12th Sunday after Pentecost

If any man will come after me, let him deny himself, and take up his cross, and follow me. 

This morning's Gospel lesson can really only be adequately appreciated in the wider context in which it is placed in Matthew's Gospel. By the very ordering of the passages in this chapter, there are important but subtle points being made. It might be easy to think of passages in the Bible like a long train on which various cars are coupled at random with no real relation to one another. Jesus goes here, and then he says that, and then gets in that confrontation. However, the Gospels are thoughtfully arranged, and a careful consideration of surrounding passages shows how they are like interlocking pieces in a great structure. Consider for a moment the parable of the prodigal son. It's not found in any other Gospel but Luke's. There it is preceded by two parables: one about a man who loses a sheep and leaves his flock to find him, and who rejoices when he does find him. A similar parable tells of a woman who loses a coin and searches diligently for it and then rejoices in finding it. All three parables are about finding that which is lost and the ensuing joy. The introduction to all three parables is a note that publicans and sinners drew near to hear him, but the scribes and Pharisees murmured against him. With these parables Jesus was trying to tell the Pharisees and his disciples that God greatly values those who have been spiritually lost but are now found, like the publicans and the sinners for whom Jesus searched. Jesus did not come to found a church whose membership would consist solely of moral supermen or perfect saints. His church is a society of prodigals; it is a gathering of those who have squandered the manifold gifts of God and who know they are not worthy to be called God's children, and yet have been received home by their heavenly Father.

Such a careful reading of Scripture in concert with itself is the basis for a sound reading of the whole Bible. When we say that we are Catholic Christians, part of what we mean by this is that we do not take isolated verses and rip them out of their context in order to support esoteric doctrine. That is a hallmark of Christian sects and schisms that always seem to have a scriptural proof for their perplexing doctrines. The Catholic and Reformed way of reading the Bible is to read it in harmony with itself and further, to read it in partnership with those who have read it throughout the church's history, like the church father's.

Keeping all this in mind, it would be impossible fully to appreciate today's Gospel without recalling last week's Gospel in which Peter makes his great confession. Briefly summarized, Jesus asks his disciples whom they say he was. Peter replies, thou art the Christ, the son of the living God. In response, Jesus tells Peter that he will build his church upon his leadership and authority. In the lesson today Peter is found rebuking Jesus. There is a kind dissonance between the climax of Peter's confession and his confusion in our passage about the true mission of the messiah. When Peter hears our Lord's disclosure that he must be handed over to sinners and crucified and rise again the third day, he rebukes Jesus. Peter cannot believe that such a thing could befall the messiah, the christ. He was the king to redeem all Israel and draw in the nations. How could he possibly do this if he were dead? Peter of course misses the point, and our Lord's addressing him as Satan is in sharp contrast to the statement a few verses earlier that he would build his church on this rock. Our Lord would restore Israel. He would draw in the nations into the fear and worship of the one true God. However, he would bring this renewal not by the gradual conquering of nations, like a religious Alexander the Great. Rather, this renewal would come about through death and resurrection. His universal invitation would not be, come, be happy, do what pleases yourself. Rather, his invitation was and will always be a call to come and die, to come and die to sin and self and to be born again for love and service. If any man will come after me, let him deny himself, and take up his cross, and follow me. He is a king, but his power is not exercised in control and in might. He is a king born to serve and save. He is a messiah, but he is not anointed to conquer the nations with a sword; rather, he is anointed for a death and a burial. It now becomes evident why the church cannot be akin to the state in power or authority because her Lord is not a tyrant but a king who exercises a power of service; nor can the kingdom of God be built on earth because the reign of God cannot be compared with earthly states and thrones.

All this suggests that Peter got the words right in his confession: Thou art the Christ, the son of the living God, but he did not really understand the true meaning of what he said. It is easy today for both those inside the church and those outside to do the same. It is easy to think that Christianity consists of a set of moral precepts, perhaps among the world's best and most abiding. It is easy to think that Christianity consists of a set of doctrinal propositions to which you must give your intellectual assent. When we think of Christianity is these simplistic ways, we are like Peter making a great confession, but not really understanding the true meaning and mission of the messiah. Christianity consists at root in a call to complete spiritual transformation through trust and surrender. It is, as I said before, a call to come and die. This is an uncomfortable message for the settled, and that is why in the history of the church, its preachers and teachers and ministers have often lapsed into preaching morality or self-help or social issues. Deitrich Bonhoeffer wrote in the Cost of Discipleship, when Christ calls a man, he bids him come and die. Have you received this call? Have you decided to hand your life over to God in surrender and trust? It is and always will be difficult and scary to hand over control of our lives to God, but ask yourself the simple question, without God where has your life gone while you were in control? For whosoever will save his life shall lose it: and whosoever will lose his life for my sake shall find it.

9th Sunday after Pentecost

         Romans 10:5-15

If you confess with your lips that Jesus is Lord and believe in your heart that God raised him from the dead, you will be saved.

When we look at the world it is easy to look at it through the narrow lens of good people and bad people. Particularly if you become passionate about a political, social, or religious cause, you will often lapse into thinking in terms of friends and foes. All of this is a way of either approving or disapproving individuals. In the words of the Bible, this is called justification. In a similar way, we can be justified , accepted before God.

But what makes a person acceptable to God? Now a common answer to this question is that we gain God's acceptance by what we do. If we do enough good things, God will finally be pleased with us. Such a view pictures the moral life as a long road stretching ahead, perhaps up a mountain. Only by tremendous exertion could one ever arrive at the destination of being loved and accepted by God. The phrase that Paul uses to describe this view of religion is the righteousness of the law. The righteousness of the law teaches that by the right things we do we are accepted by God. Paul, however, contends that there is a new type of righteousness that has been revealed in our Lord Jesus. It is actually not new—Abraham had this type of righteousness—but it is new in the sense that it has been made evident to all people. The righteousness of faith states that we could never be justified by works of the law because we can never do enough good things to make up for the gravity and seriousness of our sins. Imagine if a parent decided to love his children only after they were entirely perfect. God too does not wait to love us until we are perfect or even good. He knows that we are weak, both physically and morally. The Bible says that God remembers that we but dust. God also knows our wandering, our rebellion against his leading. Recall the scene in the garden with Adam and Eve. Up to that point in the narrative of Genesis, God has been calling things good: “And God said let there be light, and there was light. And God saw the light, that it was good.” The serpent tempts Adam and Eve to eat from the tree of the knowledge of good and evil. In other words, now Adam and Eve are going to be deciding what is good and what is evil. And this is the path of sin. When we decide to usurp God's power and authority—in the case of Adam and Eve the power to say what is good and what is evil—we fall into the destructive ways of sin, and there is no amount of good-doing that can dig us out this hole that we have dug for ourselves.

God however does not just cancel or ignore the weight of our sin. He does not just say, oh that, don't worry about that. No, sin hurts ourselves and it hurts others. Think of the record of human history: tyranny, murder, genocide, slavery, oppression. The awful weight of these sins and of the sins of the whole world, God places on the willing Lord Jesus. He, in the words of our liturgy, is the propitiation for our sins. Propitiation is a technical term to describe how his sacrifice pays the debt of our sins. And now we have acceptance with God, not based on what we have done, but by what Jesus has done on our behalf. This the righteousness of faith, and Paul describes it with these words, if you confess with your lips that Jesus is Lord and believe in your heart that God raised him from the dead, you will be saved. You will be saved, my friends, from sin and death, and raised up to new life with the risen Lord Jesus.

You can now see how to receive this righteousness—indeed it is not something that we can earn or achieve—we just have to open our hands to receive it as a gift. No long journeys are required. You don't have to do arduous and dramatic feats of penitence, like certain well-intentioned but misguided Roman Catholics in Mexico who walk up hills on their knees and practice self-flagellation. In fact, this righteousness of faith is on hand for you and for me today. This is, I believe, what Paul means when he writes rather cryptically in our Lesson, what does the righteousness of faith say? The word is near you, on your lips and in your heart. Another way of saying this is, in the words of Jesus, the kingdom of God is within you. You don't, in other words, have to go looking for it, like some secret, esoteric knowledge. The righteousness of faith, justification with God, being accepted by him is on hand right here and right now. No matter where your life has taken you in the past, wherever you have been, whatever you have done, God has shown his good will towards all in the Lord Jesus. He has shown that he wants to live in fellowship with humans redeemed by the Lord Jesus.

Even though we do not need to go anywhere to find this acceptance in God, nevertheless, there is a need to go on a journey. It is not the journey to find God, but it is the journey to share this good news of God's loving acceptance of sinners in our Lord Jesus. The latter part of the Epistle lesson describes this work, this journey. Paul asks the question how are people going to hear this message of love and forgiveness if they have never heard of Jesus and his great love for all. And how will they ever hear if no one goes to tell them? This is precisely the basis of Christian outreach. As a Christian community, we go outside the walls of this church, to show people the love and generosity of God. It is what our young people did in Portland a few weeks ago. It is what our fledgling outreach committee is attempting to do. This morning you will find in the bulletin an insert about their work.  St. Francis famously said, preach the Gospel always and if necessary, use words. Much of the work proposed by the committee is preaching the Gospel without explicit words, but we pray that the Lord will give us opportunities thoughtfully to share our faith in the context of relationships outside these walls. We reach out to others because we know we have been fully loved and accepted in our Lord Jesus not based on an accounting of our merits. Now we can, we must reach out to others with this message of hope and new life. If we have no desire to share this news, to see lives saved and transformed, it probably means that we have only been superficially touched by this message of grace. If you have discovered the abounding grace and love of God, the key to all human existence, then why would you keep this a secret? It worth sharing lovingly with others in the context of a relationship. May the Lord give his blessing to all the outreach which we undertake in his name, and may each of us as Christians have a sense of reaching out to others in the love of our Lord Jesus.

Seventh Sunday after Pentecost

When he. . . found one pearl of great price, [the merchant] went and sold all that he had, and bought it. 
                                                                - Matthew 13

In last week’s sermon, I spoke about the difference between our current existence and the hope that we have of that greater life promised in our Lord Jesus. As Christians, we have to move toward both acceptance of the fleeting nature of this world as well as surrendering to the hope which is God’s alone to give. The lessons this morning build on the themes of last week’s lessons with the motif of desire being found in all of them. This morning I want to say something about desire and hope and what it means to desire as a Christian.

The ancients spoke of four emotions: pleasure and pain, fear and desire. Pleasure and pain relate to what one experiences in the present moment: something feels good or it feels bad. Fear and desire are the anticipation of what is coming in the future, either pleasure or pain. We fear pain and desire pleasure. According to the ancients, into these four emotions we can fit all other emotions. Take anger as an example; anger is classified as a desire, namely, a desire for retribution and justice for wrongs inflicted.

A passing observation will show how much human decisions and actions are based on emotions. When we desire something we work towards the anticipated pleasure of attaining our object. It is axiomatic to say that sometimes the thrill is in the hunt. We know that sometimes, depending on what it is that we want, the attainment of our object leaves us unsatisfied and searching for something additional or better. Similarly, with fear, we try to avoid some future pain. Take somebody who finally gives up smoking because his doctor has told him that he is in eminent danger of lung cancer. The present pleasure of smoking is outweighed by the fear of future illness.
Now the ancients took a variety of attitudes towards these four emotions. One group—the Stoics—maintained that the goal of philosophy is to help train someone to ignore all emotion. Emotions are all bad, so the goal is to eliminate emotions or at least to render them impotent. Another group—the Epicureans—said that true happiness is found is seeking pleasures and avoiding pain. This is the “do what makes you happy” philosophy, and you can see how in many ways this attitude is exceedingly prevalent in our society today. You can also see that if the best thing we can do is enjoy ourselves, seeking as much pleasure as possible, then there is very little room for love, because true love will sometimes mean the experience of pain. In love one seeks the good of another, even if it is painful. Our Lord’s death is the consummate picture of this principle of love.

Saint Augustine of Hippo the great Christian theologian of the ancient world adopted the traditional four-fold conception of human emotions. However, he adapted it to a Christian perspective: for Christians the goal is not necessarily to stop feeling or responding to emotions, and it certainly is not just to seek out pleasures. Rather, St. Augustine proposes, there are good and bad emotions. A bad fear would be a fear for the loss of property because material goods are fleeting and will not give lasting happiness. We will eventually lose them when we are separated from them either by their decay, their theft or our death. A good fear would be for the loss of communion with God because in him is lasting joy and peace. Many of us realize how easy it is die alone and unhappy because life has lost ultimate meaning and purpose apart from abiding love and joy, apart, that is, from God. If you not sure what I am talking about, go watch Orson Welles’ classic film Citizen Kane.

What St. Augustine would indicate, what a Christian conception of emotions would show, is that our emotional lives are mixed. The problem with this world is that human beings are fallen. God gave us a desire for the good life, but now in our fallen and sinful condition we desire all kinds of things that are wicked and destructive. In our fallen state, we desire that which will hurt us and others. Think of the alcoholic who knows that drinking is killing him, and yet he still wants a drink. The modern conception of alcoholism would think of this as a condition of an illness, and while I don't believe that Christianity is in conflict with this idea, it does offer the explanation that we live in world where such an illness is possible because it is a fallen world, broken by sin and anarchy against God’s rule.

If we are honest, we are often a mass of different and occasionally conflicting desires. We want that which we know will hurt us or hurt others. We want two things that cannot be had together like abundant material wealth and freedom from anxiety: it is clear that the more stuff you have the more you worry about that stuff breaking or being lost or stolen. Sometimes it is as if we are groping in the dark for that which will give us lasting happiness, only to be frustrated by the handfuls of dust that we find. The Christian answer to all of this futility and confusion is the new life promised in our Lord Jesus. In him, we have the hope that our desires can be reordered; we can begin to desire that which won’t hurt or kill. One of the collects from the prayer book powerfully captures this hope. The prayer opens with these words, O ALMIGHTY God, who alone canst order the unruly wills and affections of sinful men. It is God alone who can restore us to sanity in the words of the 12 steps. He is our only hope of reordering our desires, our affections as the prayer puts it.

The lessons this morning show what it is that we should really desire. Whereas in our confusion we desire many things, the lessons indicate that there is one thing that we should desire. In the first lesson, Solomon wants this one thing: wisdom, specifically the wisdom of God to be a good and just king. Similarly, the merchant in our Lord’s parable wants one thing, the pearl of great price. Our attitude towards the kingdom of God should be that we are willing to sacrifice and surrender everything for it. If all of this sounds abstract and remote from our everyday lives, our everyday desires, consider what Paul writes in the Epistle lesson: “we do know how to pray as we ought.” To pray, of course, is simply an older word for ask. In a way, we don’t know what we want or why we want it. God has given us his Holy Spirit. It is the Spirit, Paul writes, who intercedes for us with sighs too deep for words. We’re yearning for that good life even when we seek it in all the wrong places. The Spirit prays on our behalf to lead us to that the true good life which is in God. All this requires trust and surrender to the Spirit within us. You can stay on the wheel of empty human desires, or you can give yourself to him who can give you better things than we deserve or can even desire. I want to end with the entirety of the collect I quoted from earlier. May it be the prayer of all of our hearts:

O ALMIGHTY God, who alone canst order the unruly wills and affections of sinful men; Grant unto thy people, that they may love the thing which thou commandest, and desire that which thou dost promise; that so, among the sundry and manifold changes of the world, our hearts may surely there be fixed, where true joys are to be found; through Jesus Christ our Lord. Amen.

Reclaimed child's rocker

I bought this rocker recently at a local garage sale for a few dollars. The lady asked me if I could repair the chair as is. I suspect this would have been impossible without completely redoing the rush.

There are few things that give me more pleasure than taking something that is old and useless and apparently ready for the trash heap, and reconditioning it and giving it new life. I'm told I come by this honestly, since my grandmother was much the same way, taking furniture off the side of the road and fixing it up to make it usable.

This project involved making an entire new seat, which I did out of lumber used in this project as well (bookcase). I used all hand tools to cut the shape and then hallow out a shallow center which makes all the difference between a comfortable and an uncomfortable chair. The rest of the work involved cleaning the wood and applying a little lemon oil. Looks good now for years to come (or as long as we have a child small enough to sit in it!)

Fifth Sunday after Pentecost

As the rain and the snow come down from heaven, and return not thither. . . so shall my word be that goes forth from my mouth.

The Gospel appointed for this Sunday is the familiar parable of the sower. There will probably be many sermons preached on this text today that take the parable as an exhortation or command to be like that good soil. Don't be bad soil, be good soil. Such an interpretation misses the wider context of the Gospel. In the passages that precede and follow our text, Jesus is confronted with the unbelief of the Pharisees. Despite our Lord's works of mercy and miraculous healings, they do not believe that he is sent from God. Theirs is a stubborn refusal to believe, despite the visual evidence. On the other hand, there are wealthy individuals, like the rich young ruler, who do not want to hear the message of Jesus either, because he demands the sacrifice of all to God. I would suggest that the parable of the sower illustrates the reality of different people's reactions to the work and word of God. Jesus is not saying be good soil, but rather illustrating the facts of existence. Probably many of us have wondered how people make it through life without a belief in God. This parable helps us to understand that this the way the world is. Some receive the message; some reject it; others receive it but only superficially. Another way of summarizing our Lord's message in this parable would be: do not be surprised if people reject or stray from the Gospel message. Even in his own time—even eye-witnesses of his works—did not necessarily become disciples.

A secondary aspect of this parable is that it affirms the truth that God's word is fruitful. It is no fault of the seed that it fails to germinate and take root. The sower could be said to have some culpability for scattering seed in unfruitful places, but if the sower is really a picture of God, it shows the liberality with which God spreads the seed of his word. The Scriptures say that God has not been without a witness in every generation. Evidence of his eternity and goodness is all around us in the ordered and beautiful creation, in the power of human love and in the diversity of human creativity. Each in its own way points to God. Furthermore, once we have been awakened to matters of faith, we can look back on our own lives and see the marks of God's working even when we did not believe. The book of God's word is now and always open.

In the fifty-fifth chapter of the book of the prophet Isaiah, the Lord brings a message of hope to the people. He says that, as the rain and the snow come down from heaven, and return not thither but water the earth, making it bring forth and sprout, giving seed to the sower and bread to the eater, so shall my word be that goes forth from my mouth; it shall not return to me empty, but it shall accomplish that which I purpose. The prophet was writing to a people who had gone into exile in Babylon. Having seen their homeland destroyed, their city, their temple razed, they were taken captive into Babylon, a thousand miles from everything they had known as home. The prophets said that 70 years would pass before the possibility of return to Jerusalem. No doubt their situation seemed pretty hopeless and bleak. Isaiah reminds these exiles that the Lord's word cannot be undone. He has spoken a word of new life and hope that they will return, and whatever their outward circumstances look like, God's purposes will prevail in the life of his people.
We too are a people who need to hear a word of hope and new life. If you are living and breathing, you are going through trial and difficulty. This is the nature of human existence. Your problems may feel like a wall that surrounds you, from which there is no escape. But like those Israelites, a word has been spoken over you. Paul writes in Ephesians 2:10, We are [God's] workmanship, created in Christ Jesus unto good works, which God hath before ordained that we should walk in them. In the Gospel of John 10:10 Jesus says, I am come that [ye] might have life, and that [ye] might have it more abundantly. Again Paul writes in Romans 8:32, He that spared not his own Son, but delivered him up for us all, how shall he not with him also freely give us all things? The Lord has spoken a word over you. It cannot be undone. We might summarize the content of this word by the statement you are a child of God. There is a homeless man and chronic alcoholic who calls on me periodically at the church, usually asking for things for which I find it impossible to refuse: some socks, a pair of shoes, a sandwich. I long ago renounced the idea that people are simply problems to fix, so I do not think any of this will solve his many problems, but I do encourage him to go to meetings and invariably I look him in the eye and tell him that he is a child of God.

This word of hope and new life is spoken over my friend and over us not because we deserve or merit it. In point of fact, these words were spoken long before we were born, before we had done anything good or bad, before we were facing any of the trials and difficulties of life. The Lord will accomplish his purposes in your life if you will surrender to him. The reason we know this is because our Lord Jesus is the Word of God. He has come to show God's goodwill towards us, to give us new and abundant life. If there is truth in the Gospel, if Jesus is who he says he is, then God's Word has been spoken once for all over us and all God's people. You have been claimed. His word will not return to him empty but will accomplish that for which he sent it.

Sunday after the Ascension

“This is life eternal, that they might know thee the only true God, and Jesus Christ, whom thou hast sent.”

There is a very human temptation to think that the sufferings and afflictions of life are an exception or interruption of our true existence. If true life is found where there is no pain or sorrow, where does that leave the rest of us? What possibly could be said to the chronically ill, the poor or the bereaved? There are moments of joy and happiness in life—and these are unquestionably a gift of God—but there are also many more times of trial and difficulty; these too are in a way the gift of God as well. In my observation, the happy times of years-gone-by is often just a trick of our memory: we remember the good and forgot the bad, like a whitewashed wall or an over-exposed photo. In the present moment, it is all too easy to wallow in unhappiness as long as discomfort persists. But of course life is full of trials and difficulties. If you are going to wait to be joyful until life is free from complication and difficulty, you may have a very long wait. We can predict some of the trials we will face in this life; many of them we cannot. After one has lived for a while, it is easy to slip into the attitude that life is a prison. In this prison of life some will maintain the idle hope of escape; others will be more realistic as they endeavor to make prison life more comfortable by distraction and vain pursuits.

The lessons this morning remind us that life is decidedly not a prison. Suffering and trial are not accidents that have no purpose or meaning. There is a sober honesty in the opening words of the Epistle Lesson, Do not be surprised, writes St. Peter, at the fiery ordeal which comes upon you. . . as though something strange were happening to you. My friends, there is a reason why those times of calm and peace never come in life; it is not the nature of human existence to be without trial and difficulty. If you are expecting the chicken to lay golden eggs, you will be disappointed every time the hen lays another egg of yoke and white. Life does not lay golden eggs. Peter then proceeds to explain the Christian's attitude towards the trials of this life. He writes, “Humble yourselves. . . under the mighty hand of God. . . Cast your anxieties on him.” In other words, once we accepted that this is the nature of life, then we are exhorted to trust in God and surrender to him. Consider the temporal suffering of Mary, the embarrassment and shame that would accompany pregnancy out of wed-lock in a traditional society. Mary does not ask God to be hidden away for the duration of her pregnancy or to escape her present existence. Rather, her response to the angel is humble submission and surrender: be it unto me according to thy word. This attitude is also wonderfully exemplified in the so-called serenity prayer, penned by Reinhold Neibuhr over 80 years ago, “God, grant me the serenity to accept the things I cannot change, The courage to change the things I can, And wisdom to know the difference.” In such an acceptance there is no room for self-pity or wallowing in misery, principally because when have surrendered to God, we become open to love, love for God and compassion for others.

But for Peter and for the Evangelist John, the most important aspect of the Christian attitude towards life is exemplified in the life of Jesus. His is a life as it should be. Jesus shows us the way God intended us to live. It is a life of total consecration and connectedness to God. On the night of his arrest and trial, Jesus concludes his farewell discourse to his disciples with the prayer found in chapter seventeen of John's Gospel. Our Lord says something astounding, “I have glorified thee on earth: I have finished the work which thou gavest me to do.” He is definitely the only man who could ever honestly speak these words to God. So many die with some vital work let unfinished. As human beings, we feel this loss for the unfinished. God, however, perceives all the love and compassion that we failed to give as well. He sees just how unfinished all of work truly is. It is in the perfection of his human nature that Jesus can say, “I have finished the work.” Now it is time for him to go to the cross. It is there even in suffering, even in death, that his consecration and connectedness to God remains unbroken. He was not just consecrated to God on the shores of the sea of Galilee, in the innocent gaiety of the marriage-feast at Cana, or in his peaceful entry into Jerusalem on Palm Sunday. He will offer his life in love to the Father, even to the point of death. This complete and unbroken self-offering is our model.

The problem of course is that we so rarely practice this self-offering. Rather, we almost invariably think of my time, my day. What will I do with my day? Anything that threatens to make claims on my time easily becomes the object of aggressive either explicitly or passively. Let me be the first to say, your time is not your own. You are a creature. This sense of clinging to time as a possession is a mark of our fallen and sinful condition, and God uses every means at his disposal to wrest this notion from us. First there are the responsibilities of a vocation and work. Then there are the duties of marriage and, Lord-willing, children, all of which call for our self-offering, to lose the notion that our time is our own. Finally, there is the end of life. There is either the slow steady decline of physical and mental capabilities or the precipitous and sudden slide to death. The suffering pulls us away from the delusion that our time is our own. Death is the final sentence that our time and our existence is not our own. But there is another path that we can walk in this present life. We do not have to wait for death to realize that our life and our time is not our own. We can walk now the way of eternity. We can be citizens of heaven on earth. Through self-offering, through surrender, the temple of our bodies can become vessels for the love and compassion of God. In this way, we can become open to eternity, the eternity of God. Our temporal existence with all its anxieties and sorrows is met in the man Jesus Christ, who goes before us to prepare a place for us, a habitation in God for all eternity.

Rogation Sunday

        St. John 14:15-21

“And I will pray the Father, and he shall give you another Comforter, that he may abide with you for ever.”

In this morning's Gospel lesson, we have a continuation of the Gospel from last week. The text is part of the farewell discourse, the final teaching of Jesus to his disciples before his arrest, trial and execution, contained in chapters 13 to 17 of St. John's Gospel. In this particular section of it, Jesus consoles the disciples that though they will lose his physical presence yet he will send them another comforter. The disciples are distraught. They are sorrowful. They are in anguish. Their attachment to Jesus is more than just an attachment to an idea like a person who is rabidly attached to a particular social or political cause. No, they are attached to a real man; they love this human being, not least because he has opened their eyes to the truth regarding God and the truth concerning their human situation. In an earlier passage in John's Gospel, Jesus—not surprisingly—makes some controversial remarks. The Evangelist reports that he lost some disciples on account of those remarks. Jesus then questions the twelve, will you also leave? Peter's response is quite wonderful. It speaks to what the disciples felt about their teacher and master. Peter says to Jesus: “Lord, to whom shall we go? thou hast the words of eternal life.” Undoubtedly that question was rolling through their heads—to whom shall we go?--on the night of last supper. It goes without saying that the disciples’ encounter with Jesus changed every aspect of their lives. They gave up their professions; they gave up a settled lifestyle to follow a traveling preacher; mostly importantly, they experienced a spiritual transformation as a result of their encounter with Jesus. I suspect the mere thought of his departure from them would provoke a sense of dismay and revulsion. Deep in them a shudder would rise up at the mere hint of his being taken from them. They did not want their time of earthly fellowship to come to an end.

The man Jesus however was bound by time, and like everything in time, there is a finite end to life and human relationships. This is part of the pain and sorrow and frustration of human existence. But of course, our Lord is more than a mere man. We believe he is the eternal Son of God. In his person, then, both eternity and time are united together. This is part of the mystery of the incarnation. We live in a world of change and decay, a world of time. God does not just perceive this from afar. The Christian story is not that God is only touched remotely by a feeling of sympathy for our time-bound existence. Rather, God takes that existence into himself in the man Jesus. He knows directly the cycles of time: the circle of hunger and satiation; the annual cycle of seasons and harvests; the reality that in the days given to a man to live, he will be preceded by many in death; he will witness some born; and finally he himself will leave others behind at his death. Our Lord, the Son of God, takes all this to himself. He doesn't turn away from the frustration and anguish that time can wreck on us. His embracing of our finite existence reaches a climax in his crucifixion and death. The Apostles' Creed states that our Lord “descended into hell.” In the original Latin of the Creed, the word for “hell” is infernos, literally the place of the dead. In other words, Jesus did not just appear to die. Upon death, he didn't have the after-death equivalent of the presidential suite to ride out his stay. He plunged into the uncertainty of death, about which on this side of the grave we know so little.

Our Lord's resurrection is a triumph over the ravages of time. He, in the words of the Orthodox hymn, tramples down death by death. In these events, he takes away from us the burden of sin; in the words of St. Paul, “God made him who knew no sin to be sin for us that we might be made the righteousness of God in him” (2 Corinthians 5:21). The disciples can and will know a degree of this resurrected life in this world, but it will only be a taste of the full transformation that is yet to come. They are still in this world. We are still in this world. Jesus tells his disciples that are living in time, “I will not leave you comfortless; I will come to you.” Jesus comes to the twelve and us not in the physical reality of his resurrected body. Rather, he sends the Comforter, the Holy Spirit. Now we tend to think of comforting as that which assuages pain, sorrow or disappointment. However, the older meaning of comfort is to strengthen. The Comforter, the Holy Spirit, is sent by our Lord to strengthen us. He comes to give us strength to live in this world as witnesses to the light and love of God. It is the Holy Spirit, the Comforter, who today communicates to us the reality of our Lord Jesus and leads us into the fellowship of the Father and Son. If the Holy Spirit has come, there is a source of joy that is not overcome by the vicissitudes of life. If the Holy Spirit has come, there is the power to love in the way that our Lord loved us, a self-less, self-offering love. If the Holy Spirit has come, there is a peace and faith that knows our Lord is aboard the ship with us, and we need not fear the tempest of even the fiercest storms: he will see us safely to shore. This is the Comforter from the Father, he that will abide with us forever.