, with these folks who believed in the gospel of inclusion. In God’s radical love.

“What did he say to you?” Bishop Pearson asked his fellow bishop.

“He said, ‘You saved my life.’”

Friends, it’s not the snakes that do the saving. It’s not us, or our rules, or our lies, or any of the things we try to put in place to protect ourselves or the world around us.

It’s only God.

I invite you to gaze with me upon the broken body of our Lord on the cross this Lent. To remember how much we are loved. For it's only from that place that we can go out and deal with the banal, boring, awful and annoying evil of the world we live in. And only from that place of love that we can begin to hope for any change.

When you rise from the communion rail today, look back at the cross. On the altar side there is no corpus. The Body of Christ is you. Is carried out in your bodies. Is carried out into the world.

Lift him up. Let the world see how very beloved it is. Let everyone you know see how much God loves them. Let them see it in you.

The Right Time

From the Book of Genesis:  “When Abram was ninety-nine years old, the Lord said to him, ‘I am God Almighty; walk before me, and be blameless.’”

In the name of the Father, and of the Son, and of the Holy Ghost.

It seems almost hard to believe, doesn’t it, that we’re pretty much two full months through this “new year,” 2024?  It’s been eight weeks or so since people were talking and thinking about their new year’s resolutions—and if it’s been eight week since we made them, it’s probably been seven weeks since many of us forgot all about those very resolutions. 

For a lot of folks, the beginning of Lent can take on a little bit of the character of new year’s resolutions, right?  These 40 days give us the opportunity to take on new disciplines, to try to make some new habits or to shed some old ones.  Like we do on January 1, we might approach Ash Wednesday with no small amount of ambitions.  Today we’re about ten days into Lent—already a quarter of the way through!—and if our Lenten disciplines have any resemblance to our new year’s resolutions, I wonder how we’re doing.

 In the Sunday Forum over the past couple of weeks, we’ve been talking about the Book of Common Prayer, and the resources it offers us for prayer and for deepening our relationships with God. The question has come up of what we are supposed to do if we miss praying when we meant to, or if we miss coming to church on a Sunday. This is an important question—it gets at an anxiety many of us have about our obligations to God and whether or not we are good enough to approach God—whether, for example, a God to whom one hasn’t prayed in a very long time is prepared to accept prayers that come suddenly in a moment of crisis. 

And the answer, of course, is to move forward from where you are—to pray when and where you can; if you miss one Sunday, to come the next.  Ash Wednesday is certainly a convenient starting point for renewed focus on prayer or acts of charity, just like New Years Day is a convenient starting point for making some changes in our personal or professional lives.  But really, it’s never a bad time to do a good thing.  And when it comes to God, it’s never too late.

 I think we see something of this at work in this story of Abraham and Sarah—or, as they are known at the beginning of his story, Abram and Sarai.  Our reading today is not the first time God appears to Abram—that happens several chapters earlier in Genesis, when Abram is 75 years old.  In today’s passage he’s 99, and God comes to him with an invitation and a promise.  “Walk before me and be blameless,” God says, “and I will make my covenant between me and you, and will make you exceedingly numerous.”  Abram and Sarai have not been able to have a child—and by now in their advanced age they have given up hope—and yet God says “As for Sarai your wife, I will bless her, and moreover I will give you a son by her, and she shall give rise to nations.”  This is quite a call—and quite a promise.

I’m not sure if we are supposed to understand Abram’s age—99—as literally true.  Yes, such an age underscores the miraculous dimensions of God’s promise to Abram and Sarai.  Abram will be an even 100 years old when Isaac is finally born—an age that is not only biologically unlikely but also conveniently round.  At the very least, we can say that Abram and Sarai have already lived a lifetime—they have grown up and married, they have migrated, they have faced challenges and built wealth.  All along, God has promised to make Abram the father of many nations, and all along Abram and Sarai have remained childless.

In the chapter before today’s encounter, Abram and Sarai try to bring this promise to fruition through their own devices—Abram fathers a child by Hagar, an enslaved woman who works for Sarai.  That child is Ishmael, and his and Hagar’s place in Abraham and Sarah’s household is full of complications—God will, in the end, keep them safe and grant them their own blessings.  But God’s plan for Abraham and Sarah is not yet complete.

God’s invitation to Abram, and God’s promise to him, do not work on human time scales, and they will not be fulfilled through human devices.  At the age of 99—literally or figuratively—Abram has lived a whole life already, and even though he has been faithful to God in some ways, he has doubted and erred in others—and yet here is God, again coming to him, again calling him into righteousness, again making a covenant with him.  The new names God gives them—Abraham and Sarah—underscore the new life they gain as they live into that invitation that God extends to them.  As they keep faith with God’s covenant, their old selves fall away and they live more and more fully into who God created them to be all along.

When it comes to God, it’s never too late to do a good thing.  It’s never too late to walk before God and be blameless, never too late to respond to God’s invitation, never to late to approach God in prayer or worship.

 The disciplines and austerities of Lent are not about setting out ambitious schemes of things to do and things to refrain from in the hopes of whipping ourselves into shape spiritually. Lent isn’t a checklist where we tick off our daily ascetic achievements or flagellate ourselves for where we slip up in our disciplines.  Lent is about slowing down, catching our breaths, stripping things away—not so that we make ourselves feel somber or guilty—but so that we can more easily hear and respond to God’s invitation in our lives. 

 The story of Abraham and Sarah shows us just how faithful God is in reaching out to us, in always inviting us into relationship with God—even after a whole lifetime, even after our mistakes, even if we lose our faith, or neglect it, even if we take God for granted—God is faithful to us, God meets us where we are.  Friends, each one of us who is here this morning, and all who are joining in worship with us through the livestream, have been invited by God into this place, into this gathering of prayer.  God is here to meet us, to be with us in the Body and Blood of God’s own Son at this altar.  Wherever we are on our journeys, wherever we find ourselves during this season of Lent, may God bring us again with penitent hearts and steadfast faith to embrace the unchangeable truth of God’s Word, the holy one who loved us even unto death on a cross, Jesus Christ our Lord.

In the name of the Father, and of the Son, and of the Holy Ghost.  Amen.

Mountaintop, Cross, and Empty Tomb

“He ordered them to tell no one about what they had seen, until after the Son of Man had risen from the dead.”

 In the name of the Father, and of the Son, and of the Holy Ghost.

 Today we find ourselves about halfway between Christmas and Easter.  It’s been forty days plus some since we celebrated the birth of our Lord, and forty days plus some before we will proclaim with great joy His resurrection from the dead.  I’ve been told that there’s a sporting event of note tonight, and I’ll admit that I was tempted to talk about today’s story of the Transfiguration as some kind of divine halftime show.  I promise not to.

 But I think there’s something to be said for relating this story of Jesus’s transfiguration—his metamorphosis, on this mountaintop—to where we have been, on the one hand, and to where we are going, on the other.  Over the past few weeks, we have heard stories about Jesus making God’s power manifest in the world—Jesus showing the kingdom of God drawing near through miracles of healing and casting out demons. Just a few verses before Mark’s account of today’s mountaintop transformation, Peter confesses his recognition that Jesus is, in fact, the Messiah of Israel.  And then today we see Jesus transfigured, dazzling bright, clothed in glory, joined by Moses and Elijah—the quintessential representatives of the Law and the Prophets.

But there’s a curious thing that runs through all these stories—through these stories of healing and restoration, through the stories of Peter and the disciples coming to see who Jesus really is and what he is doing. It’s a curious thing that we see again today as Jesus, after his transfiguration, comes down from the mountain.  Over and over again, he tells people not to tell others what they have seen.  When Peter calls him the Messiah, Jesus “sternly ordered them not to tell anyone about him,” Mark tells us.  And today, “he ordered them to tell no one about what they had seen, until after the Son of Man had risen from the dead.”

Why this command?  Why the need to be quiet about who Jesus really is, even when he’s travelling around the countryside, followed by crowds, healing and teaching and feeding in such an obviously astounding way? Biblical scholars call this the “messianic secret,” and there are different proposals for why Jesus would have needed to keep his identity as the Messiah a secret from everyone.  But unlike the people who appear within this gospel narrative, we have the benefit of hindsight—we know how the story is going to turn out—we are in on the secret all along. 

In today’s story, Jesus’s invocation of this secret—that none of them should tell about what they have seen, until after the Son of Man has risen from the dead—points to where Jesus will go from here—to Jerusalem, to the Passion, to Golgotha and the Cross.

And his instruction to Peter and the others reveals that it’s only in light of the crucifixion—and the resurrection—that this transfiguration can truly be understood.  Peter and the others have seen God’s glory in this new way, but even as eyewitnesses they don’t really comprehend it—they are still in the middle of the story. The fullness of this epiphany, this manifestation of God’s glory in the world—the fullness of this moment where God’s glory shines forth, centered between those paragons of God’s earlier self-disclosure to God’s people—Moses, the Law, and Elijah, the Prophets—the fullness of this moment can only be grasped from the other side of the Cross and the Empty Tomb.  God’s glory here is inextricable from Jesus’s suffering, death, and resurrection.

What we see here is a God whose glory is inseparable from God’s living among us, taking on our nature and living and dying for us.  A God whose majesty is wrapped up in, can only be fully understood in, the pain of the Cross and the joy of the resurrection.  Not a God who orders us to obey as an authoritarian or a disciplinarian, but as a God who loves us enough to join us in our struggles, in our journeys, in our joys—a God who calls us to love God and to love our neighbor because it’s in that ethic of love that we will find our deepest meaning and fulfillment, our own transfigurations.

By linking the Law and the Prophets to the Cross and the Resurrection, this story of the Transfiguration shows us a God whose greatest glory is in Christ’s victory over death, the victory of self-giving love over selfishness and evil.

Friends, in a few days we will journey into Lent.  We’ll put ashes on our foreheads and remind ourselves of our mortality.  Maybe we’ll give some things up for the season, or take on some extra devotions, as a measure of penance for our sins.  And as Easter draws near, we will remember those acts by which Christ defeated death and won everlasting life for all of us.

Whatever we do to mark this time, however, let’s remember that the austerities and disciplines of Lent are all a response to God’s love for us.  As we’ve seen throughout these weeks after Epiphany, Jesus shows God’s love for us in his acts of healing, of casting away of evil, of calling us into fellowship and discipleship with him.  We’ll see the ultimate manifestation of that love for us on Good Friday.  But it’s in light of the resurrection that all these epiphanies gain their full meaning—the glory of the God who created us, who loves us, who came into the world that we might be healed, forgiven, restored, renewed—that we might join God in full and abundant life.

In the name of the Father, and of the Son, and of the Holy Ghost.

Healing and Service

From the Gospel according to Mark:  “Then the fever left her, and she began to serve them.”

In the name of the Father, and of the Son, and of the Holy Ghost.

A very close colleague of mine at the hospital was telling me the other day about raising her kids, and she joked with me that as they were growing up, she felt like she didn’t have a single hot dinner in twenty-something years—by the time she finally got to sit down, after getting everyone else all the various things they needed, her food would invariably have cooled off.  I think my mother and my grandmothers would relate!  It’s a very loving, if a little exasperated, sentiment, right?  Parents and grandparents—often women, but not always—who care for others, who take care of the needs of so many of those around them, can find their own needs unmet—and their efforts not always recognized.

I couldn’t help but think of this when I read today’s passage from Mark’s gospel—where Jesus and his disciples go to Peter’s house—Simon, of course, is Peter before Jesus changes his name—and Jesus cures Peter’s mother-in-law of a fever.  This is Jesus’s first healing in Mark, but it’s not particularly surprising—he has just come, you might remember, from casting out a demon. What is surprising, and maybe it’s more surprising to my 21st-century American ears than it would have been to Mark’s first-century audience, is Peter’s mother-in-law’s response to the healing—“Then the fever left her,” Mark tells us, “and she began to serve them.”

So glad you’re feeling better!  Now can you make dinner for us, please?

As usual, Mark is very sparing in his details.  Matthew and Luke, in their versions of this story, are just as laconic.  We know, logically, that if Peter has a mother-in-law, then he must have, or have had, a wife—but we don’t know anything about her, even if she is still living at the time Jesus enters the picture.  We don’t learn the mother-in-law’s name, and we don’t know anything about her interior life—about what she feels or thinks about this miracle of healing she’s just experienced.  We see only the action—“Then the fever left her, and she began to serve them.”

In one sense, it might seem like things have gone back to normal.  Peter’s mother-in-law has gone back into her role, offering hospitality to her son-in-law and the men he’s brought home with him.  I can almost imagine her sighing, “Here we go again.”

And that’s something that can happen to us, right, even after something remarkable happens in our lives? 

It reminds me of how we collectively experienced the onslaught—and the recovery from—the COVID-19 pandemic.  As interminable as the pandemic seemed, it also surprised me, a bit, how quickly so much of the world got back to normal.  Maybe, like me, you’ve wondered if those months of lockdown, those months of shortages and supply chain woes, those years of anxieties and worries and loss, have taught us anything—about how we find balance between our work obligations and everything else, about how we relate to and care for one another, both practically and spiritually, and about how we care for ourselves.  After such a significant event—both the pandemic itself and the monumental efforts that were undertaken in response to it—have we learned anything, or are we back to business as usual?  “Here we go again”—back to work, without missing a beat.  So glad you’re feeling better!  Now can you make dinner for us, please?

It’s shockingly easy to go back to ordinary life, even after something momentous.  It’s easy, amid the hustle and bustle of daily life, to forget the blessings we’ve been given.  When we’re stressed out, it’s easy to lose sight of God’s work in our lives, of how we, like Simon Peter’s mother-in-law, have been offered healing and restoration.

And so I wonder if there’s something else going on here.

When Mark says that “she began to serve them,” the Greek word for “serve” is diakoneo.  It’s the same word that Jesus uses when he says that “the Son of Man came not to be served but to serve.”  It’s the same word that gives us the English word “deacon,” for that order of ministers whose vocation is one of service.  “Then the fever left her, and she began to deacon them,” we might have Mark say.

What if the mother-in-law’s service, her diakoneo, isn’t just a return to normalcy, going back to the social role assigned to her?  What if this service is a response, an affirmative choice that she makes to relate to Jesus and his circle of followers in a certain way in light of, because of the healing she has just experienced?  If Jesus is the Son of Man who came not to be served but to serve—but who nevertheless serves the mother-in-law by healing her—what if the natural response, the expression of gratitude, is this form of service?

The drawing near of God’s kingdom doesn’t mean an end to the tasks and obligations of daily life.  Two thousand years later, we still have jobs, and bills, and paperwork, busy-ness and stress and all the rest of it.  But the healing grace God offers us, a grace we receive inwardly as we receive into our bodies the outward signs of bread and wine at this altar, this healing grace means that we are invited to live in new ways of relating to one another, and to God. 

“Be subject to one another,” St. Paul writes in Ephesians, “out of reverence for Christ.”  Our thanksgiving to God—our thanksgiving for our creation, preservation, and all the blessings of this life, our thanksgiving for those ways in which we have been healed, are being healed—becomes all the more meaningful when we can express that gratitude in ministering to one another and to the world around us.  From building a life and career around service—as an educator, for example, or working in a caring profession—to engaged service in the community, to brightening someone’s day with a kind word of encouragement—we are never short of opportunities to be subject to one another, never short of opportunities to serve God by through service, through ministry, through diakoneo, to one another.

This kind of service doesn’t have to be draining.  It doesn’t have to leave us feeling put-upon or worn out.  I would be remiss if I didn’t point out that, just a few verses after this healing, Jesus himself takes a moment to retreat—to go out “to a deserted place” where he prays—where he goes to be alone with the Father who sent him.  This kind of spiritual self-care—finding opportunities for quiet, for calm, for prayer, for reconnection with God—is inseparable from an ethic of service.  Maybe this very morning is that opportunity for you.  Or maybe you can carve out a few minutes every day—early in the morning, when it’s still very dark, like Jesus; or, if you’re a night owl like me, late at night (when it’s still very dark!)—a few minutes to read a psalm, or pray the Lord’s Prayer, or just to be quiet with God in the middle of a noisy world.

Friends, the kingdom of God has drawn near.  As we approach this altar today, as we receive the blessings of God’s grace, may we respond, as Peter’s mother-in-law did, not simply with business as usual, but with the gratitude of service, of diakoneo, that we may love and serve one another, as Christ loved and died for us.

In the name of the Father, and of the Son, and of the Holy Ghost.

The Way Home

The Rev’d Jett McAlister
Christ Church, New Haven, Conn.
The Fifth Sunday of Easter
May 7, 2023

John 14:1-14

“In my Father’s house there are many dwelling places.  If it were not so, would I have told you that I go to prepare a place for you?”  In the name of the Father, and of the Son, and of the Holy Spirit.

Last week I had the great joy of traveling to Arkansas where my brothers and I surprised my father by showing up at his home on his seventieth birthday.  During the pandemic, my dad and my step-mother moved to a new town—a smaller city in the northwest corner of the state where I’ve never really spent very much time.  Everything there was new to me.  And they’ve moved into a house that, until last Friday, I had never set foot in.  This was my first time in the new place, and our first big family gathering there.

I was struck—despite all the newness of my surroundings—by how quickly and how deeply I felt at home.  Because of distance and circumstances, I hadn’t seen my brothers in person since 2019, and there were other family members that I hadn’t seen in almost as long.  But it’s amazing how strong

the feeling of being at home can be—how quickly, when we are with people whom we love and whom we know deeply and who know us deeply—how quickly we can feel like no time has passed at all, how easily we can fall back into those old and comforting routines and ways of being.  I even found my mostly suppressed Southern accent starting to emerge again!

Being around beloved family or very close friends can help us regain a sense of ourselves, right?  A sense of the best versions of who we are—the truest version of ourselves.

Home isn’t a house or a town, so much as it is relationships, history, memory.  And to be at home is to be with those people—whether biological family or chosen family, our childhood friends or relationships formed in maturity—who see us for who we are and give us the love and safety we need to be our fullest selves. 

To be at home—to feel at home—to be safe, or at rest, or to feel that you are where you belong—this is one of our deepest longings, isn’t it?  Saint Augustine gives voice to this yearning in his Confessions, famously calling out to God, “you have made us for yourself, and our heart is restless until it rests in you.”  Augustine knows that our true home is with God—and perhaps more than any other theologian Augustine knows the various places our restless hearts will look for solace and rest.  Augustine looked to all sorts of things for the comforts of home and rest—academic learning, sensual pleasures, the supposed spiritual wisdom of the age—but none of them worked.  None of them brought rest to his restless heart—and none of them brought him home.

In today’s reading from the Gospel of John, as the Last Supper draws to a close Jesus offers comfort to his disciples as he prepares to embark on his journey to the Cross.  “Do not let your hearts be troubled,” he says.  “Believe in God, believe also in me.  In my Father’s house there are many dwelling places.  If it were not so, would I have told you that I go to prepare a place for you?” Although Jesus will soon no longer be with his disciples in the flesh, he assures them that the story isn’t over—that his relationship to them will remain strong and vital as he goes to prepare a place for them in his Father’s house, places where they—where we—will be with Jesus. 

This is our true home—the home that Jesus prepares for us, where we are with the anointed one who is the Word made flesh, who was in the beginning with God and who in the beginning was God. 

Not only is our home with Jesus, not only does Jesus prepare it for us—but Jesus is, he tells us, the way to that home.  As Jesus talks about the place he’s going to, Thomas asks how he and the other disciples can get there:  “Lord, we do not know where you are going.  How can we know the way?”  Jesus’s response is one of the most famous verses of Scripture:  “I am the way, and the truth and the life.  No one comes to the Father except through me.”

A lot of churches have taught that this means that only people who believe in Jesus can be “saved.”  But I’m not so sure that’s what Jesus is trying to get at.  Jesus goes on to say that if we have known him, we have known the Father.  I love this moment when Jesus says to Philip, “Have I been with you all this time, and you still do not know me?”  After everything that’s happened, you still don’t get it?  “Whoever has seen me has seen the Father,” Jesus tells Philip. 

If you want to know God, look at Jesus of Nazareth.  If you’re think that God is an abstract principle, too vast and removed and transcendent from our world to even talk about, look at Jesus of Nazareth.  If you think God is absent, look at Jesus of Nazareth.  In Jesus, we see a God who quite frankly has a personality.  When we see Jesus heal on the Sabbath, we see a God who cares more about health and wholeness than about ritual perfection.  When we see Jesus share meals with tax collectors and prostitutes, we see a God who cares more about fellowship and inclusion than about propriety and social class.  When we see Jesus tell a rich young man to sell all his possessions and give the money to the poor, we see a God who wants none of our preoccupations to get in the way of our relationship with God.  And when we see Jesus tell his disciples that he goes to prepare a place for them in his Father’s house, we see a God who wants to be our home—a God who wants to be in relationship with us, who wants us to be the fullest and truest versions of ourselves, who wants our restless hearts to find God’s perfect rest.

So when Jesus calls himself the way, the truth, and the life, what I hear is that God has given us a view into God’s very heart—into God’s vision for how we are to live in the world, how we are to live with one another—and that the life and mission of Jesus of Nazareth shows us the way we are to walk.  If you want to know God, look at Jesus of Nazareth.  “Believe in God, believe also in me.”

To be sure, we don’t know the fullness of God’s plans for us, of the homes that Jesus prepares for us in the Father’s house, in this life.  But we can, here and now, experience the reality, the truth of that relationship with Jesus.  We know it when we see Jesus in our neighbors, when we welcome the stranger or give comfort to the afflicted.  We know it when we come together to serve the vulnerable, when we repent of our own participation in injustice, when we love one another as Christ loved us—when we give of ourselves as Christ gave himself for us.  And we know it when we approach the altar to receive Christ’s Body and Blood, knowing that we are loved, that we are God’s own children, that God welcomes us, that we are home.