tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-24446063811459099802024-03-25T17:10:55.422-07:00Grimly OptimisticSine dis et deabus in caelo animus non potest sanus esseRDGStouthttp://www.blogger.com/profile/03099242575796693843noreply@blogger.comBlogger1025125tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-2444606381145909980.post-1115643298754935652024-03-25T17:06:00.000-07:002024-03-25T17:10:22.307-07:00Terror and Amazement<br /><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEg9EJMx1VTeeJX9qYXOUHSfjYn3UZ_H869TrouwnLdIvWX_XD6qRzbcWqxiQVuflNOaQq5hD2bNFEpkn_zwMNGVq4nxUSe8-ovfK08kmnnJuydMgJNOsyZbAx8_djQWokAPYubY6Qu_gmibKGU78q1ygnL0xxyUOWzcebj-wKY3Swv4Nmw-MuxPwgigTr8/s944/Like%20Christ.jpg" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" data-original-height="944" data-original-width="782" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEg9EJMx1VTeeJX9qYXOUHSfjYn3UZ_H869TrouwnLdIvWX_XD6qRzbcWqxiQVuflNOaQq5hD2bNFEpkn_zwMNGVq4nxUSe8-ovfK08kmnnJuydMgJNOsyZbAx8_djQWokAPYubY6Qu_gmibKGU78q1ygnL0xxyUOWzcebj-wKY3Swv4Nmw-MuxPwgigTr8/s16000/Like%20Christ.jpg" /></a></div><span style="font-size: x-small;"><div style="text-align: center;"><a href="https://www.deviantart.com/kevron2001/art/Make-me-like-Christ-680228304">Make Me Like Christ</a>, by kevron2001</div></span><p><b>Propers: </b><a href="https://lectionary.library.vanderbilt.edu/texts.php?id=85">Easter Sunday, Holy Pascha, the Resurrection of Our Lord</a>, AD 2024 B</p><p><b>Homily:</b></p><p>Alleluia! Christ is risen! <i>He is risen indeed! Alleluia!</i></p><p>Grace, mercy, and peace to you from God our Father and from our Lord and Savior Jesus Christ. Amen.</p><p>“So they went out and fled from the tomb, for terror and amazement had seized them; and they said nothing to any one, for they were afraid.” Thus end our oldest manuscripts of the Holy Gospel According to St Mark. Later editors added other endings, incorporating other witnesses, but Mark appears to cut us off right then and there, with an empty tomb, and silence, and fear.</p><p>At the time when Mark was writing, Christians faced quite the crisis. The first generation of our leadership—James in Jerusalem, Peter amongst the Diaspora, Paul ministering to the Gentiles—all died in a wave of persecution. Shortly thereafter, Jerusalem fell, again, and the Temple of God was destroyed, never to be rebuilt, not for 2000 years. The world as Jews and Christians knew it had ended.</p><p>And so the second generation wrote down the witness of the first in order to pass it along to the third. The Gospels were written for grandchildren, to bequeath continuity to the faith. And Mark chose to end his here. Why? I firmly believe that the ending of any given story either makes or breaks the whole. Mark concluded his story at the open tomb—with the same women, mind you, who were at the Crucifixion. They weren’t frightened at the Cross. They weren’t scared to risk their lives for love of Christ. Yet here they are afraid.</p><p>You know, from a strictly historical perspective, it’s rather amazing that we know anything of Jesus Christ at all. He was a miracle worker from the Galilee, yes. But there were several miraculous rabbis, also from the Galilee, working wonders at that time. Crowds hailed Jesus as the Messiah, the Christ, whom they hoped would liberate Israel from Rome. Yet there were many would-be messiahs, both before and after Jesus. Rome had gotten pretty good at killing them. I’ll be impressed if you can name a one.</p><p>By rights, Jesus ought to have been forgotten, meriting a mention in the Talmud perhaps, or a footnote to Josephus. Instead He is worshipped as God Almighty by some two billion souls across every continent of this earth. What changed? What made the difference? It was Easter. Holy Pascha. The Resurrection of Our Lord. It was that open, broken tomb, the resulting fear and the shock that death herself had died.</p><p>Had Jesus stayed dead, He wouldn’t have done any good. He tells us this Himself: “Truly, truly, I say to you, unless a grain of wheat falls into the earth and dies, it remains alone; but if it dies, it bears much fruit.” There’s always the possibility that He’d have been remembered as a wise and moral guide, but I sincerely doubt it. He rooted His teachings firmly in the sapiential and apocalyptic traditions of His Jewish contemporaries, and how many of us remember them?</p><p>No, it was what happened after His death that changed the world, that changed everything. It cast His life, His mission, His Gospel in an entirely new light. Time and again the Evangelists remind us that His own Apostles, let alone the crowds, could not begin to understand Jesus until after He rose from the dead. James and Paul, the respective heads of the Jewish and Gentile Church, were not even followers of Jesus until after His Resurrection. They met the Risen Christ.</p><p>Peter and John, who knew Jesus in life—who followed Him throughout His ministry, who witnessed all His miracles, from the Transfiguration to His raising of the dead—they were consistently cowardly and confused until that very first Easter Sunday. Then they were transformed, utterly, made strong and wise and fearless, as though they were the resurrected, as though they had been raised from the dead.</p><p>God bless the teachings of our Lord. God bless His wisdom and His healings and His merciful, loving example. They are the lodestone of our lives. But all of that would amount to a hill of beans if He had just stayed dead, if sin, death, and the devil had had the final say. “Oh, look, somebody lived a life of love and we nailed Him to a Cross for it. Too bad, so sad.” Death ends everything. Death negates it all, isn’t that right? We tossed that hippie rabbi into hell, so that we could all get back to business as usual.</p><p>Only it didn’t work. This one time, this one Man, killing Him didn’t work. Violence didn’t work—which is ridiculous, really, because violence always works. That’s why we use it. And that’s what makes the tomb so scary: not in that it’s a tomb, but because somehow now it’s empty. It couldn’t hold Him. It couldn’t stop Him. Why, it barely slowed Him down. And on some level that’s more terrifying than all that went before, more frightening than the lash, the rod, the thorns, the nails, the spear. Because those things we understand.</p><p>We are intimately familiar with death. It’s what our taxes pay for, why we put cameras on our bombs. But to encounter Someone who outlives death—who accepts all of our violence, all of our hatred, all of our savagery, into the wounds of His flesh, where He then drowns it in the ocean of His love—what can we do against that? How can we fight a Man who is beyond all violence, beyond all vengeance, beyond even death?</p><p>All of our pointy little sticks, our nasty bits of metal, the fires that we light to drive the engines of our wars, all of that is impotent. All of that is useless. We are powerless in the face of His forgiveness. We have no defense at all against a grace that conquers hell. We can fight and we can spit and we can run and we can cry, but sooner or later He finds us. He absolves us. He gathers us all home in Him. And then at last our life begins.</p><p>The message of Easter is simply this: that Jesus is alive! He is alive within this community, alive within His Word, alive within these Sacraments we share. Everything that we do here, every tradition, every lesson, every song, is to put the life of Christ within you. Here in this congregation, this motley crew of sainted sinners, Jesus has baptized you into His death and His life: into His own death, already died for you, that you need never fear death again; and into His own eternal life, already here begun.</p><p>We read the Scriptures because they are Jesus’ Scriptures, the tales of His people which have shaped His heart and mind. We gather at this Altar, at the eternal Table of our Lord, to share together in His Last Supper, His Holy Eucharist, the Christian Passover feast. Here we are given His flesh and His blood, together becoming His Body: the hands and feet and voice of Christ at work within this world. Here His Spirit dwells within us, the Life and the Breath of our God, burning as a fire that can neither dim nor die.</p><p>Jesus takes upon Himself all that we have been—our arrogance, our pride, our prejudices, our mistakes, every time we’ve fallen short—and gives to us all that He is: eternal and perfect and loving and healing, alive beyond all death. We are sons and daughters of God, the Bride and the Body of Christ. Our destiny is eternal. Our future is immortal. And all the things we suffer here shall pass away at the last.</p><p>Life now outlives death. And this is not simply some future promise, but our present reality, because it changes who we are, how we live. With Christ we can brave anything. Not because bad things won’t happen—we know very well that they will—but because we know that ultimately, death has no power over us, violence has no power over us, for Jesus has had the last Word. Indeed, He is the last Word, the eternal revelation of the Father’s hidden heart. And His will for us is life without limit, life forevermore.</p><p>So live now as though this were true. Live as though death were no worry. Give as one who has received a priceless gift. Dedicate the time we have to loving as we have been loved. And know that in God no good thing is ever truly lost, and not one of us shall be forgotten. Salvation begins here and now, in people who are liberated to live as Jesus lives. And all that we are called to do is to share His life with the world. Christ is alive! And in His Resurrection, we can now be too.</p><p>Alleluia! Christ is risen! <i>He is risen indeed! Alleluia!</i></p><p>In the Name of the Father and of the +Son and of the Holy Spirit. Amen.</p><p><br /></p><p><br /></p><p><br /></p><p><i>If you would like to contribute to St Peter’s ministry online, <a href="https://secure.myvanco.com/L-Z9EG/home">you may do so here</a>, and we would thank God for your generosity</i>.</p>RDGStouthttp://www.blogger.com/profile/03099242575796693843noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-2444606381145909980.post-2743160859492046242024-03-21T08:08:00.000-07:002024-03-21T08:08:18.396-07:00O Great Generosity<br /><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEhIywgEDEeB0A6PmcCNzbc50521wlhWGRD61gz-rP99mj-1b0xwW45ReEsPTMAbbQOUqSL449MBqEu6VXDEYnhlu7KSfZVEPUdF1XTiNoKT18fuHBR_6Wbt1nx-BJP1stYCdJA2LZiil-wCcbPAiplwdve_1riMF_sZJXMjwh9oAXY9vkvYAb7mYNTFmqk/s1599/Resurrection,%20by%20Joeatta78.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" data-original-height="1599" data-original-width="1200" height="1409" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEhIywgEDEeB0A6PmcCNzbc50521wlhWGRD61gz-rP99mj-1b0xwW45ReEsPTMAbbQOUqSL449MBqEu6VXDEYnhlu7KSfZVEPUdF1XTiNoKT18fuHBR_6Wbt1nx-BJP1stYCdJA2LZiil-wCcbPAiplwdve_1riMF_sZJXMjwh9oAXY9vkvYAb7mYNTFmqk/w1057-h1409/Resurrection,%20by%20Joeatta78.jpg" width="1057" /></a></div><span style="font-size: x-small;"><div style="text-align: center;"><a href="https://www.deviantart.com/joeatta78/art/Resurrection-of-Christ-851140199">Resurrection of Christ</a>, by joeatta78</div></span><p><b>Propers:</b> <a href="https://lectionary.library.vanderbilt.edu/texts.php?id=84">The Great Vigil of Easter</a>, AD 2024 B</p><p><b>Homily:</b></p><p>Alleluia! Christ is Risen! <i>He is Risen indeed! Alleluia!</i></p><p>Grace, mercy, and peace to you from God our Father, and from our Lord and Savior Jesus Christ. Amen.</p><p>The Paschal homily of St Gregory of Nazianzus, fourth-century Cappadocian Father, philosopher, theologian, and Archbishop of Constantinople:</p><p>It is the Day of the Resurrection, and my beginning has good auspices. Let us then keep the festival with splendor, and let us embrace one another. Let us say “brethren” even to those who hate us; much more to those who have done or suffered anything out of love for us …</p><p>He who today arose again from the dead may renew me also by his Spirit; and, clothing me with the new Man, may give me to his new Creation … willingly both dying with Him and rising again with Him.</p><p>Yesterday the Lamb was slain and the door-posts were anointed, and Egypt bewailed her firstborn, and the Destroyer passed us over, and the seal was dreadful and reverend, and we were walled in with the precious Blood. Today we have clean escaped from Egypt and from Pharaoh; and there is none to hinder us from keeping a feast to the Lord our God …</p><p>Yesterday I was crucified with Him; today I am glorified with Him; yesterday I died with Him; today I am quickened with Him; yesterday I was buried with Him; today I rise with Him!</p><p>But let us offer to him who suffered and rose again for us—you will think perhaps that I am going to say gold, or silver, or … costly stones, the mere passing material of earth, that remains here below, and is for the most part always possessed by bad men, slaves of the world and of the prince of [this] world.</p><p>Let us offer [instead] ourselves, the possession most precious to God, and most fitting; let us give back to the Image what is made after the Image. Let us recognize our Dignity; let us honor our Archetype; let us know the power of the Mystery, and for what Christ died.</p><p>Let us become like Christ, since Christ became like us. Let us become God’s [own] for his sake, since He for ours became Man. He assumed the worse that He might give us the better; He became poor that we through his poverty might be rich; He took upon Him the form of a servant that we might receive back our liberty; He came down that we might be exalted; He was tempted that we might conquer;</p><p>He was dishonored that He might glorify us; He died that He might save us; He ascended that He might draw us to Himself, who were lying low in the fall of sin. Let us give all, offer all, to Him who gave Himself a ransom and a reconciliation for us [all]. But one can give nothing like oneself, understanding the mystery, and becoming for His sake all that He became for ours.</p><p>As you see, He offers you a Shepherd; for this is [that for which] your Good Shepherd, who lays down his life for his sheep, is hoping and praying … He gives you Himself double instead of single … He adds to the inanimate temple a living one [your own self and soul]; to that exceedingly beautiful and heavenly shrine, this poor and small one; yet to Him of great value, and built too with much sweat and many labors. Would that I could say [that we were] worthy of his labors!</p><p>And He places at your disposal all that belongs to Him. O great generosity!— or it would be truer to say, O fatherly love! [He gives to you] the Temple, the High Priest, the Testator, the Heir, the discourses for which you were longing; and of these not such as are vain and poured out into the air, and which reach no further than the outward ear; but those which the Spirit writes and engraves on tables … of flesh, not merely superficially graven, nor easily to be rubbed off, but marked very deep not with ink but with grace.</p><p>These are the gifts given you by this august Abraham, this honorable and reverend Head, this Patriarch, this Resting-place of all good, this Standard of virtue, this Perfection of the Priesthood, who today is bringing to the Lord his willing Sacrifice, His only Son, Him of the promise [with all the ransomed dead resplendent in His train].</p><p>Do you on your side offer to God … [free and loving] obedience … dwelling in a place of herbage, and being fed by waters of refreshment; knowing your Shepherd well, and being known by Him … following when he calls you as a Shepherd … guiding and being guided … that we may all be one in Christ Jesus our Lord, now and unto the heavenly rest, to whom be the glory and the might for ever and ever.</p><p>In the Name of the Father and of the +Son and of the Holy Spirit. Amen.</p><p><br /></p><p><br /></p><p><br /></p><p><i>If you would like to contribute to St Peter’s ministry online, <a href="https://secure.myvanco.com/L-Z9EG/home">you may do so here</a>, and we would thank God for your generosity</i>.</p>RDGStouthttp://www.blogger.com/profile/03099242575796693843noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-2444606381145909980.post-19500184281245306342024-03-20T09:42:00.000-07:002024-03-20T09:54:16.751-07:00Saint Death<br /><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEh-Fc5Y4-pI5RRITvRXsG1W-L_Qo_aVxMaRHgWEL_zzGQ324FiLuoXdWujtH8auol59PNdIIxES20Jty8-Y-oJrFHiRy-jJu1brg5caUD3mCcAFE5-77oIRLibAobAnvWBMog1tuhyphenhyphenzEEk4vjVT74LXD3iqfnd-pMW5QgPITfvw5Um0Qu-B5cIWF8neLs0/s1000/Santa%20Muerte.jpg" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" data-original-height="1000" data-original-width="714" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEh-Fc5Y4-pI5RRITvRXsG1W-L_Qo_aVxMaRHgWEL_zzGQ324FiLuoXdWujtH8auol59PNdIIxES20Jty8-Y-oJrFHiRy-jJu1brg5caUD3mCcAFE5-77oIRLibAobAnvWBMog1tuhyphenhyphenzEEk4vjVT74LXD3iqfnd-pMW5QgPITfvw5Um0Qu-B5cIWF8neLs0/s16000/Santa%20Muerte.jpg" /></a></div><span style="font-size: x-small;"><div style="text-align: center;">Zero Saints limited edition hardcover, by Daniele Serra</div></span><p><b>Propers: </b><a href="https://lectionary.library.vanderbilt.edu/texts.php?id=82">Good Friday</a>, AD 2024 B</p><p><b>Homily:</b></p><p>Lord, we pray for the preacher, for you know his sins are great.</p><p>Grace, mercy, and peace to you from God our Father and from our Lord and Savior Jesus Christ. Amen.</p><p>The fastest growing new religious movement on the planet is the literal worship of death.</p><p>I’ll grant that one must take such claims with a healthy grain of salt. So far as I can tell, every religious movement professes itself the fastest growing by some metric or another. Yet this one in particular has added 12 million devotees in just the last two decades, so the assertion has some chops.</p><p>They call her Santa Muerte, Saint or Holy Death, and her origins prove debatable at best. Her cult began in Mexico, but has spread at home and abroad. She is most aptly described as a folk saint, embraced by the masses of faithful, both Christian and pagan alike, though certainly not by the bishops. And while some hold her to be an angel or a deceased human being, most widely she is simply viewed as the personification of death.</p><p>The iconography is fascinating. Depicted as a skeleton, Santa Muerte often holds a scythe or an hourglass, symbols of death and of time, classical identifiers of the Grim Reaper. Yet she undeniably resembles Our Lady of Gaudelupe, the Marian apparition that converted Mexico. And then there are Aztec elements, recalling Mictēcacihuātl, the goddess of death and the dead. The result is a striking composite figure to say the least.</p><p>Some would claim that her cult is pagan, an underground holdover from before the Conquistadors. I am more persuaded by those who would point to Spanish Holy Week processions, when the skeletal personification of death would be wheeled out on a cart in Christian parade, representing Good Friday, the Cross and carven Tomb. But then, death is universal, so in some sense she’s always been here.</p><p>As a twenty-first-century goddess and saint, Santa Muerte’s fame appears to spring from her reputation for miracles and magic—as well as from her nonjudgmental, which is to say amoral, approach to worship and devotion. Santa Muerte doesn’t judge. She accepts narcos, prostitutes, sicarios, nightshift cabbies, cops, anyone who has to deal with death; which is all of us, really. Jesus accepts us all, then tells us to go and sin no more. Santa Muerte doesn’t give a damn.</p><p>Ever since seminary, I’ve been fascinated by the figure of Santa Muerte, and not just because I’m a sucker for Halloween. There’s always been a spooky side to Christianity. Go and take a gander at any pre-Reformation cathedral. It’s all memento mori and danse macabre. Heck, our primary symbol of faith is an instrument of execution. We tend to forget it because it’s so common, but a crucifix is a horror, the murder of Man and of God.</p><p>But we look at all that as the past, whereas the cult of Santa Muerte is very much the present. You can find her in just about every major American city. Over Thanksgiving, I purchased a novena candle to Santa Muerte at a thrift store in rural Fairmount, MN. We’re forever being told that reason rolls back the tide of religion, that science has overcome faith. Yet just the opposite is true. As organized religion wanes, so does faith in reason: we don’t trust scientific authority any more than we do ecclesiastic.</p><p>And here comes Santa Muerte, bowling over boundaries, linking Christian and criminal, pious and pagan, north and south, east and west. She offers miracles and magic, blessings and curses, an unapologetically amoral spirit for an unapologetically amoral age. Yet there is beauty in her. How else would she be so accepted? How else would she be so revered? We still have to deal with death, each and all of us, the debt all men must pay. Our vaunted technology lets us pretend to put it off, but sooner or later every man jack one of us must meet her.</p><p>And we so desperately, deeply want her to be something beautiful, something loving, something good. We want the happy death, the blessed death, the crypt become our kingdom. And that is a Christian longing: the Christian profession that death has been defeated, the great nothing filled up by the Christ, transformed now to be our gate to eternal life. We can only ignore death for so long. After that we must either despair, or find faith. Because the truth is that either death negates everything, or something negates death.</p><p>Those are the only two options. The grave devours us all, or Someone devours the grave.</p><p>That’s what this night is about. That’s why we have the gall to call it Good Friday. Make no mistake: we murdered our God. We strung up an innocent Man and tortured Him to death. And it was the end of the world! Few knew it at the time. Yet there on the Cross was the Judgment. There the ruler of this world was driven out. Christ died at our hands and for our sake, died because He forgave us our sins as though He were our God. And He was! He is God from all eternity.</p><p>At the Cross we divided by zero. We committed the impossible crime. We murdered life itself, hated Love Himself, bound the Infinite, ended the Eternal, cast our Creator into hell, the All into the nothingness of the abyss. And there He conquered! There He filled up death and hell to bursting with the life and love, the Spirit and truth, the Body and Blood of our God. He turned our whole world inside-out and upside-down. Most of us didn’t notice due to the banality of evil: just one more corpse on a cross. And yet upon that Cross, death itself has died.</p><p>God did not make death. She has no substance, no form. She is simply the lack of life, the vacuum and the void. But I wonder now whether she hasn’t been given a certain reality; called out, as are we all, from nothingness unto pleroma; her true form, true purpose, revealed as transformation, a sloughing off of dross, a rebirth into glory. Thus could St Francis of Assisi sing of her on his deathbed:</p><p><i>Praised be you, my Lord, through our Sister Bodily Death, from whom no one living can escape … Blessed are those whom Sister Death will find in your most holy will, for the second death can do them no harm</i>.</p><p>There is a Santa Muerte, a good and holy death. We can quibble about forms of devotion, personification, and especially immorality. But we have all been Baptized, into Christ’s own death and Resurrection: into Jesus’ death, that we need never fear death again, and into His eternal life, already here begun. Jesus Christ has conquered death and raised us evermore. So when we must greet the Bony Lady, we go in friendship, not in fear.</p><p>Christians worship not Saint Death, but the One who raises the dead.</p><p>In the Name of the Father and of the +Son and of the Holy Spirit. Amen.</p><p><br /></p><p><br /></p><p><br /></p><p><i>If you would like to contribute to St Peter’s ministry online, <a href="https://secure.myvanco.com/L-Z9EG/home">you may do so here</a>, and we would thank God for your generosity</i>.</p>RDGStouthttp://www.blogger.com/profile/03099242575796693843noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-2444606381145909980.post-77175555445520066312024-03-19T10:11:00.000-07:002024-03-19T10:11:35.155-07:00No God<br /><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEgB99KtLCW3jowDgG8pB5yELDVPrSCq9huGdw8iIYoeFGdXpkcqI8rjB6aM2xF718jjnychz58HBz6GXAXJ2SSphIUhFznsfiBDzO8I9v15nOURKv5N8Q9uG0AdA2W21wvXikl4bgXmXiZ-m451OEgEqA6QVy5F8IZOupboobdHnzRbzltgrM4fY8lr3u8/s1568/Blue%20Cross.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" data-original-height="1568" data-original-width="960" height="1151" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEgB99KtLCW3jowDgG8pB5yELDVPrSCq9huGdw8iIYoeFGdXpkcqI8rjB6aM2xF718jjnychz58HBz6GXAXJ2SSphIUhFznsfiBDzO8I9v15nOURKv5N8Q9uG0AdA2W21wvXikl4bgXmXiZ-m451OEgEqA6QVy5F8IZOupboobdHnzRbzltgrM4fY8lr3u8/w705-h1151/Blue%20Cross.jpg" width="705" /></a></div><span style="font-size: x-small;"><a href="https://lectionary.library.vanderbilt.edu/texts.php?id=77">Anunimouse96</a></span><br /></div></div><p><b>Propers:</b> <a href="https://lectionary.library.vanderbilt.edu/texts.php?id=76">Palm Sunday</a> of <a href="https://lectionary.library.vanderbilt.edu/texts.php?id=77">the Passion</a>, AD 2024 B</p><p><b>Homily:</b></p><p>Lord, we pray for the preacher, for you know his sins are great.</p><p>Grace, mercy, and peace to you from God our Father and from our Lord and Savior Jesus Christ. Amen.</p><p>No god would stand for this, just so that we’re clear.</p><p>There is not a single deity in any Ancient Near Eastern or Greco-Roman pantheon who would voluntarily suffer abandonment, disgrace, torture, and death, all for the love of those same souls who betrayed and murdered him. Christianity is the only religion to have as its central event the humiliation of our God.</p><p>The ancient gods and goddesses cared little for right or wrong. They themselves were beyond morality, beyond mere good and evil. What concerned them was power, power and honor. Oathbreakers, blasphemers, criminals were punished not so much for injustice as for impugning the sovereignty of whatever god had placed their victims under divine protection. So many mythological monsters were made such by offending the gods, dishonoring immortals.</p><p>There was the notion, of course, in many ancient societies, that beyond the feuding fickle heavens there dwelt a God beyond all gods, a God not even properly termed a god. This was the God, the One, the Source, the All, the Unmoved Mover, infinite, eternal, beautiful, good, and true. Yet He was believed so far beyond us as barely to notice us. Still, the dawning awareness of the God beyond all gods can be seen in the Hebrew Prophets, the Greek philosophers, the Hindu Brahmins.</p><p>Jesus suffers death in the worst way we know how. It’s slow and agonizing and utterly intentional. The Romans made murder an art, indeed a political statement: “See what we can do to one who claims to be a king.” We have no king but Caesar. How do we respond to this? What is the point of this? Is it just to feel sad? Is it to squirm in our pews, or to be emotionally manipulated by the pathos of the scene? No, my friends, my Christians. It is so much more than that. The Cross turns our world upside-down.</p><p>The idea of a god who would suffer out of love—for strangers, for enemies—is foolish, scandalous, utterly abhorrent to the ancient or classical mind. Furthermore the notion, already present throughout the Gospels, that Christ is not just a god but the God, the God beyond all gods, compounds the shock by orders of magnitude. Entirely outrageous! To think that God could be humiliated, scourged, crucified, mocked, and murdered? No wonder early Christians flabbergasted Rome.</p><p>And then there’s death, from whose bourn no traveller returns. Make no mistake: the gods fear death. Persephone, the queen of Hades, can only escape but six months a year. Ereshkigal, the goddess of death, begs for her life to her husband. Thor is worn down by old age and time, and Odysseus finds Herakles in hell, his human half at any rate. Even our deities bow down to death, and those who return for a time do not come in peace.</p><p>Yet here has Jesus conquered death. Christ has arisen from the tomb! He filled up hell to bursting with the life and love of God, and ransomed all the damned from the time of Adam and Eve, with all of those who perished in the Flood, and raised them up to God in Him. Here comes Christ, this scraggly desert rabbi, with His ragtag band of misfits and losers, fishermen and tax collectors. And somehow storms obey Him! Demons flee before Him. The sea supports His footfall. All the things we humans fear bow down in supplication.</p><p>And now at the last even death. Even the grave. Even hell. Christ is more than we’ve ever encountered, more than we could imagine. If He so chose, He could snap His fingers and command the planet Mars to knock out the Earth from beneath Him. And what does He do with His power? How does He show us His glory? By feeding the hungry, forgiving the sinner, rebuking the abusive, instructing the ignorant, turning the other cheek, healing those who suffer, and raising up all of the dead!</p><p>He saves the people who crucified Him. He saves the Apostles who abandoned Him. He saves even Judas who betrayed Him. He does all this not through fire, not through wrath, not through legions of angels from Heaven, but by selfless self-sacrifice, by loving the loveless, forgiving the unforgivable, by a mercy the like of which this world has never seen. And He changes everything.</p><p>The Cross turns our world upside-down. Or rather, our whole world was upside-down, for as long as we could remember; the Cross now sets it aright. Right replaces might. Humility overcomes honor. He lifts up the lowly and casts down the mighty from their thrones. Human rights, rule of law, equality, abolition, all of it flows from the Cross. And even death, that ancient insatiable maw consuming us and all there is, has been conquered, has been tamed, has been resurrected as the Way to life eternal.</p><p>We can’t even truly tell properly pagan stories anymore. Modern depictions of Hercules, of Thor, of RoboCop, the Matrix, and the Crow, all involve someone suffering for love, even unto death, so that he can rise again to right the world. Christ is every hero we have known. A poor Jew, executed by the state, in an impoverished and colonized country on the edge of civilization, is for us the nexus where God and Man are One. And if that doesn’t blow our minds, if that doesn’t humble our hearts, then we simply haven’t been paying attention.</p><p>The Cross was never incidental. There we broke a Man. And God poured forth from His side.</p><p>In the Name of the Father and of the +Son and of the Holy Spirit. Amen.</p><p><br /></p><p><br /></p><p><br /></p><p><i>If you would like to contribute to St Peter’s ministry online, <a href="https://secure.myvanco.com/L-Z9EG/home">you may do so here</a>, and we would thank God for your generosity</i>.</p><br />RDGStouthttp://www.blogger.com/profile/03099242575796693843noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-2444606381145909980.post-13881072470673453322024-03-14T10:06:00.000-07:002024-03-14T11:30:14.870-07:00All the Way Down<div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><br /></div><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEg9WGkmBDeEgFcwwo0wu5NUOz_6udqAD1KdXLkUGVFNILUeWKC4730dKa8DACizER-TJu5ZPKkZplBL-LOsEILBNjcHA_KJT4Z9cga3QXuH6K2OuB5Ei7uAKN4Fp8LAU009QbyPi49i4kC4SFkg1h93LGkJJbaoxzLACM4feHGJefUPVYtluzdxAT9Y8rs/s1600/into-the-spiderverse.jpeg" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" data-original-height="1600" data-original-width="900" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEg9WGkmBDeEgFcwwo0wu5NUOz_6udqAD1KdXLkUGVFNILUeWKC4730dKa8DACizER-TJu5ZPKkZplBL-LOsEILBNjcHA_KJT4Z9cga3QXuH6K2OuB5Ei7uAKN4Fp8LAU009QbyPi49i4kC4SFkg1h93LGkJJbaoxzLACM4feHGJefUPVYtluzdxAT9Y8rs/s16000/into-the-spiderverse.jpeg" /></a></div><p><b>Propers:</b> <a href="https://lectionary.library.vanderbilt.edu/texts.php?id=75">The Fifth Sunday in Lent</a>, AD 2024 B</p><p><b>Homily:</b></p><p>Lord, we pray for the preacher, for you know his sins are great.</p><p>Grace, mercy, and peace to you from God our Father and from our Lord and Savior Jesus Christ. Amen.</p><p><i>The days are surely coming, says the Lord, when I will make a new covenant with the house of Israel … They shall all know me, from the least of them to the greatest … I will forgive their iniquity, and remember their sin no more</i>.</p><p>If you’ve ever wondered why we refer to the Christian Scriptures of the Bible as the new covenant, the New Testament, such terminology derives from this passage in the Prophet Jeremiah. His was no easy calling, as Jeremiah oversaw the destruction of his nation. The Neo-Babylonian Empire conquered the Kingdom of Judah, burned down the Jerusalem Temple, slit the throats of the king’s sons before putting out his royal eyes, and dragged off all but the poorest Judeans to Exile in a foreign land. The meek inherited the earth.</p><p>It appeared that the ancient sacred covenant at long last had been broken, indeed annihilated. “I will be your God, and you will be My people,” Yahweh had promised unto Abraham: promised that Abraham would have a family, that family would become a people, that people a nation, and that nation a blessing to every family on the earth. And so it came to pass, in the stories of our Scriptures.</p><p>Abraham’s family grew and prospered, eventually becoming a great people in the land of Egypt. By the hand of Moses, God led them out from slavery in Egypt to the Promised Land of their ancestors, and gave to them a Law so that they could then become a nation. God united their 12 disparate Tribes under the kingship of David, and centralized worship at the Temple of Solomon. This is how the people knew their God: through the land, through the monarchy, and through the holy Temple.</p><p>How historical all this is we leave for scholars to debate. What matters is that this is how the Israelites understood their identity. They were defined by their covenant with God, the promise that He would be their God and they would be His people, come what may. A covenant is not so much a contract, with specifications of duties, as it is the promise of steadfast relationship, a bedrock pledge of fidelity and love.</p><p>Traditionally one “cuts” a covenant, meaning that sacrificial beasts would be split in half, so that the parties of the promise could walk between the twain, as though to say, “Should what happened to these animals happen unto me, should I ever forsake my covenant with you.” A literally visceral pact, sanctified in blood.</p><p>But then the Babylonians take away the land, take away the king, take away the Temple. No more priests, no more royals, no more rituals. No more ancestral locations, where the bones of generations sacralize the soil. Is God gone? Is the covenant undone? It’s true we broke the covenant, Jeremiah says. We brought this on ourselves by abandoning our God, not just religiously but morally, forsaking justice, abrogating mercy. Yet God has not abandoned us. He has followed us into our Exile, followed us into our mourning. He was with us in Egypt, as He is with us in Babylon, and then as now He calls us home.</p><p><i>The days are surely coming, says the Lord, when I will make a new covenant with the house of Israel … not like the covenant that I made with their ancestors … that they broke, though I was their husband … I will put my law within them, and I will write it on their hearts, and … they shall all know me, from the least of them to the greatest</i>.</p><p>People are unfaithful, Jeremiah says. Any fool could tell you that. But God is always faithful. God never goes away. We lost everything we knew, but we have never lost our God. They stripped from us every touchstone of our faith, and yet behold! Our God is here! In modern Judaism, the new covenant of Jeremiah is understood to be a reaffirmation of the old, a return to the roots of the relationship, to the promise of the covenant and the keeping of the Law. Christians historically have taken it somewhat differently.</p><p>We must tread carefully here. So often we have fallen into supersessionism, the idea that God’s old covenant is done, that the Jews have been abandoned, and that the Church is the new and true replacement of God’s defective people, a New Israel with our New Covenant. But to say so is to rankly contradict the Scriptures here. God does not abandon His people, no matter how we sin. And Jesus Himself preaches the Gospel, preaches the Good News, not as a rejection of the Law, a rejection of the covenant, but as its fulfillment in glory.</p><p>There is a real sense in which the Gospel is the Law in its truest purest form. “Love the Lord your God with all your heart and soul and mind,” said Jesus, and “love your neighbor as yourself. All the Law and the Prophets hang on these two commandments.” It’s not about replacing or breaking the promises of God. It’s about breaking them open, universalizing them, fulfilling the promise to Abraham to be a blessing to all of the earth.</p><p>That’s why, in our reading from the Gospel this morning, when Greeks come seeking Jesus, He then knows His time is short. The Crucifixion, the Resurrection, the Judgment of the world is here at hand, for the promise is fulfilled, the covenant brought to fruition. And it is done so, we believe, through our Lord Jesus Christ. His is the new covenant, the fulfillment of the old, not replacing, not superseding—for Christ is thoroughly Jewish and never ceases to be so—but expanding it to all of the world, grafting wild branches onto cultivated stock.</p><p>We shall no longer say to ourselves, “Know the Lord,” for we all know Him now. We know Him face to face. Jesus is our God made flesh, the face of God the Father. And He forgives us our sins, utterly, ridiculously, superabundantly, forgives us even as we murder Him. Such radical mercy, such scandalous love, shall when He is lifted up draw all men unto Him. There, on the Cross, is the judgment of our world. There, on the Cross, is the devil driven out. There we know the depths to which our God descends to save us.</p><p>This is why He’s come, He knows. Christ has come to die. Not because the Father demands some awful human sacrifice; Jesus was running about willy-nilly forgiving us our sins long before the Cross. No, He knew that He would have to die because of who we are. Because we could only respond to infinite love by torturing Him to death. This surely would break the covenant. If it couldn’t, then what on earth would? What Father wouldn’t burn the world that crucified His Son?</p><p>But we were wrong about everything. About Christ. About God. About judgment and death. We thought that if we threw Him into hell, that would be the end of it. No more Messiah, no more Kingdom, no more Heaven barging in wherever it doesn’t belong. Yet all we really did was put Him right where He intended: down in the pit, in the depths of hell, with all of the dead and the damned. That was His intention all along.</p><p>Christ has come to conquer all, the whole of our reality, the wellsprings of Creation. And to do that He must first descend: descending from Heaven to earth, from the womb unto the tomb; descending then from the Cross, down into nothingness, down into hell. And then He came back up! —rising all the way from the bottom, from the roots of the deepest pit, pulling up with Him Adam and Eve and all the ransomed dead resplendent in His train: thus to conquer death and hell, and bring holiness back unto Heaven.</p><p>He doesn’t conquer all the world with violence and hate. He conquers it with love, humility, self-sacrifice and growth, conquers us all by forgiving our sins, by raising us up from the dead, by gathering every wayward soul to God again in Him. Jesus went all the way down, in order to bring everyone and everything all the way back up.</p><p>This is the covenant unbreakable: that everyone, from least to greatest, knows God face to face; that our sins are forgiven, our iniquities forgotten; that everything old is new again, for life has outlived death. God is with us, He is for us, and He cannot be taken away. Such is the Judgment. Such is the Kingdom. Such is the Christ. Go, proclaim our ecstasy, to all this weary world. Go proclaim the Gospel that Jesus is alive.</p><p>In the Name of the Father and of the +Son and of the Holy Spirit. Amen.</p><p><br /></p><p><br /></p><p><br /></p><p><i>If you would like to contribute to St Peter’s ministry online, <a href="https://secure.myvanco.com/L-Z9EG/home">you may do so here</a>, and we would thank God for your generosity</i>.</p>RDGStouthttp://www.blogger.com/profile/03099242575796693843noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-2444606381145909980.post-82240174194511844382024-03-13T09:48:00.000-07:002024-03-13T14:54:51.019-07:00Unity<br /><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEhueGNEKY1ewPq039F6MRmLKlusuIRB-QhASQbYVi34g5AlfyQ_GyOVhIrIIOV3QY7fRK23S3_Tm9-SfJYr7VpRSjKMFHT7fYj_dWHPJZQl19bjyseeDuL43V9eOENBf2EY4YhAxuv1-QielbB7Q5kd6F723FVvcZu2JuZ0yZECdBnZvb2OAEHIgkixw54/s1596/Hagia%20Sophia.jpg" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" data-original-height="1596" data-original-width="1140" height="1183" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEhueGNEKY1ewPq039F6MRmLKlusuIRB-QhASQbYVi34g5AlfyQ_GyOVhIrIIOV3QY7fRK23S3_Tm9-SfJYr7VpRSjKMFHT7fYj_dWHPJZQl19bjyseeDuL43V9eOENBf2EY4YhAxuv1-QielbB7Q5kd6F723FVvcZu2JuZ0yZECdBnZvb2OAEHIgkixw54/w844-h1183/Hagia%20Sophia.jpg" width="844" /></a></div><span style="font-size: x-small;"><div style="text-align: center;">Hagia Sophia, by Luciana Hartwin</div></span><br /><p style="text-align: center;"><b><i>Lenten Vespers, Week Five: Holy Wisdom</i></b></p><p><b>A Reading from Hagia Sophia, by Thomas Merton:</b></p><p>There is in all visible things an invisible fecundity, a dimmed light, a meek namelessness, a hidden whole-ness. This mysterious Unity and Integrity is Wisdom, the Mother of all, <i>Natura naturans</i>. There is in all things an inexhaustible sweetness and purity, a silence that is a fount of action and joy. It rises up in word-less gentleness and flows out to me from the unseen roots of all created being, welcoming me tenderly, saluting me with indescribable humility. This is at once my own being, my own nature, and the Gift of my Creator's Thought and Art within me, speaking as Hagia Sophia, speaking as my sister, Wisdom …</p><p>O blessed, silent one, who speaks everywhere! We do not hear the soft voice, the gentle voice, the merciful and feminine. We do not hear mercy, or yielding love, or non-resistance, or non-reprisal. In her there are no reasons and no answers. Yet she is the candor of God's light, the expression of His simplicity …</p><p>All the perfections of created things are also in God; and therefore He is at once Father and Mother. As Father He stands in solitary might surrounded by darkness. As Mother His shining is diffused, embracing all His creatures with merciful tenderness and light. The Diffuse Shining of God is Hagia Sophia. We call her His "glory." In Sophia His power is experienced only as mercy and as love …</p><p>Hagia Sophia in all things is the Divine Light reflected in them, considered as a spontaneous participation, as their invitation to the Wedding Feast. Sophia is God's sharing of Himself with creatures. His outporing, and the Love by which He is given, and known, held and loved. She is in all things like the air receiving the sunlight. In her they prosper. In her they glorify God. In her they rejoice to reflect Him. In her they are united with him. She is the union between them. She is the Love that unites them. She is life as communion, life as thanksgiving, life as praise, life as festival, life as glory.</p><p>Here ends the reading.</p><p><b>Homily:</b></p><p>Lord, we pray for the preacher, for you know his sins are great.</p><p>Grace, mercy, and peace to you from God our Father and from our Lord and Savior Jesus Christ. Amen.</p><p>I learned as a child that wisdom is not knowledge, though I often struggled at the time to distinguish between the two. Knowledge consisted of data, facts, information. Wisdom was described to me as how we use that knowledge, how to apply and tailor it to specific situations, how to string the data together into some coherent whole. But I never found that explanation satisfying.</p><p>Wisdom is one of those things that we all believe in, we all experience, we all talk about, regardless of culture or creed. Yet it’s typically tenaciously difficult to define. Wisdom proves elusive, hard to nail down. Like art, we shall know it when we see it. Wisdom shows us how to live a good and proper life, according to the Book of Proverbs. Wisdom reveals life to be but vanity and suffering, according to Ecclesiastes. And those two were supposedly written by the same guy, part of the Bible’s “wisdom literature.”</p><p>All religions have wisdom traditions, as do all philosophies. Philosophy literally means the love of wisdom. And one quickly finds connection between wisdom and mysticism. Mystics are those, in any tradition, who seek unity with the Absolute, a direct connection to God. All religions are born of mystical experience, of encounters with God, however termed. That’s what all of this is about, all of Christianity: encountering God in Jesus, becoming one with Him in Word and Sacrament. Christ is our mystical union with God.</p><p>At that’s what wisdom is, at heart. Wisdom is oneness: the unity, if not uniformity, underlying and transcending all that there is. In Taoism, that’s the Tao. In Judaism, that’s the Law. In Buddhism, that’s Enlightenment. It’s the realization, the personal experience, of the oneness undergirding all Creation; indeed, our oneness with God. Hindus sum this up in their famous phrasing, “Atman is Brahman,” the self or soul is God.</p><p>That doesn’t mean, mind you, that I, this ego RDG Stout, am the Creator and Father of all, the Source and Ground of all being. Rather, it means that I and all things are created by God, sustained by God, and return to God. We are fashioned in His image, brought to life by His breath. When we affirm that God creates ex nihilo, out of nothing, we mean of course that He creates us out of nothing other than Himself.</p><p>Jesus teaches us that the greatest commandments are to love God with all we are, and to love our neighbors as ourselves. And that’s because we all are one. My neighbor is my brother; more than that, he is myself. We are all the one Adam. We are all the Body of Christ. And God dwells within us. We are temples of His Spirit, says St Paul. I love God by loving what He loves. I love God by loving His Creation, for He is the Father of us all. We are one with each other. God would be one with us.</p><p>Sophiology, in Christian thought, is a branch of theology, which is how we think of God. The Christian insight, the Christian revelation, includes the understanding that God is Three in One: One Substance, One Essence, in Three Underlying Realities. We are not alone in this. Many faiths speak of God as Three and yet as One. Over the course of these midweek Lenten Vespers, I have spoken at length on the reality of <a href="https://rdgstout.blogspot.com/2024/02/our-father.html">God as Father</a>, <a href="https://rdgstout.blogspot.com/2024/02/whither-walks-word.html">Son</a>, and <a href="https://rdgstout.blogspot.com/2024/03/manifestrix.html">Holy Spirit</a>; and how the Spirit and Son <a href="https://rdgstout.blogspot.com/2024/03/holy-mother-church.html">join us to God in the Church</a>.</p><p>Tonight I want to speak about the Oneness of God, which we term Holy Wisdom, or Hagia Sophia. Sophia is not some fourth member of the Holy Trinity. She is not known apart from Father, Son, and Holy Spirit. She is the Oneness that they share. If the Three are God, then Sophia is the Godhead. If the Three are the personal Divine, then Sophia is transpersonal divinity.</p><p>Father, Son, and Holy Spirit all possess Wisdom, all share the One Essence, and so the Spirit and the Son are rightly called God’s Wisdom in the Scriptures. Just as we cannot love in the abstract, but only love specific people, so we cannot know Wisdom in the abstract, but only through the Trinity, the God in Three Realities. She is also, of course, the outpouring of God’s self, His kenosis, which makes possible all of Creation. God creates for love and joy. He pours out Himself for His children.</p><p>Thus God’s own self, His Substance and Essence, is the source and ground of existence. “In Him we all live and move and have our being.” You are made in the image of God, housing the Spirit of God, baptized into the Body of God. He is our root, the divine spark within. Creator and Creation differ, therefore, not so much in substance as in mode. If God is perfect being, infinite and eternal, utterly actualized, lacking nothing, then Creation is becoming, called out from nothing, up into existence, at last to be “gods in God”—holy ones, saints.</p><p>Sophiology speaks both of Divine Wisdom, the Oneness of God, and also of Creaturely Wisdom, the unity, interconnectedness, and interdependence of the cosmos. Yet at the root of things, at the very beginning and the very end, these two Wisdoms are the same. There is but one Sophia, one single divine unity, gathering all into God. In the words of Jesus Christ, the Word and Son of God:</p><p><i>I pray … that they may all be one. As you, Father, are in me and I am in you, may they also be in us … The glory that you have given me I have given them, so that they may be one, as we are one, I in them and you in me, that they may become completely one, so that the world may know that you have sent me and have loved them even as you have loved me</i>.</p><p>Wisdom is the root of all religion. Wisdom is the Love who makes us one. Wisdom is the God alive within you. Wisdom calls us home when we are done.</p><p>In the Name of the Father and of the +Son and of the Holy Spirit. Amen.</p><p><br /></p><p><br /></p><p><br /></p><p><i>If you would like to contribute to St Peter’s ministry online, <a href="https://secure.myvanco.com/L-Z9EG/home">you may do so here</a>, and we would thank God for your generosity</i>.</p>RDGStouthttp://www.blogger.com/profile/03099242575796693843noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-2444606381145909980.post-67962221964534013892024-03-12T10:58:00.000-07:002024-03-12T11:43:28.113-07:00Holy Mother Church<br /><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEjPpLsGtxqErgbidBC6NQX8XONgyzAAMXGcPFQK6bd-aj9oU0-qaGj5TY52f1xhCI5GFkEUmXAlnLAA1dTtnwMobBPNVCxQDRppkWe5e7wKltMTe6smQE1P7Um_zwRfO1E784GyKbYATKgDFIhFLGua4pVxUQxEC8_fAkay2UjmyhboxCbImGmQo9c1nnw/s1234/Mary%20Church.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" data-original-height="1234" data-original-width="1025" height="1130" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEjPpLsGtxqErgbidBC6NQX8XONgyzAAMXGcPFQK6bd-aj9oU0-qaGj5TY52f1xhCI5GFkEUmXAlnLAA1dTtnwMobBPNVCxQDRppkWe5e7wKltMTe6smQE1P7Um_zwRfO1E784GyKbYATKgDFIhFLGua4pVxUQxEC8_fAkay2UjmyhboxCbImGmQo9c1nnw/w939-h1130/Mary%20Church.jpg" width="939" /></a></div><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><b><i><br /></i></b></div><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><b><i>Lenten Vespers, Week Four: The Church</i></b></div><p><b>A Reading from St Paul’s Epistle to the Colossians:</b></p><p>May you be made strong with all the strength that comes from his glorious power, so that you may have all endurance and patience, joyfully giving thanks to the Father, who has enabled you to share in the inheritance of the saints in the light. He has rescued us from the power of darkness and transferred us into the kingdom of his beloved Son, in whom we have redemption, the forgiveness of sins.</p><p>He is the image of the invisible God, the firstborn of all creation, for in him all things in heaven and on earth were created, things visible and invisible, whether thrones or dominions or rulers or powers—all things have been created through him and for him. He himself is before all things, and in him all things hold together. He is the head of the body, the church; he is the beginning, the firstborn from the dead, so that he might come to have first place in everything. For in him all the fullness of God was pleased to dwell, and through him God was pleased to reconcile to himself all things, whether on earth or in heaven, by making peace through the blood of his cross.</p><p>And you who were once estranged and hostile in mind, doing evil deeds, he has now reconciled in his fleshly body through death, so as to present you holy and blameless and irreproachable before him, provided that you continue securely established and steadfast in the faith, without shifting from the hope promised by the gospel that you heard, which has been proclaimed to every creature under heaven.</p><p>The Word of the Lord. <i>Thanks be to God</i>.</p><p><b>Homily:</b></p><p>Lord, we pray for the preacher, for you know his sins are great.</p><p>Grace, mercy, and peace to you from God our Father and from our Lord and Savior Jesus Christ. Amen.</p><p><i>We believe in one holy catholic and apostolic church. We acknowledge one baptism for the forgiveness of sins. We look for the resurrection of the dead, and the life of the world to come</i>.</p><p>What is the purpose of the Church? Such would seem to be the unspoken question on the minds and in the hearts of the postmodern Western world. Why go to Church? What is it for?</p><p>Some will say that organized religion is on the wane because we’ve embraced a scientific materialism, but that’s hogwash. Modern science was born of religious men and women; there’s never been a conflict before. That’s a modern myth. Indeed, the great irony is that as organized religion wanes, so too does faith in basic science. Besides which, belief in ghosts, UFOs, horoscopes, Bigfoot, pagan gods, and public hunger for the paranormal more generally, have only increased throughout my lifetime.</p><p>Concurrently, civil society has collapsed. Book groups, bowling leagues, Boy Scouts, fraternal lodges, and just about anything else that involves voluntary in-person commitment, have one and all withered on the vine. So the issue, I think, is social, not necessarily religious. The Enlightenment came along and turned us all into individuals, so now the devil just sits in hell with his feet up on his desk, because there isn’t anything left for him to do.</p><p>Technology plays a role; virtual community is undeniably easier than actual community, and a good deal less messy, even if it’s the spiritual equivalent of a junk food diet. And consumerism shoulders a lot of the blame as well, it being our society’s replacement religion. When you’re conditioned from birth to view everything through the lens of production and consumption, Christianity doesn’t seem to make a lot of sense.</p><p>Is the Church for profit, or is it for entertainment? Because if we can’t place it into one of those two clear-cut categories, then Americans simply cannot comprehend it. We’re either making money, or we’re spending money. Nonprofit doesn’t enter the equation.</p><p>The word “church,” believe it or not, derives from the Greek ἐκκλησία, literally the “gathering of the summoned.” This would be the assembly of the citizens in an ancient city-state. The Christian Church consists of those called out from the world into Christ—called, indeed, to be Christ for this world, to be His hands and feet and voice. We are, in a very literal sense, made into His Body, made into His Bride.</p><p>In Jesus Christ, God became Man that Man might become God. In Him, the divisions between Creator and Creation, the human and the divine, are forever done away with. As we are made one in Him, so we are made one in God, partakers of eternal life, the life of true divinity. And the Church is the result of that. We, as Christians, together as the Church, are the continuation of Jesus’ Incarnation. That’s what everything here is about. Everything we do, we do to be one with Jesus.</p><p>We come to Christ through Baptism, baptized into His death, that we need never fear death again, and into His eternal life, already begun. We are given in Baptism His Holy Spirit, the Spirit of Jesus Christ, who is His life and breath and love. And we are given His Name: we are called Christians, little Christs.</p><p>Then we come to Communion, the Lord’s Supper, the Holy Eucharist, where we are given Jesus’ Body and His Blood. And now you can do the math: when we have the Name of Jesus, the Life of Jesus, the Body and the Blood of Jesus, what does that make us? It makes us Jesus! Not individually, of course, but all of us together, all of us made one, living in our unity if not our uniformity. We are made into Jesus and sent out into His world.</p><p>Why do we study the Scriptures? Because the Scriptures give us Jesus. Why confess our sins? Because Jesus here forgives. Every week we are gathered in, forgiven, taught, fed, blessed, renewed and resurrected, then sent out again for a world in need of salvation. That’s what the Church is. That’s what Christianity is: broken, lost, and wayward sinners, called into union with Christ, called to die and rise again, called to proclaim the Good News.</p><p>Our archetype and matron is the Mother of Our Lord. The Blessed Virgin Mary is the counterpart of Christ: as God becomes human in Jesus, so humanity is joined to God through Mary. She is humanity lifted up, mortality made immortal. She knows union with Christ in body and soul and bears Him into our world; so too are we called as the Church to birth our Lord in our own age, through labor and suffering and joy and new life.</p><p>Everything that was promised to Mary is promised as well to us all. She is the Church in microcosm. What she is as an individual, we are as a community, and someday the whole world, indeed all worlds, shall be as well. The Church is a preview, a prophecy, a community called out of time, to reveal to the cosmos its universal destiny, that God at the last shall be all in all.</p><p>Mary, the Church, and the Apocalypse are really all one and the same: we are all of us the Creation made one with our Creator; all of humanity, all of reality, gathered back into the bosom of our God. What Mary was, we are, and all of the world will be.</p><p>Christ reveals, through the Church, here in time, the eternal truth of the Gospel: that God and Man are one in Christ; that sin and death and hell are conquered; that nothing and no-one in all of Creation can separate us from our God. That is the purpose of the Church. That is what Jesus has made of us, and what He makes us still: every morning, every Sunday, every Easter.</p><p>Do you have what it takes, to shoulder the Cross, to defy the devil, to raise up the damned from the dead? I should say that you do not! But Jesus does. And by His grace, He makes us His; He makes us into Him. We are His Body. We are His Church. We are the Resurrection and the Life! And by the victory of the Christ, we have already won.</p><p>In the Name of the Father and of the +Son and of the Holy Spirit. Amen.</p><p><br /></p><p><br /></p><p><br /></p><p><i>If you would like to contribute to St Peter’s ministry online, <a href="https://secure.myvanco.com/L-Z9EG/home">you may do so here</a>, and we would thank God for your generosity</i>.</p>RDGStouthttp://www.blogger.com/profile/03099242575796693843noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-2444606381145909980.post-63380552330335871902024-03-08T10:03:00.000-08:002024-03-12T11:14:52.130-07:00Sophiology<p><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEip4wdtCh7ubqFJLYw5BuSAyyF2hf7iTyC1BMD0aUXfnpUdQtXKwroMUVunsQVKbR9MYOm39Zyg_o4WbCW4_vsCtq2uTNh2kFFBTm0ImBNHi9i6ImrbmwO7HOkXFD4hDMiTkk7Tl9xdl35PxgPZ1-fnGbb1vwnF15GSkgbQgrh9sJPzV2NHoipZgQ5KN3w/s2376/Sophia.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em; text-align: center;"><img border="0" data-original-height="2376" data-original-width="2042" height="772" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEip4wdtCh7ubqFJLYw5BuSAyyF2hf7iTyC1BMD0aUXfnpUdQtXKwroMUVunsQVKbR9MYOm39Zyg_o4WbCW4_vsCtq2uTNh2kFFBTm0ImBNHi9i6ImrbmwO7HOkXFD4hDMiTkk7Tl9xdl35PxgPZ1-fnGbb1vwnF15GSkgbQgrh9sJPzV2NHoipZgQ5KN3w/w663-h772/Sophia.jpg" width="663" /></a></p><p style="text-align: center;"><b><i>A very brief review of Sophia, The Wisdom of God: An Outline of Sophiology, by Sergei Bulgakov.</i></b></p><p>Many of the twenty-first century’s greatest theological minds have asserted that the greatest theologian of the twentieth century was none other than Sergei Bulgakov.</p><p>To say that Bulgakov’s works are daunting would be an understatement. His multilingualism and complex philosophical vocabulary, combined with no great urge to explain his own definitions however esoteric, produced thick and brilliant tomes that nevertheless come across as word salad to the uninitiated. It’s taken me years to get to the point at which I think I know what he means—and even then, I only think so, I’m not sure.</p><p>My mistake appears to have been in tackling his magnum opus right off the bat, an abortive exercise in frustration, when I ought to have begun right here: with his far slimmer summation and outline of Sophiology as he understands it. Even then, this slender volume demanded slow and attentive reading, no less a labor than the 1200-page history that I wrapped up last week.</p><p>Sophia is wisdom, and wisdom subsists in recognizing the oneness, the unity, underlying all things. Here then is my starting point: translating every instance of “Sophia” in Bulgakov as “Oneness.” Unity, of course, does not mean uniformity.</p><p>Bulgakov affirms the definition of Chalcedon, that God is One Essence in Three Hypostases. Western theology pays plenty of attention to the Threeness, he argues, to Father, Son, and Holy Spirit, but makes no concerted effort to tackle the Oneness, the Ousia or Substance of the Godhead. For Bulgakov, that Oneness is Sophia: he uses the terms Ousia, Wisdom, and Glory more-or-less interchangeably. Wisdom is the content of Ousia and Glory its manifestation.</p><p>Sophia is not personal, not some fourth Hypostasis. She is, so to speak, divinity rather than Deus, the Godhead rather than God. If God is truly transpersonal, beyond the distinction between personal and impersonal, then Sophia may be taken as the latter and the Trinity as the former. In effect, Sophiology is an entirely new level of theology of which the West is unaware, such that opening Bulgakov feels akin to discovering a New World.</p><p>God creates all things from nothing, which is to say, from nothing other than Himself. Only the divine is real, the source and ground of all. “What is not God is nothing,” Bulgakov bluntly states. Thus the difference between Creator and Creation lies not in substance but in mode: God is, while Creation is becoming. We are called, as it were, out from nothing unto pleroma. All of Creation comes from God, is sustained in God, and returns to God. Deification is the fullness and fate of all things.</p><p>The same divine Oneness that reveals the Persons of the Trinity unto one another (Divine Sophia) also sustains the world and reveals God unto us (Creaturely Sophia). At root, all of Creation is a single unity, and that unity is shared with and in God. Thus there are not two Sophias but one, and our destiny is to realize Her, fulfilling Wisdom in Creation through divine-humanity, that God at the last may be All in All.</p><p>Bulgakov goes on to demonstrate how Sophia is expressed, or manifested, within the Trinity, through each individual Hypostasis, in Creation, Incarnation, Pentecost, the Blessed Virgin Mary, and the Church—this last, for Bulgakov, consisting of the entirety of divine-humanity in history, both the Old Covenant and the New, even in “the barren church of heathendom,” and extending to the worlds of angels and of beasts.</p><p>Just as love can never be encountered in the abstract but only in loving particular people and things, so Sophia can only be encountered in the Persons of the Trinity, and in the divinity undergirding all of Creation. She belongs to God, yet is God, both His substance and possession. And all are One in Her.</p><p>Or something like that. I think.</p>RDGStouthttp://www.blogger.com/profile/03099242575796693843noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-2444606381145909980.post-20671489295894191642024-03-07T09:46:00.000-08:002024-03-09T06:09:11.441-08:00God's Hit Squad<br /><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEgOEhwtfFexANV3D_uewpA7YnSKkSzCqoybUz48IrxSD-KaemMkA9Xbleke0oaMVZU2Rdo_GiPYK1tGrLJTfNk8o3_kpMS_6_FogqOFBF0zi_pmePjvsB0MhY6HvbbF0TPm6rLtv7zhKgM44_h9YEExocAPY1RZ4k5u7SNkJjfV17oOucBs-L8uiFWwSC8/s866/Seraph%203.jpg" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" data-original-height="866" data-original-width="637" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEgOEhwtfFexANV3D_uewpA7YnSKkSzCqoybUz48IrxSD-KaemMkA9Xbleke0oaMVZU2Rdo_GiPYK1tGrLJTfNk8o3_kpMS_6_FogqOFBF0zi_pmePjvsB0MhY6HvbbF0TPm6rLtv7zhKgM44_h9YEExocAPY1RZ4k5u7SNkJjfV17oOucBs-L8uiFWwSC8/s16000/Seraph%203.jpg" /></a></div><p><b>Propers:</b> <a href="https://lectionary.library.vanderbilt.edu/texts.php?id=74">The Fourth Sunday in Lent</a> (Laetare), AD 2024 B</p><p><b>Homily:</b></p><p>Lord, we pray for the preacher, for you know his sins are great.</p><p>Grace, mercy, and peace to you from God our Father and from our Lord and Savior Jesus Christ. Amen.</p><p>It is an easy thing to say that God is good when life is going well, when everyone is healthy and your income is secure and things improve from day to day at a slow and steady pace. It is quite another to praise God, to have faith in God’s faithfulness, when everything falls apart, when we lose that which we hold dear, and life appears as little more than a litany of our failures. Then it becomes something scandalous, something powerful.</p><p>Such is the Cross. Such is the faith that raises the dead.</p><p>We have two very different pictures of God in our readings from this morning, the first from the Book of Numbers. In it, the Israelites have been liberated from slavery in a foreign land, led out by the mighty hand of Moses, as God executed 10 terrible judgments upon the false gods of Egypt. And of course they use their newfound freedom to complain. What a bunch of whiners. One must admire the Hebrew Scriptures for this: they ever depict their forebears, even the greatest of their kings, warts and all.</p><p>There’s humor in their complaint: “There is no food … and we detest this miserable food.” Waiter, my dinner is awful, and such small portions! Thus annoyed at their annoyance, and understandably upset at their ingratitude, God sends venomous serpents amongst them, and many of them die. Rapidly they repent of their impiety, and on God’s orders Moses fashions a serpent of bronze upon a pole, such that the bitten may look upon the snake and be miraculously healed.</p><p>A little background may be helpful here. The Hebrew term for “venomous serpent” is more literally “fiery serpent,” only in an active voice: “burner-snake,” a little dragon. And in the world of the Ancient Near East, the milieu into which Numbers had been written and compiled, such burner-snakes were understood to accompany divinities. Gods had these fiery serpents, these seraphim, on retainer as the avengers of their dignity, little scaly hitmen, agents of divine retribution.</p><p>And in the logic of sympathetic magic, it was common to fashion images of such serpents as amulets of protection. Think of the flaring cobra on the headpiece of King Tut. The metal snake guarded, protected, against divine displeasure, spitting venom, spitting fire. Thus the imagery in Numbers, of heavenly snakes sticking up for their boss, and only being pacified by a metal idol of their likeness, would have been very familiar to its audience.</p><p>The message would have been that these ingrates should not trifle with the dignity of God. Here had Yahweh gone to extraordinary lengths to bring Egypt, the superpower of her day, down to her knees. And for whom? For slaves! For homeless desert wanderers. Show some respect. We know that in later years—centuries after this story takes place—such a bronze serpent, called Nehushtan, resided in the Temple at Jerusalem. This story from Numbers may have been told to explain its presence there.</p><p>Greeks had their own variation, by the way, the caduceus, the staff of Hermes. This depicted two serpents wound about a winged rod, the same image that we see on ambulances and in hospitals. The serpent holds a dual role, bearing both wisdom and death. The same venom that harms us may heal, as the difference between medicine and poison lies in the dose. From Apophis through Genesis to Jormungandr, snakes are dangerous divines.</p><p>We cannot take this literally. I thought about sugarcoating it, but I just can’t. This is precisely the sort of Old Testament tale that the Church Fathers would insist we must take allegorically. Otherwise it’s a horror story, a savage and frightening image of God. Our understanding of God, our one true Image, is Jesus Christ, who, to say the least, would never send fiery serpents after gripey apostles. Lord knows they gave Him opportunity.</p><p>“Which of you, if your son asks … for a fish will give him a snake?” Jesus says. “If you, then, who are evil, know how to give good gifts to your children, how much more will your Father in Heaven give good things to those who ask Him!” When the Father’s children beg for food, Jesus says, He will not send them snakes. I can’t imagine that Jesus did not have this precise story in His mind. He is specifically refuting a literal interpretation of Numbers. The God we know in Jesus is no monster.</p><p>How then shall we interpret it? Well, John is glad you’ve asked. “Just as Moses lifted up the serpent in the wilderness,” the Johannine Jesus proclaims, “so must the Son of Man be lifted up, that whoever believes in Him may have eternal life.” John’s Gospel is all about Jesus being raised: raised up upon the Cross, raised up from the empty Tomb, raised up in His Ascension unto Heaven. John’s Jesus comes down to pull us all back up, to lead every lost and wayward sinner back to the bosom of God.</p><p>If we but look upon Him, our sins are forgiven, our wounds are healed, our life restored. If we but look upon Him, we have eternal life—for to have eternal life is to know God in Christ Jesus. This is the picture of God we would claim, the true and only Image: “For God so loved the world that He gave His only Son, so that everyone who believes in Him may not perish but may have eternal life. Indeed, God did not send the Son into the world to condemn the world, but in order that the world might be saved through Him.”</p><p>Easily the most beloved verses in all the Christian Scriptures. Why has the Father sent the Son? Why has God come into this world as one of us, descending as Light into darkness? Is it to condemn us, to punish us, to throw us to fiery snakes? Hell, no! Christ has come to die for us, at our hands and for our sake, to raise us up forever, to draw all things unto Him, and to save the entirety of this fallen bloody cosmos! He has come to love us all the way to hell and back, and nothing and no-one can stop Him.</p><p>“This is the judgment!” John thunders. Not some future tribunal offering thumbs-up or thumbs-down, but Jesus Incarnate, Jesus Crucified, Jesus Risen, Jesus Ascended! Those who see Him, know Him, love Him already have eternal life for they have seen the face of God. And those who do not believe have already been condemned, not to some future hellfire but by their very lack of Christ here and now.</p><p>They don’t know what they’re missing, John says; they love darkness more than the Light. They condemn themselves to dwell in shadow, not knowing the true face of God, not knowing the infinite ocean of mercy and love poured out from His side on the Cross. But they will. They will all know someday. At the Name of Jesus, every knee shall bow and every tongue confess. If they do not see Him now, in us, that is punishment enough. Jesus shall draw all men unto Him; at the last all this world shall be saved.</p><p>Eternal life is not some future pie in the sky by and by. It begins here, now, in the Light of the Christ. To love that Light is salvation; to shun it is self-condemnation. No-one needs Christians to sit around condemning sinners, condemning the world. Certainly Jesus doesn’t. The world needs Christians to actively show them the Christ, the love and mercy and self-emptying compassion of the God who sustains all the cosmos, and who loves every iota and atom of it.</p><p>Lots of people see God as good when life is good, and God as cruel when life is bad. But He isn’t the one sending snakes. When we suffer, God suffers. When we mourn, God mourns. When we die, God rends open hell and shatters the gates of the tomb. Real faith is not just for fair weather. Real faith is the conviction that God is always good, always loving, always forgiving, always resurrecting; that it is not His will the we suffer; and that far from remaining aloft and aloof, He descends to our world in the flesh.</p><p>He suffers unjustly. He undergoes betrayal. He is humiliated and abandoned and tortured and displayed like some slaughtered lamb. He collapses into nothing, into death, into hell. And there He conquers! So that there is not one single aspect of human life, human agony, human disappointment that He has not claimed and redeemed in His flesh. He is the only God whom we worship. He is the only God who can save. And by the will of the Father, the whole world shall be saved in Him.</p><p>In the Name of the Father and of the +Son and of the Holy Spirit. Amen.</p><p><br /></p><p><br /></p><p><br /></p><p><i>If you would like to contribute to St Peter’s ministry online, <a href="https://secure.myvanco.com/L-Z9EG/home">you may do so here</a>, and we would thank God for your generosity</i>.</p><div><br /></div>RDGStouthttp://www.blogger.com/profile/03099242575796693843noreply@blogger.com1tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-2444606381145909980.post-13072850882771081602024-03-05T09:41:00.000-08:002024-03-05T11:16:44.429-08:00Manifestrix<br /><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEj13l0Wj_ELQASzBovxt09j8rSJltJWiXksaxuClUEdcQ9iIIiaheSI46Ord6DSbqs8VhCEQXFin6zFVtfu2Kz6bF8YHLzHRgem9UTvAQ6V61VtIMSQbkvyhI3SdliRnGsxmMYPSy_HjIzzn0Dj4mbUISzhEPadnp3jFVVfzSvnZjA8NzTwttdwoUUTI8Q/s1024/Holy%20Spirit.png" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" data-original-height="1024" data-original-width="886" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEj13l0Wj_ELQASzBovxt09j8rSJltJWiXksaxuClUEdcQ9iIIiaheSI46Ord6DSbqs8VhCEQXFin6zFVtfu2Kz6bF8YHLzHRgem9UTvAQ6V61VtIMSQbkvyhI3SdliRnGsxmMYPSy_HjIzzn0Dj4mbUISzhEPadnp3jFVVfzSvnZjA8NzTwttdwoUUTI8Q/s16000/Holy%20Spirit.png" /></a></div><div style="text-align: center;"><a href="https://www.deviantart.com/hackmau5/art/The-Holy-Spirit-rising-above-962754087">Holy Spirit Rising</a>, by hackmau5</div><br /><div style="text-align: center;"><b><i>Lenten Vespers, Week Three: God the Holy Spirit</i></b></div><br /><b>A Hymn to the Holy Spirit, by Timothy Rees:</b><br /><br />Holy Spirit, ever dwelling in the holiest realms of light,<br />Holy Spirit, ever brooding o'er a world of gloom and night,<br />Holy Spirit, ever raising those of earth to thrones on high,<br />living, life-imparting Spirit, you we praise and magnify.<br /><br />Holy Spirit, ever living as the Church's very life,<br />Holy Spirit, ever striving through us in a ceaseless strife,<br />Holy Spirit, ever forming in the Church the mind of Christ,<br />you we praise with endless worship for your gracious gifts unpriced.<br /><br />Holy Spirit, ever working through the Church's ministry,<br />teaching, strengthening, absolving, setting captive sinners free,<br />Holy Spirit, ever binding age to age and soul to soul<br />in communion never ending, you we worship and extol.<p>Here ends the reading.</p><p><b>Homily:</b></p><p>Lord, we pray for the preacher, for you know his sins are great.</p><p>Grace, mercy, and peace to you from God our Father and from our Lord and Savior Jesus Christ. Amen.</p><p><i>We believe in the Holy Spirit, the Lord, the giver of life, who proceeds from the Father and the Son, who with the Father and the Son is worshiped and glorified</i>.</p><p>Orthodox Christianity confesses belief in the Holy Trinity. This is our experience, our conviction, that God is Three in One and One in Three. In this we are not alone. Classical pagans understood God as the Good, the True, and the Beautiful. Hindus worship God as Creator, Preserver, Destroyer. Muslim mystics speak of God as Consciousness, Being, and Bliss, while modern neopagans write of the Maiden, the Mother, and the Crone.</p><p>In the time of Jesus, Second Temple Judaism embraced such concepts as the Wisdom of God, the Word of God, the Spirit of God. Wisdom was how the infinite, transcendent, hidden Father reveals Himself to the world in a twofold manner; through the Word, which is His mind, His logic, His law; and through the Spirit, which is His breath, His life, His love.</p><p>How can we know the Most High God? Not by climbing up to Him. Only by Him coming down, only by His deigning to approach us in His love, to stoop as it were to our level. We can know God through natural beauty, through human reason, and through divine revelation. All of these are the gifts of God, given to us in His grace.</p><p>We believe, <a href="https://rdgstout.blogspot.com/2024/02/whither-walks-word.html">as reaffirmed last week</a>, that Jesus Christ is the λόγος, the Word of God come down, the Word of God made flesh. The same Word through whom all things are made became Man, became incarnate, in Christ our Lord. He is the only Son of the Father, the visible Image of the invisible God, the Hidden made Manifest. And this is a radical claim. Because what we are saying is that Jesus is not just a prophet, not just an angel, not some lesser divinity, but God in the fullest, truest sense. Immanuel: God-With-Us.</p><p>God is both Father and Son, the unknowable and the known, the origin and the reason underlying all that there is. In one perfect eternal moment, God both is all and knows all. The Being of God we call Father; the Knowing of God we call Son. What the Son knows is the Father. What the Father is, is the Son.</p><p>And in that same eternal moment, God is endless Love: the love poured out from the Being of the Father into the Son, and the love perfectly reciprocated, perfectly reflected, by the Knowing of the Son back into His Father. God loves what He is, and loves what He knows, and that mutual outpouring, that bond of life and breath and bliss and joy, is the Holy Spirit, the very life of God. They are inseparable, Father, +Son, and Holy Spirit. Such is the relationship that God is in Himself, and the relationship by which He is made known unto us.</p><p>The calculus of the Trinity is in some sense very simple: only God can join us to God. Were the Word and the Spirit somehow less than God, less than infinite, then they would be no closer to the Father than are we, and thus no help at all. But if we believe that Jesus Christ joins us to His Father, then Jesus must be God in the truest, fullest sense. And since we know He does so by His Holy Spirit, well, then the Spirit must be God as well. That’s all there is to it.</p><p>We typically translate the Trinity as “One God in Three Persons,” but I find that terribly misleading. It makes it sound as though God were a committee of three separate divinities who all just happen to agree. A more faithful translation would be that we confess God as “One Essence in Three Underlying Realities.” But since that doesn’t exactly roll off the tongue, we shorthand it as One God with Three πρόσωπον, Three Faces.</p><p>Faces, mind you, not in the sense of God being some actor concealed backstage, whom we know only through false masks or roles—a heresy called Modalism—but true faces in that the Father is God, the Son is God, the Spirit is God, and all these Three are One. Think back to Genesis, when God speaks all things into being. To speak, of course, one needs a word, an idea or a meaning in the mind, and a breath to give it voice, to make it real and send it out. The Father creates through the Word by the Spirit. Together they are God.</p><p>The Spirit admittedly remains the shy member of the Trinity, in that we sort of tack Her on at the end and say, “Oh, look, She’s here too.” But it oughtn’t be so. The Holy Spirit is the Life and the Breath of God, fulfiller of the Word, who makes of us all something real. In Hebrew She is feminine, in Greek neuter, and in Latin masculine, a reminder that God has no gender, and that the Body of Christ incorporates male and female alike. Personally I prefer the old Syriac tradition, those who speak a dialect of Jesus’ native tongue, and thus still call the Spirit Mother.</p><p>When we confess belief in One Holy Catholic and Apostolic Church, one Baptism for the forgiveness of sins, the Resurrection of the dead and the life of the world to come—that’s all Her. That’s all the work of the Holy Spirit. She baptizes. She resurrects. It is the power of the Holy Spirit, the Spirit of Jesus Christ, who takes His words, “This is My Body; this is My Blood,” and makes it so. She gathers us all into Christ, by the preaching of His Word and the administration of His Sacraments. Thus She makes us Jesus!</p><p>The beauty of Creation, the wonder of the cosmos, the joy of life itself, is God the Holy Spirit. She is every love poured out between friends, lovers, siblings, neighbors, parents and children, birds and beasts, for She is Love itself, the infinite Love of God.</p><p>Christ is the idea and the ideal. The Spirit makes it so, incarnates the Son in the womb of the world, gives to Him flesh and sinew, breath and blood, and so binds us all unto Him. The Spirit explodes the Incarnation to encompass the whole of the Church, and the whole of the world at the last.</p><p>The Father is our origin. The Word is our form. And the Spirit makes it so, makes us real. She is inseparable from Jesus, inseparable from the Creator, for She in fact is God. And once you know Her, once you see Her, once you feel Her in your veins, the Trinity ceases to be academic, and is simply the fullness of life in Jesus Christ our Lord.</p><p>In the Name of the Father and of the +Son and of the Holy Spirit. Amen.</p><p><br /></p><p><br /></p><p><br /></p><p><i>If you would like to contribute to St Peter’s ministry online, <a href="https://secure.myvanco.com/L-Z9EG/home">you may do so here</a>, and we would thank God for your generosity</i>.</p>RDGStouthttp://www.blogger.com/profile/03099242575796693843noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-2444606381145909980.post-38850266649263308332024-02-29T12:14:00.000-08:002024-02-29T12:41:04.062-08:00Temple Eternal<br /><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEif8QdOjxBrKTvWWawn1AL-vYxZT2JZ-6syGWJi1OsU7lBKyqKr27cV3VdoXZsLJmn1hj44F50knLcGh4Bj6RwhWe1YTvHt8xqvBBRiqq_-xSMmFB4zaowCxlDYbtuIcvutSXsepH01zaXnN9ezP4vpSJz4v1wGKuTa8pnV-8JcelEkM4JAOhDv1V4GO94/s1568/Temple%20Eternal.jpg" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" data-original-height="1568" data-original-width="960" height="1387" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEif8QdOjxBrKTvWWawn1AL-vYxZT2JZ-6syGWJi1OsU7lBKyqKr27cV3VdoXZsLJmn1hj44F50knLcGh4Bj6RwhWe1YTvHt8xqvBBRiqq_-xSMmFB4zaowCxlDYbtuIcvutSXsepH01zaXnN9ezP4vpSJz4v1wGKuTa8pnV-8JcelEkM4JAOhDv1V4GO94/w849-h1387/Temple%20Eternal.jpg" width="849" /></a></div><span style="font-size: x-small;"><div style="text-align: center;"><a href="https://www.deviantart.com/robgigidabert/art/Tower-to-Heaven-950584015">Tower to Heaven</a>, by Robgigidabert</div></span> <br /><p><b>Propers:</b> <a href="https://lectionary.library.vanderbilt.edu/texts.php?id=73">The Third Sunday in Lent</a>, AD 2024 B</p><p><b>Homily:</b></p><p>Lord, we pray for the preacher, for you know his sins are great.</p><p>Grace, mercy, and peace to you from God our Father and from our Lord and Savior Jesus Christ. Amen.</p><p>Never underestimate the Temple in the hearts and minds of the authors of the Bible.</p><p>The Temple wasn’t just a synagogue or a church building or a mosque. It wasn’t simply a convenient place for people to gather in worship. The Temple was the house of God on earth, His tent, His tabernacle, His footstool and His dwelling. We might best think of it as a sacrament, a holy mystery of God’s indwelling presence, the intersection of Creator and Creation, indeed the very gateway to Heaven on earth.</p><p>Here all the stories of God’s people Israel intersected. Here in ancient times had Abraham encountered Melchizedek, the mysterious priest-king of God. Here on Mt Moria had he nearly offered up Isaac his son. Here had David united the disparate Tribes of Israel into one confederation, with one king and one capital city. Here had he brought the Ark of the Lord, the sacred box containing the commandments of the covenant, serving as the mercy seat of God.</p><p>Here had Solomon fashioned a mighty Temple to house the Ark of God, so that the Shekinah, the concealing cloud of the divine presence, descended upon the structure, just as God had descended to speak with Moses atop Mt Sinai. Here were all the sacrifices carried out, the sin offerings and guilt offerings, the dedication of the firstborn, and the grisly slitting of the throats of all the Passover lambs.</p><p>In the heart of the Temple sat the Sanctum Sanctorum, the Holy of Holies, empty but for the Ark and a pair of mighty cherubim guarding not God but humankind, shielding us from the unfettered glory of the Lord. One man, the High Priest, on one day of the year, the Day of Atonement, was permitted to wrap himself in white and pass beyond the mighty veil separating the sanctuary from the Holy of Holies, the veil over which the prayers of countless thousands passed as incense.</p><p>And there he would make penance for the sins of all his people, there amongst the angels and the sons of God, there beyond the portal between Heaven and this earth. The other priests within the sanctuary would tie a cord about his waist, so that should he be struck dead, overwhelmed by his exposure to divinity, they could pull the corpse of the High Priest back out from incorruption into this mortal realm. A bloody red thread would be tied to the door of the Temple on the Day of Atonement, and when the forgiveness of sins was announced, that thread would miraculously turn white. It was a house of wonder, a house of miracles, a house of mysteries. The House of God.</p><p>Imagine, then, the trauma when the Babylonians burned it down, and dragged the people of Jerusalem, and all but the poorest of Judea, off into Exile in a foreign land. For 70 years in Babylon the Israelites, the Judeans, remembered who they were, as People of the Book, remembered their covenant with God, and yearned to return home.</p><p>And then one day they did—delivered by Cyrus, the Perisan messiah, their nation raised up from the dead—and of course the first order of business was to rebuild the holy Temple. It never was quite the same, however. No matter how Herod built it up in the days of Jesus Christ, no matter how new dynasties asserted their legitimacy over the High Priesthood, many factions believed that the Temple had been corrupted, perhaps irretrievably so.</p><p>Broken down, rebuilt, defiled, usurped. Yet still beloved. Still, for many, the House of God. Such was certainly the case for Mary, Joseph, and Jesus. Clearly it was central to their faith. Jesus called it His Father’s house. He went there at least three times a year, throughout His ministry: for Passover, Pentecost, Sukkot, and even Hanukkah. Indeed, His insistence on celebrating the Passover in Jerusalem would ultimately get Him caught and killed.</p><p>In our Gospel reading today, Jesus has come to the Temple for Passover, as He does every year of His life. And there He sees in the Court of the Gentiles, the outermost court of the Temple, all the livestock merchants and the moneychangers sitting at their tables. The merchants made their living selling sacrificial birds and beasts to the 400,000 or so pilgrims packing into the city in order to celebrate the festival. Obviously it made no sense to bring their critters along with them, when they could simply buy their sacrifices there.</p><p>But of course most of the money circulated throughout the Roman Empire would be standard Greco-Roman coinage, with pictures of pagan gods and deified emperors stamped upon the silver. This violated the 10 Commandments: no false gods, no graven images. And so the moneychangers, for a tidy profit, offered to exchange the idolatrous coinage for good semitic shekels, appropriate for use within the Temple’s sacred grounds.</p><p>Such were the economics of religion. And this time, it seems, they proved too much for Jesus. Making a whip of chords—to spur animals on, mind you, not to harm people—He drove the sheep and cattle out of the courtyard, and overturned the moneychangers’ tables, scattering their coins across the cobbles. “Stop making of my Father’s house a marketplace!” He cries.</p><p>This is a bold and remarkable outburst. How could Jesus get away with this? Did no-one try to stop Him? The Synoptic Gospels of Matthew, Mark, and Luke place this event at the end of Jesus’ earthly life, in Holy Week, just before His Crucifixion. That makes a certain sense, given the crowds of supporters who welcomed Him on Palm Sunday, and the city’s simmering tension, which gave the Romans pause from summarily drawing their swords. Jesus would be dead in a few days nonetheless.</p><p>But John tells us of this Cleansing of the Temple toward the beginning of Jesus’ ministry, a curious choice, which has led certain interpreters to surmise that this was His regular practice. Jesus might have cleansed the Temple more than once, on an annual basis. The Synoptics make it clear that Christ’s concern in doing so is toward the poor. Here is the religious establishment taking advantage of widows and orphans, selling the sacred for scrip. And He will have none of it, not in His Father’s house, not in His Father’s name.</p><p>John says that He does this for zeal, and connects it to Jesus’ prophecy that should the Temple be torn down—this ancient and incomparable center of communal life in God, under renovation for nearly half a century—Christ would raise it up again in but three days.</p><p>And that right there is precisely the connection that John would have us make. He wants us to know from the get-go, from the start of Jesus’ ministry, that Christ is the Temple of God: the presence of God, the face of God, the miracle and the mystery tabernacled in flesh. He is for us what the Temple was of old, the place where all the stories converge, where all our hopes are housed; the intersection of God and Man; the gateway to Heaven on earth.</p><p>And the seeming loss of Jesus Christ, His Passion and Crucifixion, His agonizing public death, with His body hastily wrapped and sealed into another man’s tomb, was as searing and traumatic a psychic wound as was the loss of Solomon’s Temple. Indeed, by the time that John is writing, the Temple had been destroyed again, this time by the Romans, and never to be rebuilt. It was the end of the world as Christians and Jews had known it. Yet unlike the stones of the Temple, Jesus rose in but three days, having shattered the grave and harrowed hell, and ascending to hallow the heavens.</p><p>In Jesus Christ, God is with us, God is for us, God is one of us. He can never be taken away, He can never be lost to us, and He can never be killed again for Jesus Christ has conquered death. No sacrifice, no money can earn His forgiveness and favor, which have been won for us all by His Cross, and poured out freely in His grace. This is His final, eternal Passover, from death unto life, from our slavery in sin to immortality in Him. In three days, is His conquest complete. In three days, He rules all that there is.</p><p>Easter is our Passover, Christ both our Temple and High Priest. And nothing and no-one in hell or on earth can separate us from our God. His house is here forever.</p><p>In the Name of the Father and of the +Son and of the Holy Spirit. Amen.</p><p><br /></p><p><br /></p><p><br /></p><p><i>If you would like to contribute to St Peter’s ministry online, <a href="https://secure.myvanco.com/L-Z9EG/home">you may do so here</a>, and we would thank God for your generosity</i>.</p>RDGStouthttp://www.blogger.com/profile/03099242575796693843noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-2444606381145909980.post-13125606002743178002024-02-28T09:31:00.000-08:002024-02-28T09:31:20.088-08:00Carved Out<div><br /></div><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEjEPxtuRz_M4sfAyHuCO9GU6bJXnx17KrmkWLU9ah-ocERWZo9IfHIFRYc2NkMQCveLpPtdpTw4QwrVIb4WxlrScr21NJyXCpQNG_u2TOjqqiM1fRSSfrUk0q4cVxP0MlsaOKfSGobZbr5Xj0_SbwLYtRpAb5HDCPeM0L0FY7Bw2iJ5yCTMDzUMt_5w2Mk/s1535/Sanctuary.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" data-original-height="1535" data-original-width="1333" height="964" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEjEPxtuRz_M4sfAyHuCO9GU6bJXnx17KrmkWLU9ah-ocERWZo9IfHIFRYc2NkMQCveLpPtdpTw4QwrVIb4WxlrScr21NJyXCpQNG_u2TOjqqiM1fRSSfrUk0q4cVxP0MlsaOKfSGobZbr5Xj0_SbwLYtRpAb5HDCPeM0L0FY7Bw2iJ5yCTMDzUMt_5w2Mk/w837-h964/Sanctuary.jpg" width="837" /></a></div><span style="font-size: x-small;"><div style="text-align: center;"><a href="https://www.deviantart.com/futurerender/art/Mage-Portal-00737-957738907">Mage Portal</a>, by Future Render</div></span><p style="text-align: center;"><b>Pastor’s Epistle—April 2024</b></p><p><i>Remember the sabbath day, to keep it holy. Six days you shall labor, and do all your work; but the seventh day is a sabbath to the Lord your God; in it you shall not do any work, you, or your son, or your daughter, your manservant, or your maidservant, or your cattle, or the sojourner who is within your gates</i>.</p><p>—Exodus 20:8-10</p><p><i>The sabbath was made for man, not man for the sabbath</i>.</p><p>—Mark 2:27</p><p>I find it difficult to imagine anything quite so countercultural as the sabbath.</p><p>In the Hebrew Scriptures, God commands the people of Israel to hallow the seventh day of the week, and neither to do nor to allow any labor during that period from sundown to sundown. Sabbath observance is to be the mark of His people, even more so than circumcision. By setting this time apart, they set themselves apart.</p><p>Sabbath observance, mind you, deals not with laziness or with simple entertainments. The sabbath is a time for learning and for prayer. It’s when we remind ourselves that we are not merely beasts of burden, but human beings, possessing an innate dignity far more precious than whatever we can accomplish or produce. Sabbath is a time to be, rather than to do.</p><p>Leisure, in our society, has become something of a lost art. We live not as responsible citizens of a republic, but as consumers; with a worth based not on the Image of God but on our purchases, preferences, and politics. How much money do we make, and what can we buy with it? Production and consumption are the exclusive concerns of postmodern life in the West.</p><p>“If you want to confuse an American,” my old Confessions professor liked to say, “ask him what freedom is for.” We no longer know what to do with leisure, with truly free time. For years I used to muse that most people confuse leisure with entertainment, yet now even the entertainment industry has been superseded by the distraction industry, with scrolling, clicks, and likes.</p><p>True leisure is never distraction. It isn’t laziness or entertainment. True leisure involves time set apart to contemplate, to imagine, to ponder. It lets us gaze in awe at nature. It leads us to sit at the feet of great masters, even if only in books. Leisure begets philosophy, art, music, poetry, prayer, law, scientific inquiry, all the grand achievements of the human psyche and civilization.</p><p>For much of history, leisure remained a luxury available only to the wealthy, to those who needn’t labor because they made others do it for them. Aristocratic Romans, for instance, vilified actual careers, viewing any sort of job as a selling of one’s body, and thus a form of prostitution. Subsistence farmers, slaves, soldiers, merchants, and common laborers had little such time to set aside.</p><p>The sabbath changed all that, for the Israelites at least. The sabbath applied to everyone and indeed to everything: rich and poor, male and female, slave and free, adult and child, even to beasts of burden and to the very land itself. Fields were to lie fallow every seventh year, a sabbath rest for Creation. Thus can sabbath observance be seen as the world’s first labor law.</p><p>By it, the wealthiest merchant had to cease periodically from his profiteering, and the lowest pauper got to live one day a week as a free and sovereign human being. To gather with one’s family, to sit and gaze at stars, to share a meal and a story with nowhere else to go, and to stand in reverence before the holiness of God: such are the riches of the sabbath.</p><p>And there in the silence, there within this sanctuary carved in time, one ponders life and death, truth and beauty, sin and salvation, all the things we would ignore by distracting ourselves from the real. Imagine setting aside the cellphone from Friday dusk through Saturday, not watching TV, not busying oneself with chores, not pretending that productivity makes your life worthwhile. Just you, and silence, and wonder, and the starry-decked heavens above.</p><p>Christians are not commanded to keep sabbath, not in the way that our Israelite siblings and forebears have been. Yet it’s still a good idea, isn’t it? Most Romance languages preserve the convention of calling Saturday the sabbath, and Sunday the Day of the Lord. Setting apart a particular day, refraining from particular activities, may vary between communities, families, and individuals. But taking the time to be human—to value your life in itself—remains vital.</p><p>The Buddha would set aside three hours each day, and three months out of every year, to retreat into solitary meditation. Jesus often attempted something similar, climbing mountains, crossing lakes, setting off into the desert. Alas for Him, we always found Him. Thanks be to God, He never could turn away anyone who was seeking out or striving for salvation.</p><p>When He told us that the sabbath was made for man and not man for the sabbath, He was reminding us that sabbath observance, in whatever form, is a blessing, a time for healing and for helping out our neighbor in their need. He warned us against legalism, turning the sabbath into a burden. But He clearly endorsed the practice, the blessing, of taking time to be and to breathe in the presence of God.</p><p>Much more could be said on meditative and contemplative prayer. For now I simply offer the vision of Jesus Christ: of a humanity valued for what we are rather than what we can do; of life as something sacred, something holy in itself; and a true and worthy rest that’s not distractive but divine. For God and our own soul shall ever await us in the silence.</p><p>Observe the sabbath. Keep it holy. And work to provide opportunity for others to keep the same.</p><p>In Jesus. Amen.</p><p><br /></p><p><br /></p><p><br /></p><p><i>If you would like to contribute to St Peter’s ministry online, <a href="https://secure.myvanco.com/L-Z9EG/home">you may do so here</a>, and we would thank God for your generosity</i>.</p>RDGStouthttp://www.blogger.com/profile/03099242575796693843noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-2444606381145909980.post-58964763649448252032024-02-27T10:06:00.000-08:002024-02-27T11:38:19.991-08:00Whither Walks the Word<br /><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEgsS73Yd-KJ6x0ZBTvrrLv3nT0Buxf6maDzOywYvCv9RFqVupq_34Defq_r55sXWewhBPP78oNJyDWzXmK5S6U0Eb6iPow5HfWw19EiCvUGQbx4zXVoEhwzS1wp2dtuQI2JBuuIvVLhuFlwUvMW_P6ax9PKgbQEkM9kHtactmKUVQPixvy5XPD-JLAQHeQ/s1600/Galaxy%20God.jpg"><img border="0" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEgsS73Yd-KJ6x0ZBTvrrLv3nT0Buxf6maDzOywYvCv9RFqVupq_34Defq_r55sXWewhBPP78oNJyDWzXmK5S6U0Eb6iPow5HfWw19EiCvUGQbx4zXVoEhwzS1wp2dtuQI2JBuuIvVLhuFlwUvMW_P6ax9PKgbQEkM9kHtactmKUVQPixvy5XPD-JLAQHeQ/w773-h1374/Galaxy%20God.jpg" /></a><br /><div style="text-align: center;"><span style="font-size: small;"><a href="https://www.deviantart.com/lamona42/art/Galaxy-God-6-924928547">Galaxy God</a>, by Lamona42</span></div><br /><div style="text-align: center;"><b><i>Lenten Vespers, Week Two: God the Son</i></b></div><p><b>A Reflection on Jesus Christ, the Son of God, by George MacDonald:</b></p><p>I believe, then, that Jesus Christ is the eternal son of the eternal father; that from the first of firstness Jesus is the son, because God is the father—a statement imperfect and unfit because an attempt of human thought to represent that which it cannot grasp, yet which it so believes that it must try to utter it even in speech that cannot be right. I believe therefore that the Father is the greater, that if the Father had not been, the Son could not have been. I will not apply logic to the thesis, nor would I state it now but for the sake of what is to follow. The true heart will remember the inadequacy of our speech, and our thought also, to the things that lie near the unknown roots of our existence. In saying what I do, I only say what Paul implies when he speaks of the Lord giving up the kingdom to his father, that God may be all in all.</p><p>I worship the Son as the human God, the divine, the only Man, deriving his being and power from the Father, equal with him as a son is the equal at once and the subject of his father—but making himself the equal of his father in what is most precious in Godhead, namely, Love—which is, indeed, the essence of that statement of the evangelist with which I have now to do—a higher thing than the making of the worlds and the things in them, which he did by the power of the Father, not by a self-existent power in himself, whence the apostle, to whom the Lord must have said things he did not say to the rest, or who was better able to receive what he said to all, says, “All things were made” not by, but “through him.”</p><p>Here ends the reading.</p><p><b>Homily:</b></p><p>Lord, we pray for the preacher, for you know his sins are great.</p><p>Grace, mercy, and peace to you from God our Father and from our Lord and Savior Jesus Christ. Amen.</p><p><i>We believe in one Lord, Jesus Christ, the only Son of God, eternally begotten of the Father, God from God, Light from Light, true God from true God</i>.</p><p>We see God in Jesus.</p><p>That’s it. That’s the entire Christian faith in a nutshell. Everything we do, everything we practice, everything we preach, emerges from this scandalous conviction, this bedrock assertion, that to make ourselves one in Jesus Christ is to make ourselves one with God. The only reason—the only reason!—that we read the Bible, is to find Jesus in it. The only reason that we come to Church is to find Jesus here. And when we love our neighbor, when we forgive our enemies, when we remember the poor, Jesus meets us out there in His world.</p><p>Christ is the center of our Gospel. Christ is the center of our faith. Christ is the center of our life. He and He alone makes us Christians, that is, makes us one in His Spirit and His Body, makes of us all little Christs.</p><p>About 2000 years ago, Jesus’ public ministry began in the Galilee, a backwater part of a tiny country under the thumb of the mighty Roman Empire. He was thoroughly Jewish, as were His parents, steeped in the religion, the traditions, and the stories of His people. Raised by a skilled builder, He became a rabbi, a scholar and teacher of Jewish Law. And He gathered around Himself a motley crew of fishermen, tax collectors, and other assorted ne’er-do-wells to be His disciples, preaching that the Kingdom of God was at hand.</p><p>His was a time of high messianic expectation, when a restless and subjugated people yearned for a deliverer, an Anointed One sent by God, who would liberate them as had Moses of old. Many had tried; all had failed, crushed beneath the hobnailed heels of Rome. But as Jesus’ fame and fellowship continued to spread, people began to whisper—Could it be Him? Could this frustrating, fascinating Galilean possibly be the Christ?</p><p>Mind you, the Christ for whom the people sought would not, they believed, be as the anointed ones of old, the kings and priests who one and all fell to arrogance, idolatry, and greed. No, this would be a cosmic Christ, an angel sent from Heaven; perhaps in some mysterious way even God Himself, who had of course been Israel’s true King from the start. And as Jesus continued to teach and to heal, to work wonders and speak truth to power, people found themselves asking not “Who is this Man?” but “What is this Man?”</p><p>But then obviously He was killed, publicly tortured to death as a warning to would-be messiahs, those who might claim themselves king, when we have no king but Caesar. And that should’ve been the end of it, one more lost and forgotten christ. Yet three days later—mirabile dictu—He rose up again from the dead! And people started to see Him. People kept seeing Him. And it changed them, radically, killed them and made them alive again. You’d have thought that they’d been the ones resurrected.</p><p>And to this very day, some two millennia following the Cross and empty Tomb, people still encounter Jesus: in Word and in Sacrament, in service and in prayer, in the love shared between neighbors and in the story of salvation. He comes to us both in patient endurance and in flashes of spiritual ecstacy, both mundane and miraculous. And ever He gives to us life. Ever He gives to us hope. Ever He raises us up.</p><p>Christ is alive! Let Christians sing! And in Him, through Him, by Him, we see God. He is so perfectly transparent, so utterly open to the life and love of God, that He is God, as a Man, God in human form: Emmanuel, God-With-Us. And that He is divinity enfleshed does not make Him less than human—some sort of hybrid, crossbreed, like Gilgamesh or Hercules—but it actually makes Him more human than we are, the only truly fully human being. He is who we were meant to be, and will be in the end, that God at the last may be all in all.</p><p>This conviction is born of experience, and of the witness of Scripture. Yet the question inevitably arises as to how exactly this works. Last week we spoke of <a href="https://rdgstout.blogspot.com/2024/02/our-father.html">God the Father</a> as infinite, eternal, utterly transcendent and so perfectly immanent. How can the God whom the heavens can’t contain be born from the womb of a Virgin?</p><p>For this Christians turned to the Word. And I mean that literally. Greek philosophy, including Hellenistic Jewish theology, sought to address the problem of how an infinite and transcendent God might be known by finite creatures of flesh. If God is so big, so high, so great as to be ultimately unknowable, how then is that any better than atheism? A God we cannot know might as well not be there at all.</p><p>But God is known. He reveals Himself to us through His Λόγος, a Greek word which we translate as “Word,” but which also means reason, plan, logic, or mind. The Λόγος is the mind of God, the reason of God, the thoughts of God. It is the Word that contains all words, the thought that contains all thoughts. If the Father is the infinite Being of God, then the Word is the infinite Knowledge of God. God knows Himself, knows His Being, and thereby knows everything, for God is infinite.</p><p>All of us have within our minds an image of ourselves, of who we think we are. And because we are finite, because we are flawed, that mental reflection of us is imperfect. There is more to us than we know, for good or for ill. But the same is not quite true for God. God’s self-understanding, His self-image, is perfect, and as infinite as He is. The God in the mind of God is God, fully, truly, utterly. And this Mind of God, this Knowledge of God, we call the Son, the visible Image of the invisible Father.</p><p>These are not two Gods, which remains a logical impossibility. Rather here we know One God, One Essence, in two Underlying Realities: God the hidden Father, and God the revealed Son. Both are real, both are true, both are God. “For the Father and I are one.”</p><p>If the Father is the consciousness of God, then He is logically prior to the Son, who is the infinite understanding of God; logically, mind you, but not chronologically prior. The Father and the Son are co-eternal. In one infinite moment, God is, and God knows. It is by His reason, His Word, His thought, His Son, that God is revealed to Godself. And it is through the Son, the Mind of God, that all things are created, all things are revealed. “Through Him all things were made.”</p><p>The Λόγος permeates and unifies all things in reason and in truth, for God knows all things and thus is in all things. All of us are words within the one Word, minds within in the one Mind. All of Creation is spoken by God; all of it comes through His Word. In Jesus, a human being devoid of sin, the perfect union of God and Man is revealed, or fulfilled, or restored. Jesus is both a Man become one with God, and God become one Man. By His Cross He draws all to Himself, all people, all life, all the cosmos.</p><p>He isn’t just an angel. He isn’t just a creature. He certainly isn’t half of God and half something else. Christ is the manifestation of the Hidden One, God Himself made flesh. And we shall all be one in Jesus, because of what He has done, because of who He is.</p><p>In weeks to come we will speak more on this. We shall speak of God the Holy Spirit, who is the Spirit of Christ. We shall speak of Holy Mother Church as Jesus’ Body and His Bride. And we shall speak of Sophia, the Oneness permeating God and Creation alike. For now let us simply abide in the truth that Jesus is our Alpha and Omega, our beginning and our end. And all that really matters is that we see God in Him.</p><p>In the Name of the Father and of the +Son and of the Holy Spirit. Amen.</p><p><br /></p><p><br /></p><p><br /></p><p><i>If you would like to contribute to St Peter’s ministry online, <a href="https://secure.myvanco.com/L-Z9EG/home">you may do so here</a>, and we would thank God for your generosity</i>.</p>RDGStouthttp://www.blogger.com/profile/03099242575796693843noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-2444606381145909980.post-51218414363427862592024-02-21T10:49:00.000-08:002024-02-21T10:57:50.838-08:00Heirs<br /><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEhilVH6nhYSv6R_8XPJe0ptTFUwKdf8Yek3PAItXsNpYb3whqr7myXi0052PasXj6ma5tENITUXXIvhkD8s25ZAmQiuGY_Viskhs6d96ITeRTK9pY0H3FFBHBZ20AzNDfQnkRD_Y-A3gVdEcH_GJ0Tw3gzfemYRq4TPYeEhddzSs2b96Rmpl95ZC_2zUdc/s1023/Charlemagne.jpg" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" data-original-height="1023" data-original-width="807" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEhilVH6nhYSv6R_8XPJe0ptTFUwKdf8Yek3PAItXsNpYb3whqr7myXi0052PasXj6ma5tENITUXXIvhkD8s25ZAmQiuGY_Viskhs6d96ITeRTK9pY0H3FFBHBZ20AzNDfQnkRD_Y-A3gVdEcH_GJ0Tw3gzfemYRq4TPYeEhddzSs2b96Rmpl95ZC_2zUdc/s16000/Charlemagne.jpg" /></a></div><p><b>Propers:</b> <a href="https://lectionary.library.vanderbilt.edu/texts.php?id=72">The Second Sunday in Lent</a>, AD 2024 B</p><p><b>Homily:</b></p><p>Lord, we pray for the preacher, for you know his sins are great.</p><p>Grace, mercy, and peace to you from God our Father and from our Lord and Savior Jesus Christ. Amen.</p><p>I supposedly descend from Charlemagne: King of the Franks, Emperor of the West, and Father of Europe. Statistically, so do most all of you.</p><p>About a decade back, one of my brothers handed to each of his siblings a nice, fat binder compiling nearly a decade’s worth of genealogical research, a combination of DNA analyses and historical records of varying stripe and reliability. Here we had an 8000-person family tree, stretching back more than a millennium.</p><p>The trick, it seems, is to find some ancestor of minor nobility, and after that you’re off to the races, because the European aristocracy was so ridiculously inbred that a connection to one is a connection to darn near all of them. The nobility are overrepresented in historical records because they were the only folks with time and reason to prove their pedigree, their legitimacy to rule. Of course, if you have motive and means to establish your lineage, you also have motive and means to fake it.</p><p>Yet in taking a genealogical deep dive, I quickly discovered that the fun is not in certainty. The fun is in the stories. That’s what really matters: not blood, not genetics, but the story of it all: your place within the story of your family, and your family’s place within the story of humanity. That’s what people really want to know. Who are we? Whence come we? What have I inherited, and what can I pass on?</p><p>Michael Chrichton famously said that if a man doesn’t know his history, he doesn’t know anything. He’s a leaf that doesn’t realize it’s part of a tree. Are we really descended from Somerled, from Charlemagne, from Caesar? The better question might be, do we want to be? Do we become part of their stories by making them part of ours? Go back far enough, and all of us are related. Whose stories then shall we claim?</p><p>Abraham remains perhaps the unlikeliest of all the Bible’s protagonists. And that is saying something, for they are a motley crew. He lived some 4000 years ago, as long before the birth of Christ as Christ is before us. And when we first encounter him in the book of Genesis, he is already elderly by the standards of his day: 75 years old and childless; in the words of St Paul, “as good as dead.”</p><p>This was a great source of shame back then, when family, clan, and tribe were everything, when your success in life was measured by the number of your descendants. And God appears to Abraham—not just any god, mind you, some scraggly desert deity, but Yahweh, the Creator of all worlds—and He says to this childless old man, “You shall be my people and I shall be your God.”</p><p>And then He launches into this absurd series of superabundant promises: “I shall make of you a family, and of that family a people, and of that people a nation, and that nation shall be a blessing to all the families of the earth! Your descendants shall be as the stars in the sky and the sands on the beach, and your very name shall mean the father of a multitude of nations!”</p><p>This is a lot to take in. Abraham just wanted an heir, someone to carry on his lineage and name. Here he is promised the stars, the sea, and all of history. And really, what has he to lose? So he trusts in this God. He believes in the promises, has faith that they will be fulfilled. And that faith, that trust, in the promise of our God is reckoned unto him as righteousness.</p><p>Here at the end of a long and full life, we discover that his story has begun. In a world in which all of our heroes are typically teenagers or twentysomethings, here’s an old man sent off to start his great adventure. He migrates to the Promised Land, he and his wife and their household. He finds fantastic success, and makes fantastic mistakes. And decades later, when he hits an even hundred, the child of the promise comes at last.</p><p>Yahweh is the God who gives life to the dead, and calls into existence the things that do not exist. At one point Abraham is confident that even should he kill his son, God would bring him back—for not even death can break the promise of God.</p><p>Abraham wasn’t righteous because he was good. The man made colossal mistakes. Abraham wasn’t righteous because he followed religious law. He lived centuries before Moses, and did some very unkosher things. Abraham was held to be righteous simply because of faith: not faith in the sense of adherence regarding certain propositions, but simple, trusting, childlike faith in the faithfulness of God. That’s all faith is: trust in God’s faithfulness, trust in God’s promises.</p><p>Abraham was righteous as a gift. Abraham was righteous by God’s grace. And that faith saw him through a lifetime of disappointments, misadventures, conflicts, tragedies, losses, and sins. It was a rocky road he trod. But he never walked it alone.</p><p>Some people seem to think that bad things wouldn’t happen to us if we would just be good. Those people haven’t read the Bible. Bad things happen to good people all the time. Indeed, we chose to inflict the worst death that we could think of upon history’s only sinless human being. But to trust that God is good, that He is working in love to save us, that He does not will us harm, that He suffers with us, within us, and for us, and that in the Resurrection He will right our every wrong—such is the faith of Abraham, which overcomes aging and death.</p><p>Tallying up religious adherents has been problematic since the biblical book of Numbers. But by most estimates there are today nearly 16 million Jews, two billion Muslims, and two-and-a-half billion Christians. That doesn’t include Samaritans, Druze, Baháʼí, Mandeans, Rastafari, and possibly even the Sikhs, all of whom have one thing in common: these are the Abrahamic faiths. Well over half the population of the planet claims Abraham as our forebear, the father of us all.</p><p>That’s quite a turnaround. A childless centenarian ends up with a family of four billions within 4000 years: a ridiculous promise, ridiculously fulfilled. And we aren’t children of Abraham because of blood or lineage or even ethnic identity. We are his children by his faith, billions of us carrying on his legacy, his story, and his name.</p><p>Have faith that God is good. Have faith He keeps His promise. Have faith that He is with us. He is our God, and we are His people, every man jack one of us. And we shall be reckoned as righteous, for righteousness is the gift and the grace of our God.</p><p>Ultimately, of course, one greater than Abraham came, the one who fulfills every promise, the one who blesses every family of this earth. Jesus was not the Christ whom we wanted, the violent Christ, the warlord Christ, oppressor of all our oppressors. No, He came as one as good as dead, nailed to a Cross, buried in a Tomb. He came as one who saw neither tribe nor clan, neither Gentile nor Jew, but all the human family, united in His Body and His Spirit, all of us people of God, and God as the God of us all.</p><p>“Theology of the Cross,” we call it: God finding us in the last place where we would expect to find Him. Who would’ve expected Abraham? Who would’ve expected this Christ? And so, at the edges, God meets us, where we do not think to find Him, in aging and suffering and disappointment and death. And there He raises us up. There He gives us new life.</p><p>Such is the promise of God. And God does not break promises.</p><p>In the Name of the Father and of the +Son and of the Holy Spirit. Amen.</p><p><br /></p><p><br /></p><p><br /></p><p><i>If you would like to contribute to St Peter’s ministry online, <a href="https://secure.myvanco.com/L-Z9EG/home">you may do so here</a>, and we would thank God for your generosity</i>.</p>RDGStouthttp://www.blogger.com/profile/03099242575796693843noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-2444606381145909980.post-1908933220318896512024-02-20T11:17:00.000-08:002024-02-20T11:20:35.981-08:00Our Father<span style="font-family: inherit;"><br /></span><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEjHd8hlSmx8ZU-6jyLGc2Lvvu-9RzNEK72sx0GDtErxA_Z3c3dsH5o0XnYlgz6zSbp-LsU2H4nmumzhrnjwbh8_6OJKmHSadoNYq7tA7aN2rp531MsjnCr4J-92Zs_Af0eZCvkPI2_GJUd6Gcs0Mn4SMx35-l9F0RIDcc7RvzfzRYfevGKBhL4ppWOGfes/s1200/Nirguna%20Brahman.jpg" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><span style="font-family: inherit;"><img border="0" data-original-height="1200" data-original-width="900" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEjHd8hlSmx8ZU-6jyLGc2Lvvu-9RzNEK72sx0GDtErxA_Z3c3dsH5o0XnYlgz6zSbp-LsU2H4nmumzhrnjwbh8_6OJKmHSadoNYq7tA7aN2rp531MsjnCr4J-92Zs_Af0eZCvkPI2_GJUd6Gcs0Mn4SMx35-l9F0RIDcc7RvzfzRYfevGKBhL4ppWOGfes/s16000/Nirguna%20Brahman.jpg" /></span></a></div><div style="text-align: center;"><span style="font-family: inherit; font-size: small;"> </span><span style="font-family: inherit; font-size: x-small;"> Nirguna Brahman, by Miles Toland</span></div><span style="font-family: inherit;"><br /><br /></span><p dir="ltr" style="line-height: 1.38; margin-bottom: 0pt; margin-top: 0pt;"></p><div style="text-align: center;"><b style="white-space-collapse: preserve;"><i><span style="font-family: inherit;">Lenten Vespers, Week One: God the Father</span></i></b></div><span><span style="font-family: inherit; white-space-collapse: preserve;">
<b>A Reflection on God and the Gods, by David Bentley Hart:</b>
It is possible to mistake the word “God” for the name of some discrete object that might or might not be found within the fold of nature, if one just happens to be more or less ignorant of the entire history of theistic belief. But, really, the distinction between “God”—meaning the one God who is the transcendent source of all things—and any particular “god”—meaning one or another of a plurality of divine beings who inhabit the cosmos—is one that, in Western tradition, goes back at least as far as Xenophanes.
And it is a distinction not merely in numbering, between monotheism and polytheism, as though the issue were simply how many “divine entities” one thinks there are; rather, it is a distinction between two qualitatively incommensurable kinds of reality, belonging to two wholly disparate conceptual orders. In the words of the great Swami Prabhavananda, only the one transcendent God is “the uncreated”: “Gods, though supernatural, belong … among the creatures. Like the Christian angels, they are much nearer to man than to God.”
This should not be a particularly difficult distinction to grasp, truth be told. To speak of “God” properly—in a way, that is, consonant with the teachings of orthodox Judaism, Christianity, Islam, Sikhism, Vedantic and Bhaktic Hinduism, Bahá’í, much of antique paganism, and so forth—is to speak of the one infinite ground of all that is: eternal, omniscient, omnipotent, omnipresent, uncreated, uncaused, perfectly transcendent of all things and for that very reason absolutely immanent to all things.
God so understood is neither some particular thing posed over against the created universe, in addition to it, nor is he the universe itself. He is not a being, at least not in the way that a tree, a clock, or a god is; he is not one more object in the inventory of things that are. He is the infinite wellspring of all that is, in whom all things live and move and have their being. He may be said to be “beyond being,” if by “being” one means the totality of finite things, but also may be called “being itself,” in that he is the inexhaustible source of all reality, the absolute upon which the contingent is always utterly dependent, the unity underlying all things …
Obviously, then, it is the transcendent God in whom it is ultimately meaningful not to believe. The possibility of gods or spirits or angels or demons, and so on, is all very interesting to contemplate, but remains a question not of metaphysics but only of the taxonomy of nature … [while] the question of God, thus understood, is one that is ineradicably present in the mystery of existence itself, or of consciousness, or of truth, goodness, and beauty.
Here ends the reading.
<b>Homily:</b>
Lord, we pray for the preacher, for you know his sins are great.
Grace, mercy, and peace to you from God our Father and from our Lord and Savior Jesus Christ. Amen.
<i>We believe in one God, the Father, the Almighty, maker of heaven and earth, of all that is, seen and unseen</i>.
When people say they don’t believe in God, I almost have to laugh; because truthfully the god in whom they don’t believe, I don’t believe in either. Someone claims that God does not exist, and what can I do but agree? God does not exist, not in the way that you or I do.
Rather, God is existence itself, being itself, reality in the fullest, deepest, truest sense. And you and I and everything only exist insofar as we exist in Him. The question of belief in God at that point just sounds silly. For who can doubt existence?
This confuses and frustrates people. The unchurched imagine God to be a fairy in the sky, an old man on a cloud, a magical being whose significance rivals leprechauns and unicorns. When instead I speak of God as the source and ground of all being, they then accuse me of moving the goalposts, of changing the meaning of words. Yet this distinction between gods as spirits within nature, and One God as the Father of us all, predates even Plato, stretching back to well over two and a half millennia.
Moreover, this is the understanding of God on which all of us agree: pagans, Hindus, Christians, Jews, Muslims, and even, I would argue, certain stripes of Buddhists. People who reject this simply have not done their homework, like that one cocky kid who seeks to lead the class discussion when he clearly never cracked a book.
If goodness and beauty and truth are real, if consciousness, being, and bliss are real—and no-one but a madman doubts they are—then this leads us inevitably to the question of God, the question of ultimately reality. What is real, what is true, what is good, that is God. The objection might arise that if we’re speaking of reality, then why bother with the god-talk. That just confuses things. Let us speak instead of physics, of natural laws.
Yet this misses the mark on several counts. We possess a number of logical poofs, as potent today as they were to the ancient philosophers, demonstrating that that which is contingent must rely on something that exists necessarily, that the finite depends on the infinite, the temporal upon the eternal. God thus exists, as it were, logically. And moreover, without Him our logic falls apart.
Of course, while such things prove useful for overcoming the flawed arguments of cynics, what really points us to God is intuition, lived human experience, which all of us share and none can deny. We all crave meaning and purpose and value. We all strive for the infinite horizon, the eternal, the transcendent. We all live not by bread alone but by goodness and beauty and truth. And all of these things stretch beyond the merely material.
Consciousness, being, and bliss are fundamental spiritual realities, which we cannot explain away, no matter how blithely some attempt to fob them off as epiphenomena. There is more to being human than chemistry and physics. The sheer wonder that motivates and undergirds all science, all justice, all art, is itself our reaching out for the divine. We cannot shake the conviction that there is something more, there’s someone there, and we are not alone.
God is not some proposition; God is an experience. And the fact that the overwhelming majority of humanity throughout the overwhelming majority of history has said in chorus, “Yes, we’ve seen Him too,” is proof to us that we are not insane. There is no irreligious species of humanity. Those who would claim otherwise are sadly in denial, because I promise you: everybody worships something. And if your god is not the Creator, under whatever name, then your god is false and it will fail you at the last.
When we speak of God as Father, this is what we mean. Not a sky fairy. Not an old man on a cloud. But the infinite, eternal Source of all, in whom we all live and move and have our being. The Father is beyond all our imaginings. The Father is beyond all limitations. No matter how well we think of God, the Father is always better, always greater, always more.
Can we think of God the Father as a person? Well, certainly not, if by “person” we imagine some limited psychological subjectivity, someone with moods and choices and flaws, who changes His almighty mind, with the fickleness of Zeus. Yet if instead we mean by “person” love, understanding, awareness, freedom, life, bliss, and joy, then God is far more a person than we could ever hope to be.
In truth, God is neither personal nor impersonal but transpersonal, beyond any division we could make between the two. And this makes sense, if again we consider that God is ultimate reality, in whom and by whom all things exist, including ourselves. Clearly, reality as we know it has to be at least as personal as we are, since we are part of it, while also including both things below and forces above our understanding. And ours is but one of innumerable worlds our Father has made.
God transcends all reality. God is always more.
Any theological tradition worth its salt distinguishes between Nirguna Brahman, “God without characteristics,” and Saguna Brahman, “God with characteristics.” The former is God as the absolute transcendent divine beyond all mortal ken; while the latter is God as we can know Him, the immanent divine, closer to you than your jugular. In the words of Martin Luther: “The Father is too high, but the Father has said: I will give you a way to come to me—that is Christ. Go, believe, and embrace Christ.”
Next week we will speak of God the Son. For tonight let it be sufficient to stand in wonder at God our Father, Creator of us all, in whom we all live and move and have our being; without whom nothing at all could exist, nothing could ever be real. We all come from Him, abide in Him, and return to Him. He is the ocean in which we swim, the womb in which we grow, the mind in which we are but thoughts. He is Love itself, Goodness and Beauty and Truth itself, infinite Consciousness, Being, and Bliss.
Whatever we can think of Him, the Father’s always more. More wonder. More life. More joy. If we cannot seem to know Him, it’s not because He’s hidden. The Father simply shines with glory brighter than the sun, and we stand in wordless awe as we are blinded by His light.
In the Name of the Father and of the +Son and of the Holy Spirit. Amen.
<i>If you would like to contribute to St Peter’s ministry online, <a href="https://secure.myvanco.com/L-Z9EG/home">you may do so here</a>, and we would thank God for your generosity</i>.
</span></span><p></p><div><br /></div>RDGStouthttp://www.blogger.com/profile/03099242575796693843noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-2444606381145909980.post-8159753374042404332024-02-15T09:38:00.000-08:002024-02-15T09:38:23.341-08:00Deluge<br /><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEhVk6cb7wd9z-Go6i7I8uN-P9j6UKnsL8ubpFAg7lkLhnbsTb0GcsCZnoXhrdGA949pXbf18ZNTWAEKSft434V0jDelNfCyT1kzYsqYnwSpPLb6jDGOKGOtwYyOaddx8UA3TrJS9PoKr4AaoV2BftmSQ14ajVxgCvpNELiC1CJ1ml0GTQDPg7RUPsu6Axc/s1350/Ulmo.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" data-original-height="1350" data-original-width="900" height="1102" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEhVk6cb7wd9z-Go6i7I8uN-P9j6UKnsL8ubpFAg7lkLhnbsTb0GcsCZnoXhrdGA949pXbf18ZNTWAEKSft434V0jDelNfCyT1kzYsqYnwSpPLb6jDGOKGOtwYyOaddx8UA3TrJS9PoKr4AaoV2BftmSQ14ajVxgCvpNELiC1CJ1ml0GTQDPg7RUPsu6Axc/w735-h1102/Ulmo.jpg" width="735" /></a></div><span style="font-size: x-small;"><div style="text-align: center;">Ulmo, by <a href="https://www.deviantart.com/kiprasmussen/art/Ulmo-Holds-Back-the-Great-Sea-754061497">Kip Rasmussen</a></div></span><br /><p><b>Propers:</b> <a href="https://lectionary.library.vanderbilt.edu/texts.php?id=71">The First Sunday in Lent</a>, AD 2024 B</p><p><b>Homily:</b></p><p>Lord, we pray for the preacher, for you know his sins are great.</p><p>Grace, mercy, and peace to you from God our Father and from our Lord and Savior Jesus Christ. Amen.</p><p>Once upon a time, a great Flood swept away the world as we knew it. Those few human beings who survived the deluge had to restart civilization with the domestic animals they’d managed to save. Yet Creation was never quite the same again.</p><p>Now, you may be thinking: that’s Noah’s Ark, Genesis, a story from the Hebrew Bible. And of course you’d be right. But it’s also tale told in Akkad, and Sumer, and Babylon, and Persia, and Greece, and India, and China, and North America. By some counts there are 175 variants of this myth. If multiple attestation establishes veracity, then it would seem that we’re all remembering something rather large indeed.</p><p>One needn’t be a strict biblical literalist to wonder at the origins of the Flood. Theories range from the bursting of the Black Sea through massive global glacial melt to a comet impacting somewhere in the oceans. Others consider it to have been something simpler: an archetype of the mind, associating water quite naturally with creation, destruction, and renewal; turning all localized floods into instantiations of the one original Flood, the primordial spiritual sea.</p><p>Regardless of how we might look at it today, the Flood was simply a fact of life in the ancient world. It had happened. There wasn’t much doubt of that. What mattered was what it meant. How do we interpret the Flood? What do our stories tell us? In all the versions current when Genesis was written, the gods had tried to wipe out humankind. Because we were annoying. We were noisy. We bothered them. Not to put too fine a point on it, human beings are a nuisance.</p><p>In Mesopotamian mythology more broadly, the gods arose from chaos; the world is at best an indifferent and more often an actively hostile place; and mankind matters little in the great schemes of the cosmos. We’re something of an afterthought. The early chapters of the Book of Genesis specifically refute these myths at each and every point. Genesis takes the mythology and flips it on its head, inverting the worldview of the entire Ancient Near East.</p><p>In Genesis, the gods do not arise from chaos. Rather, in the beginning is God, Yahweh, the great I Am. He has no beginning, for He is all beginnings. And from nothing, He fashions the world—from nothing, that is, other than Himself. And the world that He makes, that He speaks into being through His Word and His Spirit, is not savage nor cruel nor indifferent. It is good. At every stage of its evolution, the cosmos God creates is good.</p><p>And humans, far from being afterthoughts, far from being incidental, are the culmination of this process, the finishing flourishes on the canvas divine. We are called to steward Creation, to manage and to care for it, as sub-creators, as agents of Heaven on this earth. All of us kings, all of us priests, in the service of the Most High, the Creator of us all.</p><p>That’s a shocking take; a radical reinterpretation of how most people, most civilizations, had understood their place within the grander scheme of things. The Bible was then, and remains today, a revolutionary document, a collection of books which have both challenged and changed humanity in fundamental ways, and across generations.</p><p>Human rights, women’s rights, abolition, the rule of law, separation of church and state: these might all have arisen without the Bible, but it’s hard to imagine how. And if we can no longer see that—if we view the Holy Scriptures as outmoded or irrelevant or alien—that’s only because they’re a victim of their own success. We don’t notice the impact of the Bible any more than a fish notices the water in which it swims. It’s part of our environment, the air which we all breathe.</p><p>Genesis approaches the myth of the Flood with a similar iconoclasm. Here it’s no longer the tale of wicked gods eliminating our species as a pest. Now it’s the story of God saving humankind, delivering Creation through a cleansing of the waters. According to Genesis, sin had so thoroughly infected the population that “their every thought was only evil all the time.” Imagine that: every thought in your head, every choice in your day, only ever the worst possible option.</p><p>We had failed in our duty. We had failed to care for and to steward God’s Creation. But He did not give up hope. He did not snap His almighty fingers and start the world anew. No, He found the one remaining person not completely irredeemable and set him to the task of constructing a massive ark, a second Garden of Eden. Here he gathered animals, two-by-two, and shut the doors of this ship of salvation against 40 days and 40 nights of rain, the opening of the floodgates of the earth.</p><p>The waters of death and resurrection cleansed this fallen world, and the seed of goodness, the seed of God’s intention for Creation, survived upon the surface of the sea. In Noah and his family, the world, or at least civilization, gains a second chance, a rebirth. And God sets His bow in the clouds as a sign of His peace, that whenever we might see it, we would know He’s on our side, that divine violence had been renounced.</p><p>That is quite an inversion. The Bible took a story that everybody knew, a story of terror and destruction wrought by wicked deities, in which humankind survived by the skin of our teeth, and turned it into the tale of a wicked humanity, ravaging the world, stopped by the love of God who gives us all a second chance. What’s important here is not the historicity of the Flood. Again, that was assumed. What’s important is how we understand the work of God therein.</p><p>Imagine a terrible disaster. And one person says of it, “Look, here’s proof that the gods must hate us all.” But another says of the same event, “Behold how God loves us and is with us even now, even in this.” Same event. Different narratives. Within them are implicit assumptions regarding how we understand God, the world, and our place in it. And that’s what makes it a myth, mind you.</p><p>The word “myth” doesn’t mean that something didn’t happen. A myth is a story that we use to make sense of our world: to impose a narrative upon it, or to distill a narrative from it, that answers our longings for meaning and purpose and value. We are mythmakers, meaning-makers. Or at least meaning-discerners. Every big story that tells us who we are is a myth.</p><p>That includes the Big Bang, Darwinism, the Revolutionary War. The question isn’t whether these events occurred but what they mean for us today, what they tell us about who we are and what we love and how we ought to live. Do not judge the story of Noah’s Flood merely by modern sensibilities. Compare it, rather, to the stories of its day, to the myths of 3000 years ago, and ask yourself, “What were they trying to tell us? What wisdom does the Bible here impart?”</p><p>And the bottom line is: God doesn’t hate us. God doesn’t kill us. God loves us and gives to us new birth, a fresh and second start, purely out of grace. That’s the moral of Noah’s Flood, and the miracle of it, to take a tale of death and woe and make it a story of life.</p><p>And if that doesn’t satisfy our misgivings, if we still look to this with modern eyes and wince at the destruction, at the drowning of all those sinners, the great mass of humankind, then take heart—for the story isn’t done. Turn to the New Testament, to the First Epistle of Peter, who writes that Jesus Christ “was put to death in the flesh, but made alive in the spirit, in which also he went and made a proclamation to the spirits in prison who in former times did not obey … in the days of Noah.”</p><p>St Peter, or at least the author of 1 Peter, explicitly states that in between His death and Resurrection, when Christ descended into hell, He brought the Gospel to those who had died in the days of Noah, those whose “every thought was only evil all the time.” Think about that. 100% absolute pure evil—and Jesus died for them! Jesus rescued them. Jesus resurrected them, went to hell and back for them. What happened to all the people who had drowned in Noah’s Flood? Jesus saves them all.</p><p>If the Bible is the progressive revelation of who God is for us, then the true Word of God, the ultimate and total self-expression of God to humankind, is Jesus Christ our Lord. And there is no soul beyond His redeeming, no sin beyond His expunging, no sinner beyond His mercy, His grace, His compassion and love.</p><p>If you want to know who God is for us, look to Jesus Christ. He is the myth written into history, the myth written into human flesh. He is God-With-Us, God as us, and He will save us all! By the waters of our Baptism. By the waters of the Flood.</p><p>In the Name of the Father and of the +Son and of the Holy Spirit. Amen.</p><p><br /></p><p><br /></p><p><br /></p><p><i>If you would like to contribute to St Peter’s ministry online, <a href="https://secure.myvanco.com/L-Z9EG/home">you may do so here</a>, and we would thank God for your generosity</i>.</p>RDGStouthttp://www.blogger.com/profile/03099242575796693843noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-2444606381145909980.post-61214883240682694172024-02-13T09:29:00.000-08:002024-02-13T09:29:18.488-08:00Mortification<br /><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEh28BqRwyioTSUKZ8WPqPuZwnlqVahuN2SbjJQeFYFrZhKFgegLiM2RJ7MjFLhbIfZMfWmPuOq__Utsee1wq17yMybmOyFflmUtkPp_f4mpoawkth4abcHdyKzJ9lCbx6Is0LChIj5TiqhuokHGdGVzPTUNJ-1UgGaSeVYY5GsezuiUZCDmqOhW0Ubh8U4/s1200/Mortification.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" data-original-height="1200" data-original-width="1200" height="729" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEh28BqRwyioTSUKZ8WPqPuZwnlqVahuN2SbjJQeFYFrZhKFgegLiM2RJ7MjFLhbIfZMfWmPuOq__Utsee1wq17yMybmOyFflmUtkPp_f4mpoawkth4abcHdyKzJ9lCbx6Is0LChIj5TiqhuokHGdGVzPTUNJ-1UgGaSeVYY5GsezuiUZCDmqOhW0Ubh8U4/w729-h729/Mortification.jpg" width="729" /></a></div><p><b>Propers:</b> <a href="https://lectionary.library.vanderbilt.edu/texts.php?id=70">Ash Wednesday</a>, AD 2024 B</p><p><b>Homily:</b></p><p>Lord, we pray for the preacher, for You know his sins are great.</p><p>Grace, mercy, and peace to you from God our Father and from our Lord and Savior Jesus Christ. Amen.</p><p>Death and resurrection: that’s what Lent is all about. In many ways, that’s what Christianity is all about.</p><p>Once upon a time, following Jesus could get you killed. Jewish Christians could be stoned for confessing Jesus not only as the Christ but as God incarnate, God-With-Us. Gentile Christians faced execution for refusing to acknowledge the supremacy of the Roman imperial cult. You could worship whom you wished so long as Caesar got his due, his ritual pinch of incense.</p><p>Most believers, if they just kept their heads down and their mouths shut, could likely go about their lives with a minimum of molestation. But the prominent folks—bishops, catechists, those of saintly stripe—the state would make into examples. Certain modern scholars have criticized early Christian martyrologies for their supposed exaggerations, leaving one to wonder just how many of a group’s leadership have to be tortured and publicly executed in order for said group to claim aggrieved status.</p><p>You might think that, given these difficulties, these traumas, no-one in their right mind would want to join the Christian church. But just the opposite appears to have been the case. Even assuming grossly inflated numbers, it’s clear that the church grew quickly and broadly, starting amongst the lower echelons of imperial society—women, slaves, Jews—then spreading rapidly across classes and ethnicities.</p><p>Nor was this due to ease of entry. The church played many of her cards close to the vest in those days. Most anyone was welcome to worship for the first part of the liturgy: reading the Scriptures, hearing the homily, chanting the prayers. But for that second part, following the sharing of the peace, anyone not yet baptized had to leave. Christians reserved the Eucharist for themselves. Some, like St John, would not speak nor write of it openly. The sacrament, the mystery, had to be experienced for oneself.</p><p>The process of formation leading up to Holy Baptism took years in the Christian East. The catechumenate, those preparing for their baptisms, spent this time in reading, prayer, fasting, and good works. The Christian West sped up the process considerably. We always were a bit more practical. 40 days it took to prepare a catechumen in the West: 40 days, not including Sundays, for the day of Resurrection is always a festival, never a fast.</p><p>That number, 40, reoccurs throughout the length and breadth of the Bible. Noah knew 40 days and 40 nights of rain. Moses’ life neatly divides into three periods of 40 years. The Israelites wandered 40 years in the wilderness. And Jesus Christ spent 40 days in the desert, tempted by the devil. One might ask, why 40? And the answer proves to be rather straightforward.</p><p>Ancient peoples knew that it takes roughly 40 weeks for a pregnant woman to come to term. Thus, the number 40 consistently signifies a time of pain and growth and hardship culminating in new life, new birth. The old dies and the new is born, yet the new is also the old reborn. Death and resurrection.</p><p>Having completed their 40-day preparatory pilgrimage, the catechumenate would then be baptized at the Great Vigil of Easter, the Christian Passover celebration. For us, every Sunday is a little Easter, while Easter itself is Sunday for the year. We are joined to Jesus’ Passover from death to life: to His death, already died for us, that we need never fear death again; and to His own eternal life, already begun.</p><p>Today we call this season Lent, a middle English term for spring, the lengthening of days. We observe it in solidarity with those preparing for Holy Baptism, walking with them to the Cross and empty Tomb, to be reborn and resurrected at the Easter Vigil. By this we reaffirm and renew our own baptism into Christ, not in that it needs to be redone—for it is the promise of God, and God does not break promises—but in that we ever need the Resurrection. We ever need to die unto our sins, our selves, our egos, and to rise anew in Jesus Christ, each and every day.</p><p>In Him, there is always forgiveness. In Him, there is always new life. Such is His power. For “when I am lifted up from the earth,” as He promised, “I will draw everyone unto Me.”</p><p>This day, in particular, we remember our mortality. We repent in ashes, eschewing celebratory things and fleshly indulgences. We remember that we are dust, and to dust we shall return. It is of course humbling to remember our death, but also to affirm our hope. The grave is not our end. Christ has gone before us; Christ has conquered death; Christ has harrowed hell, and hallowed Heaven to receive us! In Him, the tomb is now become our gate to immortality. Yes, we shall all die. And in dying, we all shall rise.</p><p>The question then becomes how to live our resurrection. What does it look like, when men and women are freed from sin and death and guilt and grave? It looks like Lent. Jesus instructs us in Matthew’s Gospel to give and to fast and to pray; and to do these things not for personal gain, not for public spectacle, but in order to live out our love for God by loving all of our neighbors.</p><p>In other words, we do not give or fast or pray in order to earn the love of God. His love is freely given, poured out from His riven side! Rather, fasting and praying and giving are our salvation, our response to Jesus’ love. We fast to know that man does not live by bread alone, and to understand that ever craving more than we truly need is itself a sort of slavery, a kind of living death. We give because God is love, and we must discern His face in our neighbor. All of us are part of Christ’s Body, all of us children of God. In giving to others, we give to ourselves.</p><p>And we pray, not because God needs our prayers, but because we need our God. To know Him in every moment, every object, every living thing; to understand that in Him we all live and move and have our being; this is what makes us truly human. We forever strive for the infinite, the eternal, the transcendent. But we settle for poor substitutes: possessions and pleasures and powers. All of us are born with a God-sized hole inside, and nothing can possibly fill it, except the love of God.</p><p>Thus when we pray we are sated, freed from the false food of spiritual impoverishment and poison. It’s not about granting wishes, for God is not a genie. It’s about the deeper reality, the Image of God within. And it’s about faith: which is nothing other than trust that God is the Good and the True and the Beautiful; and that all of the pains, which we suffer in this life, will vanish in the fire of His Spirit at the last.</p><p>There shall be time for feasting. There shall be time for joy. But what is a feast, if it’s all that we’ve known, and we haven’t the stomach to fast? What is joy if we can’t acknowledge sorrow, or a life that never faces its own end?</p><p>Lent is the little death, the little sacrifice, the little fast. It is an athletic dimension of faith, a discipline which liberates. For as a weightlifter trains with little weights, to be strong when it really counts, so Christians give and fast and pray, so that in the time of crisis we’re prepared to be God’s saints, to live in faith and die in hope and rise in Jesus Christ.</p><p>We have His Word and His Spirit. We have His Body and Blood. We have His death and Resurrection burning in our souls. Come and be renewed in the waters. Come and die to rise again.</p><p>In the Name of the Father and of the +Son and of the Holy Spirit. Amen.</p><div><br /></div><div><br /></div><div><br /></div><div><i>If you would like to contribute to St Peter’s ministry online, <a href="https://secure.myvanco.com/L-Z9EG/home">you may do so here</a>, and we would thank God for your generosity</i>.</div>RDGStouthttp://www.blogger.com/profile/03099242575796693843noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-2444606381145909980.post-8985668717762899322024-02-07T15:23:00.000-08:002024-02-07T15:52:51.904-08:00Cave Blind<br /><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEgdld6c6LV_1Oc9MRZXtDaNy-sJp94C-Yonm7zsFttA63yWn6LPJf3XPqe6iXgNwmIcC2C8RrIsGCuMkVfTD80BCYwE59DKDq4HxCS-z0LQ_1TQkDVhL9AtcWz4ZwRpEV6wGec-zC0GVeNKa8Rms3T_fTYfqYpx89OxEA1MBmhhRxzGqnoy34Ep6LMMHFo/s998/Cave.jpg" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" data-original-height="998" data-original-width="718" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEgdld6c6LV_1Oc9MRZXtDaNy-sJp94C-Yonm7zsFttA63yWn6LPJf3XPqe6iXgNwmIcC2C8RrIsGCuMkVfTD80BCYwE59DKDq4HxCS-z0LQ_1TQkDVhL9AtcWz4ZwRpEV6wGec-zC0GVeNKa8Rms3T_fTYfqYpx89OxEA1MBmhhRxzGqnoy34Ep6LMMHFo/s16000/Cave.jpg" /></a></div><p><b>Propers:</b> <a href="https://lectionary.library.vanderbilt.edu/texts.php?id=69">Transfiguration Sunday</a>, AD 2024 B</p><p><b>Homily:</b></p><p>Lord, we pray for the preacher, for You know his sins are great.</p><p>Grace, mercy, and peace to you from God our Father and from our Lord and Savior Jesus Christ. Amen.</p><p>Next to the legend of Atlantis, the Allegory of the Cave has to be Plato’s most famous and influential work. He uses it as a metaphor for philosophy, literally the love of wisdom. And the story goes something like this: imagine a group of prisoners who have been chained together in a cave since childhood, utterly immobilized, able only to look straight ahead at one wall of their cave.</p><p>Behind them is a fire, but they don’t know what a fire is. Their captors fashion little images, little puppets, and the firelight projects shadows of these puppets on the wall. This then is what the prisoners imagine to be real: these shadow forms, and the echoes of human voices behind them, which they think come from the shadows themselves. That’s reality to these prisoners: light and darkness dancing on a wall.</p><p>Now imagine that the prisoners are released. They can turn around to see what’s behind them, to see the fire, but the bright light of its flames hurts their unaccustomed eyes. They are told that the fire is the source of their light, the puppets the source of their shadows, that what they see now is more real than anything they’ve ever known. But the prisoners refuse to believe it! This is too new, too confusing. And so they turn back to the shadows, preferring their previous reality, dark as it may be.</p><p>Further imagine now that the captors seize by force one of the prisoners and drag him up out of the cave, into daylight, cowering before the sun. Now he’s in agony, blinded by the light. Yet as his eyes adjust, soon he can make out shadows, then reflections, then people and animals, next the stars and moon, and finally the sun in all its blazing glory. And having seen the sun, he can now begin to reason, now begin to think on what all he has witnessed.</p><p>Thus enlightened, he would rejoice at his newfound understanding, his newfound freedom, and come to pity his fellow prisoners in the cave. Surely he must help them. Surely he must tell them. Even the puppets and the fire were as nothing compared to this, to the spheres of the heavens and the earth.</p><p>Yet upon his return, eyes now accustomed to the sun no longer see clearly in the dark. He has become blind to the shadow realm, and his fellow prisoners pity him. They think that he’s been harmed, crippled, driven mad. So if anyone attempts to drag them up to the surface as well, they’ll make sure to kill that man, lest they wind up like their brother. Thus those who descend from the heavens come to free their fellow men, only to be murdered by the ones they’ve sought to save. That should ring familiar in any Christian ear.</p><p>I think about this often whenever the New Testament speaks of slavery to sin, of judgment, of perishing. I think to the Allegory of the Cave. To Jesus and Peter and Paul and John, it’s not so much a matter of punishment after death, as it is a revelation of our present living death, a life bound and chained, a shadow realm we take for real, preferring it to the light, welcoming lies in place of wisdom.</p><p>We all do it. We all know it. Yet we continue on this course. Because it’s familiar. Because we can see it. Because the illusion is real to us: the illusion of self-sufficiency, of consumerism, of purchasing one’s happiness, of placing oneself before others. We’re all stressed-out, unhealthy, lonely, debt-ridden, cynical, medicated, percolated through with microplastics, marveling at the destruction of the planet, and yet we embrace this unsustainable, philosophically untenable, mainstream materialistic mode of life.</p><p>How is that not a living death? How are we not all prisoners here of our own device? Maybe the reason why nobody worries about going to hell anymore is because we know that we’re already there. But better the devil you know, I suppose. “If life is illusion, then I am no less an illusion, and being thus, the illusion is real to me.”</p><p>I confess that I was raised religious, and cannot remember a time in my life when I was not aware of the presence of God, and of how that presence imbued every molecule and moment of my existence with purpose and meaning and truth. I believe in God, to paraphrase Lewis, not simply in that I can see Him, but that by Him I can see everything else. Now, granted, I had a very positive experience of religion growing up, within a highly active and overall quite healthy congregation. A lot of people haven’t.</p><p>Yet even in highschool, most all of my friends were religious. We all had different religions— Lutheran, Catholic, Baptist, Hindu, Reformed and Conservative Jewish— but we all took our faith seriously. I have a hard time imagining anyone who can’t. Plato would tell us that everyone has some sort of god, some sort of greatest good, which gets us out of bed in the morning and gives direction to our lives.</p><p>Alas, so many in our postmodern world appear to have no god beyond the belly, beyond entertainment and consumption and the next new thing. And I have spent my entire adult life attempting to communicate that higher, deeper, freedom: that spiritual reality beyond death, decay, and debt. And more and more people look at me like I’m stupid or insane, as though there could never be anything more to life than shadows and whispers and chains. The Son, they imagine, must have struck me blind.</p><p>There will always be religion; there will always be God; there will always be those who experience the Spirit, the revelation of Wisdom Most High. “Even if our gospel is veiled, it is veiled to those who are perishing.” Jesus Christ will save this world, but I’m afraid that the West as we know it will only go kicking and screaming.</p><p>Today is Transfiguration Sunday. We mark it, like a deep breath of fresh mountain air, before the long plunge into Lent. Jesus takes James and Peter and John up upon the mountaintop, and there He is transfigured before them, blazing as bright as the sun. And the great figures of His people, Moses and Elijah, appear before Him in His glory: Moses and Elijah, who spoke with God upon the mountaintop; Moses and Elijah, both taken bodily up into Heaven; Moses and Elijah, who represent the Law and the Prophets leading up to the revelation of Christ as the true Word of God.</p><p>And good old Simon Peter, impetuous as ever, wants to build shelters, tabernacles, for these three heavenly figures, for Peter knows that at the End of Days we shall all speak to our God face-to-face, as He once appeared to Moses in the Tabernacle. Peter believes it’s the end of the world, and Peter is not wrong. But then suddenly, as abruptly as it began, the glorious vision vanishes, and we are left with only Jesus; who comes down now from the mountain, down into the valley of death, down to the Place of the Skull.</p><p>In some ways the Transfiguration serves as a preview of Resurrection, a glimpse of the Risen Christ here before His Cross and Tomb. One cannot have a clearer confession of Jesus’ divinity than to hear Moses and Elijah consult Him atop the mountain. But what I want to emphasize today is that this is His Transfiguration, not His transformation. Jesus doesn’t change. Christ was always God. What changes is our vision, what we’re able and ready to see. Here we espy the deeper reality, Truth Himself made flesh.</p><p>We see Jesus as He truly is and will forever be. He is the Light of God, the Wisdom of God, the Incarnation of God, visible Son of the invisible Father. When we see Him as He is, then all else is revealed. He shatters our chains, scatters our shadows, raises us up from the cave and the tomb— for the cave has always been our tomb. And we shall rise in the light of the Son, to marvel at His wonders and His works.</p><p>Then you know we must go back. You know we must descend. We have to free our brethren. We have to share the truth. And yeah, they’ll think us crazy. And yeah, they’ll call us blind. And once they weary of pitying us, they might just strike us dead. Yet we who have seen the Risen Son cannot be sated by shadows. We must pursue the love of wisdom. We must live the life of truth. We must share our Resurrection. And having been dragged up and into the light, we must now be Christ for the world.</p><p>In the Name of the Father and of the +Son and of the Holy Spirit. Amen.</p><p><br /></p><p><br /></p><p><br /></p><p><i>If you would like to contribute to St Peter’s ministry online, <a href="https://secure.myvanco.com/L-Z9EG/home">you may do so here</a>, and we would thank God for your generosity.</i></p><p><i>Brownie points if you knew the illusion quote without having to google it</i>.</p><div><br /></div>RDGStouthttp://www.blogger.com/profile/03099242575796693843noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-2444606381145909980.post-59323945005508768432024-01-31T12:20:00.000-08:002024-02-01T07:54:26.591-08:00The Broken Hand<br /><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEiHq-lbZSJekhHpIghmMSAWoBBW5KVNGLjnaBGXOSfjgaYY9Gi2o7rz4lR-k84486XhSYDXgSanagDODfNMcFAsFx2lNbcY0zXY7Ab7rNEb5K7ETcagVFq7pbKnWX6HzZMTJx48ofXo955GslOwf-Mf-u93Ne65YlplpGOjtGScgDOoB5VtPku68F8u5cY/s1960/Hand.jpeg" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" data-original-height="1960" data-original-width="1470" height="924" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEiHq-lbZSJekhHpIghmMSAWoBBW5KVNGLjnaBGXOSfjgaYY9Gi2o7rz4lR-k84486XhSYDXgSanagDODfNMcFAsFx2lNbcY0zXY7Ab7rNEb5K7ETcagVFq7pbKnWX6HzZMTJx48ofXo955GslOwf-Mf-u93Ne65YlplpGOjtGScgDOoB5VtPku68F8u5cY/w693-h924/Hand.jpeg" width="693" /></a></div><p><b>Propers:</b> <a href="https://lectionary.library.vanderbilt.edu/texts.php?id=64">The Fifth Sunday After the Epiphany</a>, AD 2024 B</p><p><b>Homily:</b></p><p>Lord, we pray for the preacher, for You know his sins are great.</p><p>Grace, mercy, and peace to you from God our Father and from our Lord and Savior Jesus Christ. Amen.</p><p>“He took her by the hand and lifted her up. The fever left her, and she began to serve them.”</p><p>Jesus’ career began in the Galilee, in the north of Israel, where he was educated and raised. And with all due respect to the land of Zebulun and Naphtali, it’s the boonies. Sparsely populated, mountainous and rocky, “Galilee of the Nations” was home to pagans, Itrurean converts, and settlements of horse-warriors from Persia claiming descent from King David some thousand years before. Nazarenes, they called themselves: the Branch.</p><p>There was a large lake for fishing, somewhat boldly called a sea. And Sepphoris, just a few miles from Nazareth, had been a nice enough city—before the Romans burned it down and sold the population into slavery. All in all, the more urbanized Judeans of the south looked to the Galilee as a hinterland, a backwater, a bunch of hillbillies. “Can anything good come out of Nazareth?” sighed Nathanael.</p><p>Had Jesus simply toured about the countryside, few outside of the Galilee might’ve heard His proclamation, the coming of His Kingdom but a local curiosity. Two of His Apostles, however, the brothers Andrew and Simon Peter, have a household in Capernaum. And Capernaum, while in Galilee, sits upon the Via Maris, one of the two great trade routes that run down either side of the Holy Land, connecting Europe, Asia, and Africa. The Via Maris is an artery pumping money, soldiers, goods, up and down the continents.</p><p>When Jesus preaches here, when He heals and casts out demons in Capernaum, travelers from distant lands may now marvel at His works. News of this remarkable Galilean transmits readily to Judea, to Samaria, to the peoples and places beyond. It’s a shrewd move on His part. It elevates His message to a higher stage, a greater audience. Of course, by increasing His profile, He thereby increases His peril. But then Jesus always knew where this was going. He knew that we’d reward Him with a Cross.</p><p>Now, admittedly, Mark’s is a somewhat breathless Gospel. He leaps from point to point, sparing nary a detail. Yet he takes the time here to note that, after a long day of public exorcisms on the sabbath, Jesus finds the mother-in-law of Simon Peter sick. She is home in bed with a fever, and while today that might be for us an unpleasant inconvenience, back then it yet remained a somewhat riskier affair. Up until rather recently in our history, fevers often proved themselves quite fatal.</p><p>His healing of her is as tender as it is simple. He takes her by the hand and lifts her up. That’s it. Jesus takes her hand and she is healed! And immediately she starts to serve them. Please understand, this isn’t a gender role thing. The verb Mark uses here for “serve” is the same that he applies unto the angels. Jesus didn’t fix her so that she could fix Him a sandwich. There’s more to it than that, I should think. It would seem that the service is part of the healing. It may well be that none of us are truly healed, truly whole, until we too learn how to serve.</p><p>Set aside the demons for a moment. That’s a conversation we can have another time. Let us look first to the healing, of body and soul alike. Everywhere that Jesus goes, people are made whole. Sometimes that means the end of a chronic disease. Sometimes it’s the restoration of a social outcast. Sometimes it’s a person who just needs to know that they are seen, that they are loved, that they are forgiven.</p><p>When we pray for healing in our own day and age, we wish that miracles would happen on demand. And oftentimes they do: both modern medical miracles, as well as the more traditional inexplicable sort. And while we’ve all lost loved ones, while we’ve all had prayers that appear to go unanswered, nevertheless we look ever to the healing love of Jesus to find the heart of God. In the words of David Bentley Hart:</p><p><i>For, after all, if it is from Christ that we are to learn how God relates himself to sin, suffering, evil, and death, it would seem that he provides us little evidence of anything other than a regal, relentless, and miraculous enmity; sin he forgives, suffering he heals, evil he casts out, and death he conquers. And absolutely nowhere does Christ act as if any of these things are part of the eternal work or purposes of God</i>.</p><p>Sooner or later, I have to believe, God will raise us all: healed, whole, and resurrected. C.S. Lewis pointed out that the miracles which Jesus works are the same as God works for us all, only on a different scale. Jesus turns water into wine; so does God for us all. Jesus heals wounds; so does God for us all. In Christ we simply see the purity of grace. And we are called to do likewise, are we not? To feed the hungry, house the homeless, instruct the ignorant, rebuke the sinner, forgive the repentant—in short, be Christ for the world?</p><p>And yet, health is not an end unto itself. We treat it that way, but it’s not. Even the healthiest lifestyle is but a deferment of death. Rather, health has a purpose: to help us to be human. And as bizarre as it may sound, illness sometimes aids in that. I don’t mean to glorify suffering. Surely God does not. But just as Satan twists God’s good things into evil, so can we in faith extract some goodness from our pain.</p><p>Our struggles can give us sympathy, humility. They can realign priorities. They can remind us what a gift it is to simply be alive, to gain another day, another chance. And on top of that, our own tribulations can empower us to help others, to see them through the same. Many a saint has prayed for healings that ran deeper than the flesh. They prayed and were conformed to Christ. They prayed and grew more human.</p><p>Jesus in the garden, sweating drops of blood, pled that this cup might pass from Him: the cup of His final Passover, the cup of His Passion and death. And I used to wonder if the Father had denied His Son that prayer. What a bizarre division in God that would be. But I’ve come to understand that His prayer indeed was answered. The cup did pass from Him: He tasted it from the Cross, from that sponge upon a stick, and proclaimed with His final breath, “It is finished.” The cup did pass: but He passed through it, not around it.</p><p>This is what we pray as well: not simply that bad things won’t happen. We know darn well that they will. This is the valley of the shadow of death, after all, the vale of tears, where even a sinless human being ends up lashed and pierced upon His Cross. But we pray we see it through. That Christ be with us through it all, through all we have to suffer, all we have to face, never leaving us abandoned, never leaving us alone; walking by us, suffering in us, and bringing us in wholeness to the other side.</p><p>He takes us by the hand and lifts us up. In this world or the next, He lifts us up. God’s is the broken hand that heals.</p><p>And when we know salvation is assured—when we know, no matter what, that we’re seen and known and loved, that even the grave cannot contain us—then suffering loses its sting. Then we can endure, for we are not alone. Where is God when we suffer? He is in our very wounds, as we are within His, suffering in us, suffering for us, bringing us to new birth. Everything will pass away, except the love of God. And that love will raise the dead.</p><p>We are healed, in order to be human. We are healed, in order to serve. We are healed, that we may be Christ for such a world as so sorely needs a Savior. Touch the holes in His hands. Place your hand in His side. And know that there is nothing you or I could ever face that He has not faced first, and conquered. Christ has gone before us so that He can be our Way, carving His Kingdom through hell, and up beyond the stars.</p><p>Life is a fever; we think we’re alone. But, O dearly beloved, look who has your hand.</p><p>In the Name of the Father and of the +Son and of the Holy Spirit. Amen.</p><p><br /></p><p><br /></p><p><br /></p><p><i>If you would like to contribute to St Peter’s ministry online, <a href="https://secure.myvanco.com/L-Z9EG/home">you may do so here</a>, and we would thank God for your generosity</i>.</p>RDGStouthttp://www.blogger.com/profile/03099242575796693843noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-2444606381145909980.post-70928300908088361372024-01-30T11:50:00.000-08:002024-02-01T08:40:11.201-08:00The Buddha & the Lion<p></p><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEh5GjX_zAqfmK_kBc4ARSM6MIiwPuMRq2AHfF8HSrIOQGu3Ekuq75tQopgsbhX2czKzMQwqrIZQhMNF7dEmdT691uyTHxhms-1ik2NEi5_rmvrgwdg6vfucGufKTHvX6xpv2acN9T8uu6968hFd9X5oftrnncXpUI97C3Yx5mzANjCwINbHqBXOt96zw_0/s1024/Buddha%20Lion.jpg" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" data-original-height="1024" data-original-width="708" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEh5GjX_zAqfmK_kBc4ARSM6MIiwPuMRq2AHfF8HSrIOQGu3Ekuq75tQopgsbhX2czKzMQwqrIZQhMNF7dEmdT691uyTHxhms-1ik2NEi5_rmvrgwdg6vfucGufKTHvX6xpv2acN9T8uu6968hFd9X5oftrnncXpUI97C3Yx5mzANjCwINbHqBXOt96zw_0/s16000/Buddha%20Lion.jpg" /></a></div><div style="text-align: center;"><b><br /></b></div><div style="text-align: center;"><b>Pastor’s Epistle—March 2024</b></div><p></p><p><i>Have you not known? Have you not heard? The Lord is the everlasting God, the Creator of the ends of the earth. He does not faint or grow weary; his understanding is unsearchable</i>.</p><p>—Isaiah 40:28</p><p><i>He was given authority, glory and sovereign power; all peoples, nations and men of every language worshipped him. His dominion is an everlasting dominion that shall not pass away</i>.</p><p>—Daniel 7:14</p><p>When I warn my children of consequences for their bad behavior, I have to be both discerning and sparing; for whatever I threaten, I must then be willing to follow through. One arrow in my quiver that worked particularly well when they were younger was my promise to play one of my black-and-white subtitled samurai films, which I adore and which bore my children to tears. They took this threat seriously, because they knew that I would be happy to carry it out.</p><p>American and Japanese pop culture have been entwined in a love affair ever since the end of World War II. Few directors on either side of the Pacific have been so influential as Akira Kurosawa. His movies have been remade, often shot for shot, into such familiar titles as <i>The Magnificent Seven</i>, <i>A Fistful of Dollars</i>, <i>A Bug’s Life</i>, and, yes, even <i>Star Wars</i>. For his part, Kurosawa loved Shakespeare, filming his own medieval Japanese interpretations of Macbeth and King Lear.</p><p>Most fascinating to me was how he adapted the religious aspects of those stories. His approach was simple and straightforward: Kurosawa outright replaced references to the Blessed Virgin Mary with Kannon (Guanyin), the Buddhist bodhisattva of mercy, and those to Christ with Amita (Amitābha), the savior-figure of Pure Land Buddhism. Could it really be that easy? Could cutting and pasting a couple of divine names leave the spiritual substance intact?</p><p>Apparently so. A colleague and seminary classmate of mine from California once mentioned cousins of his who converted from Christianity to Pure Land Buddhism—only then to be shocked at just how Christian their new faith felt. In Pure Land understanding, anyone who calls on Amida Buddha is saved purely by mercy, purely by grace: reborn into his paradise, where all reach enlightenment, all achieve salvation. Salvation by grace through faith! Sound familiar?</p><p>Long had I wondered why Christianity never took widespread root in Japan. The Church flourished both in China and Korea, despite such horrors as the Taiping Rebellion, when a nineteenth-century Chinese visionary, who claimed to be the brother of Christ, started a war that ended up costing 20 million lives. One can see why modern Chinese might be wary of the Cross. Yet soon China will be able to boast the largest Christian population on the planet. Were the Japanese really so different?</p><p>For Japan, Christianity remains the road not taken, a historical and cultural “What if?” Before the Tokugawa Shogunate consolidated Japan under their rule in the early seventeenth century, many daimyo (feudal lords) had embraced the Christian faith, and even carried it to Korea, where it remains powerfully present today. Alas, those Christian rulers largely lined up on the wrong side of the Battle of Sekigahara in AD 1600, and the remaining southern Japanese Christians were crushed during the Shimabara Peasants’ Rebellion in 1637.</p><p>With their leaders and missionaries crucified, the surviving “Kirishitans” went underground for some 250 years, maintaining their faith in secret until its legalization in 1873. That’s a heck of a long time to keep the faith. Today Christians make up some 1.5% of the Japanese population, compared to a third of South Koreans. That’s twice as many Korean Christians as Buddhists.</p><p>Kurosawa’s approach to translating Western stories into his Far Eastern context, and the fluidity with which American and Italian filmmakers were able to accomplish the same feat in the opposite direction, offered a solution to my query that I hadn’t expected. What if the Japanese had little interest in Christ because—so to speak—they’ve already got one?</p><p>This isn’t quite as wild as it sounds. Christians and Buddhists interacted for centuries along the Silk Road, and the exchange went both ways. It’s entirely possible that the Buddhist concept of the bodhisattva—a person who reaches enlightenment only then to return to this burning world in order to save others—developed from the Christian understanding of saints. Meanwhile, the Buddha became Christianized in legend and lore as the paired Sts Barlaam and Josaphat.</p><p>In <i>The Last Battle</i>, the final volume of C.S. Lewis’s Chronicles of Narnia, a character of another faith, who worships Tash, is shocked to find himself welcomed into Aslan’s paradise. Aslan, of course, is a literally lionized Christ figure, whilst Tash stands in for all false gods and demons. Aslan tells the man that all evil done in Aslan’s name, Tash claims; and all good done in Tash’s name, Aslan claims; not because Tash and Aslan are one, but because they are opposites.</p><p>I wonder about those of other faiths in our own world, who call upon the Lord of Love under such names as Krishna or Amida. Is it Christ they know, the self-revealing Logos of God, in some other form, however veiled? Or when the dying call to Amida, is it Christ who answers their prayers? A name is so much more than just a password, after all. Jesus’ mother never called Him Jesus. That’s our Latinization of a Hellenization of the Hebrew Yeshua, which in turn is short for Yehoshua, meaning “Yahweh Saves.” A name is a relationship, a connection.</p><p>I’m not saying all faiths are the same. I’m simply musing that the grace of God in Jesus Christ almost certainly transcends all the limits we impose. He surely loves all of His children. He finds a way to bring us home, even if He has to go all the way to the Cross, all the way to hell and back. The Church’s job, after all, is to tell people where God is, not to tell them where He’s not. The former we know. The latter we don’t.</p><p>I would that all of Japan, indeed all of the world, would know God in Jesus Christ, that all would be Christians in the truest sense of the term. Were we doing our job, the whole world might well be converted by now. I simply wonder in the meantime if the same Jesus who has lavished us with His grace, undeserving sinners that we are, hasn’t also found a slantwise way to nourish others as well. For His understanding is unsearchable, and all peoples worship Him.</p><p>In Jesus. Amen.</p><p><br /></p><p><br /></p><p><br /></p><p><i>If you would like to contribute to St Peter’s ministry online, <a href="https://secure.myvanco.com/L-Z9EG/home">you may do so here</a>, and we would thank God for your generosity</i>.</p>RDGStouthttp://www.blogger.com/profile/03099242575796693843noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-2444606381145909980.post-16718086182766481812024-01-24T11:34:00.000-08:002024-01-25T07:47:47.838-08:00The Meat of the Matter<br /><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEgFNEudxJPO5sr7QJ2yoIAJw0eQQ2L2Pq0AR_NkyPVePJ2N0MPzEdpTmiM-89zmpqJVgY6yemWBj-pLhHNIskhHqqvxgMY1viKm_6QSg2kZp2IpnHSdmLZK9BMvpZHyOER4oYMRK-wRy0GHld0yThu6OP8trcrLuAkrYShLHObhmFBXd98XFxVtG03obG4/s812/Samhain.jpg" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" data-original-height="812" data-original-width="613" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEgFNEudxJPO5sr7QJ2yoIAJw0eQQ2L2Pq0AR_NkyPVePJ2N0MPzEdpTmiM-89zmpqJVgY6yemWBj-pLhHNIskhHqqvxgMY1viKm_6QSg2kZp2IpnHSdmLZK9BMvpZHyOER4oYMRK-wRy0GHld0yThu6OP8trcrLuAkrYShLHObhmFBXd98XFxVtG03obG4/s16000/Samhain.jpg" /></a></div><p><b>Propers: </b><a href="https://lectionary.library.vanderbilt.edu/texts.php?id=63">The Fourth Sunday After the Epiphany</a>, AD 2024 B</p><p><b>Homily:</b></p><p>Lord, we pray for the preacher, for You know his sins are great.</p><p>Grace, mercy, and peace to you from God our Father and from our Lord and Savior Jesus Christ. Amen.</p><p>“No idol in the world really exists. There is no God but one.”</p><p>In our epistle this morning, St Paul writes to the Christian congregation at Corinth, an ancient Grecian city with an opulent reputation, which Rome nevertheless had burnt to the ground, then refounded as a provincial capital, a colony of Romans, Greeks, and Jews. In Corinth, as throughout the Empire, religion could not easily be extricated from civic and social life. Indeed, religion was understood as part of public obligation. Private belief and pious family practice would be considered more a philosophy than a religion.</p><p>Most people, even in urban areas, would’ve been largely vegetarian, or at least pescatarian, because meat remained rare and expensive. One exception proved to be the temples. Greco-Roman priests regularly held elaborate public sacrifices. And it’s not as though the gods would then descend to eat the flesh. Rather, temples shared this sacrificial meat in civic festivals. Corinthian sanctuaries, such as those dedicated to Asclepius, Demeter, and Kore, either abutted the marketplace or had dining rooms of their own. They functioned as public eateries, religious restaurants.</p><p>So imagine that you’re a Christian who typically cannot afford to eat meat, yet on holidays your city hall holds an ox roast for the entire community. Finger-lickin’ good. Should it bother you that the cooks aren’t Christian? Or can your family feast, in good conscience and good health? Such is the problem St Paul would here address.</p><p>We might not think it particularly relevant to our own situation. It’s been rather a long time since we used to slit the throats of bulls and goats, to hang them upside-down from yew trees in honor of Thor and Odin. Yet Paul discerns division within the Body of Christ. And it wouldn’t be the first time. The Corinthians are a troublesome congregation, imposing hierarchies of wealth and privilege, treating fellow Christians as second-class members in the Kingdom of God. The rich, for example, enjoyed a finer, fancier Eucharist.</p><p>Some of the Corinthians in question have no problem at all tucking into a nice T-bone at the Asklepeion, whilst their coreligionists wrestle a troubled conscience. So what’s it going to be, Paul? Can we all join the party or not?</p><p>St Paul begins diplomatically. Concerning idols, he writes, we all possess knowledge. We’re all educated people here, are we not? Thus “we all know, we all understand, that no idol in the world truly exists, and that there is no God but one.” Indeed, he continues—and here it gets interesting—“there may be many so-called gods in heaven and on earth,” many gods, many lords, “yet for us there is one God, and one Lord Jesus Christ, through whom are all things and through whom we exist.”</p><p>What is he saying? The simplest, most fundamentalist interpretation would be that idols are make-believe, that only our God exists, the exclusively Christian God, so what does it matter whether someone dedicates our daily bread to an imaginary being? If the mayor thanks a unicorn, does that cause us theological qualms? Yet that’s not Paul’s belief, not his take. Paul follows up immediately by affirming that “there may be many so-called gods in heaven and on earth, as in fact there are many gods and many lords.”</p><p>Paul, you see, believes in spirits, in angels and elementals, powers and principalities. He’s not saying, then, that idols are all in our heads. These are the spirits that men call gods, and here Paul affirms that they’re real. He warns us not to be in thrall to them. For Christians to participate in pagan rites, he will tell us two chapters from now, is for us to sacrifice to demons. We ought to know better, for we have seen that there is but one God, one Lord, one Father of us all, in whom we all live and move and have our being.</p><p>Think to the book of Acts, when Paul is in Athens, praising the Athenians for their many temples, many shrines. “I see that you are very religious in every way,” he tells them, and holds it to be a virtue, immensely to their credit. He then sees a shrine dedicated “to an unknown god,” and this he uses as his in: “What you worship as unknown, this I proclaim to you.” Paul, in Athens, presents Christianity not as negating their native religion but as fulfilling it, revealing it, opening it up.</p><p>St Paul quotes philosophers and poets as readily as he does the Hebrew Scriptures. When he says that God is one, he doesn’t mean that faith can be reduced to some multiple choice test on which you’d better pick the proper divinity. Rather, he affirms that all true religion, all true devotion, however unenlightened, however misguided, points toward the One God, the True God, beneath and beyond them all.</p><p>Paul, in other words, appears to believe that all of us, in some sense, worship the One God whether we know it or not; and that this One God, of all peoples and places and ages and worlds, has now been fully revealed, fully unveiled, in the person of Jesus Christ. Everything else we perceive as through a glass darkly. Christ at last is the true face of God, the God beyond all gods. C.S. Lewis, Martin Luther, and Benedict XVI all agree that other faiths do worship God. They simply do not know Him in the way we do through Christ.</p><p>We cannot go backward. Paul tells us such would be to sacrifice to Satan. Yet we can affirm the presence of God in every human life, and bring our Lord to others through our own.</p><p>So when St Paul says that no idol exists, that there is no God but one, he isn’t denying the reality of other spirits, other so-called gods. Rather, this sacrificial meat, offered up in ignorance to Kore, is offered in some real way to God—because there is only One God. It’s a middle path, but a common one. He doesn’t say that all religions are the same; he is a Christian, after all, and willing to die for his faith. Yet St Paul sees a value in his neighbor’s faith as well: a value he would offer unto Jesus, by offering Jesus to all.</p><p>Eat, in other words: because all of it comes from God to us; all of it is offered to God by us; and all of us are returning to God in one way or another. All things exist through Jesus. And you know this, Paul writes. You’re sharp enough, mature enough in your faith, to have this knowledge, to possess this richer, more nuanced understanding. Alas, there’s one thing you’ve forgotten: and that’s the fact that knowledge puffs up, but love builds up.</p><p>There are those in your community, St Paul says, who do not have your strength of faith, who cannot look to a statue of Zeus and see some reflection of Christ, however dim. They need the simple milk of faith before the solid food. Such believers aren’t ready for philosophy. They see you eating at a pagan temple, and they think you’ve left the faith. They see you as apostate, betraying Jesus Christ. They won’t eat with you. “For one believes he may eat all things, yet the weak eat only vegetables,” as he writes in Romans.</p><p>Your mind, Paul pens to the carnivorous Corinthians, is in the right place. I agree with you in theory. But where is your heart? Where is your love lived out in practice? “Take care that this liberty of yours does not somehow become a stumbling block to the weak.” You have the proper knowledge, he says, but in scandalizing your brethren, you thereby sin against Jesus Christ. You wound His Body—not by the eating, but by your callousness towards their concerns, by dismissing a Christian conscience not yet fully formed.</p><p>This is a pastoral problem, not a theological one. What good does our freedom in Jesus do if we misuse it so that others fall away? Basically, Paul tells the intellectual Corinthians that they’re right in the head but wrong in the heart. If it bothers your neighbor, don’t do it, he writes. What is freedom for, if not to love our brethren? Jesus doesn’t care about the meat. But He cares about the person by your side.</p><p>Anno Domini 2024, we haven’t many pagan temples left—though we seem to be building some more. Yet the heart of Paul’s concern, the Christian division at Corinth, boils down to the fact that Christians would often rather be right than shut up and love our neighbor. And that’s as much an issue today as ever it was in our past. May Christ, who frees us from sin and death, and is with us wherever we go, enlighten both our hearts and minds alike.</p><p>In the Name of the Father and of the +Son and of the Holy Spirit. Amen.</p><p><br /></p><p><br /></p><p><br /></p><p><i>If you would like to contribute to St Peter’s ministry online, <a href="https://secure.myvanco.com/L-Z9EG/home">you may do so here</a>, and we would thank God for your generosity</i>.</p>RDGStouthttp://www.blogger.com/profile/03099242575796693843noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-2444606381145909980.post-64965779611265381742024-01-17T11:21:00.000-08:002024-01-18T07:48:02.398-08:00The Worst Sermon<br /><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEhTPnzKztCnt_JSjkROBxpBcNH8ETdrx3eeua_QIvs9GfyfUOakb4mR3d5LZSsrL1HggdpbNRtrofNGawe693kuoAgRpm8Bbwzw6FDjru9uOiR4EOiE85Xzvub47lIFA7ecjVNUvzG3FlKH9J3V5n7gIogA-qYR_fbcFtzrkkrb8A8lZAsjW52Dxjcy7nE/s870/john_martin_-_repentance_of_nineveh_-_1958.66_-_yale_university_art_gallery.webp" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" data-original-height="870" data-original-width="721" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEhTPnzKztCnt_JSjkROBxpBcNH8ETdrx3eeua_QIvs9GfyfUOakb4mR3d5LZSsrL1HggdpbNRtrofNGawe693kuoAgRpm8Bbwzw6FDjru9uOiR4EOiE85Xzvub47lIFA7ecjVNUvzG3FlKH9J3V5n7gIogA-qYR_fbcFtzrkkrb8A8lZAsjW52Dxjcy7nE/s16000/john_martin_-_repentance_of_nineveh_-_1958.66_-_yale_university_art_gallery.webp" /></a></div><p><b>Propers:</b> <a href="https://lectionary.library.vanderbilt.edu/texts.php?id=62">The Third Sunday After the Epiphany</a>, AD 2024 B</p><p><b>Homily:</b></p><p>Lord, we pray for the preacher, for You know his sins are great.</p><p>Grace, mercy, and peace to you from God our Father and from our Lord and Savior Jesus Christ. Amen.</p><p>“40 days more, and Nineveh shall be overthrown!” —is likely the worst homily in the whole of the Scriptures. It is abrupt, judgmental, unlearned, all Law with nary a hint of Gospel, not even attempting to explain the meaning of the Word of God, which is of course the purpose of a sermon.</p><p>Moreover, it is delivered by a preacher who despises his audience, who hates the congregation to which he has been sent. Jonah views Nineveh as the enemy, and the last thing that he wants is for them to be delivered from the wrath that is to come. Nineveh deserves to burn. And it has only been through extraordinary means, involving storms and whales and a pagan crew, that God has managed to bring His reluctant prophet, kicking and screaming, to this massive capital of the much-loathed Assyrian Empire.</p><p>Jonah as a book is all about exposing our expectations and flipping them on their heads. We anticipate an angry, violent God, only to discover that we are the ones who ever seek the downfall of our foes; we are the ones who want vengeance, in brutality and blood. The book of Jonah presents us with a very different understanding of God: one in which He loves all peoples, even the worst of the worst, even the ones whom we would damn; and yes, my friends, even us.</p><p>The prophet doesn’t want a word of grace. The prophet doesn’t want a God of love. And so the prophet flees to the ends of the earth, sets out upon the sea, braves the savage storm, all to avoid, not the judgment of God, but His mercy poured out on our nemeses. Jonah literally descends to the dead, only to be swallowed by a sea beast and uphurled upon the shore. The whole book is a farce, you understand, a parable intended to illustrate our own hardness of heart, and how it pales before the mercies of our Lord.</p><p>And so we must imagine this bedraggled prophet, back from the dead—bedecked, I’d like to think, in seaweed, salt, and ambergris—fuming, petulant, pouting, finally giving the absolute bare minimum message that God has impressed upon him: “40 days and Nineveh shall be no more!” I mean, it’s laughably bad. That’s the point.</p><p>And yet! Somehow the Word works. Somehow the Spirit gets through. This utterly abominable sermon has the desired effect—desired by God if not by the preacher—that the whole city of Nineveh, a vile hive of scum and villainy, and even the Emperor upon his throne, all repent in sackcloth and ash and turn from the myriad evils they have wrought. They repent and are forgiven. They return to God and are saved.</p><p>And this of course leaves Jonah hopping mad. He knew that this would happen! He knew it from the beginning, that God is “gracious and merciful, slow to anger and abounding in steadfast love, relenting from punishment.” What a load of hippy-dippy drek. He didn’t want them saved! He didn’t want them forgiven. He didn’t want them loved. And yet, the grace of God came through—both through the preacher and in spite of him.</p><p>This often gives me hope: that even in the lamest sermon, Jesus’ love gets through. All these terrible things we’ve thought of God were only our projections, mirrors we held up in which to see ourselves. God is always better than we think, than we even could think. Jonah’s sermon was the worst, and yet the Word got through. The flipside to this, of course, is that outward signs of failure may not be the preacher’s fault. Discouragement and struggle are a feature, not a bug. The best of us may bear the Cross in their obscurity.</p><p>There is a famous midrash—a pious Jewish legend—that the King of Nineveh in the book of Jonah is none other than the Pharaoh from the book of Exodus. After the Red Sea washed his horses and chariots away, as the story goes, Pharaoh stood aghast upon the shore. He wandered into the wilderness, where a people found him who recognized his royal dress and bearing. They made him king of their new city, Nineveh, where he reigned for some miraculous 500 years.</p><p>And so when Jonah came to him, as a new Moses demanding repentance, Pharaoh never hesitated. Once he had led an empire to destruction by defying the will of God; now he leads a new one to forgiveness, a turning back to righteousness. Thus is Pharaoh redeemed. It’s a wonderful midrash, connecting the divine judgment against Egypt with the forgiveness shown to Assyria, illustrating how justice and mercy can both be one and the same, for both of them are truth. What seems to us judgment is in fact God’s mercy; and God’s mercy, of necessity, is just.</p><p>This is how I’ve come to read the judgment of our God: not as retributive, not as merciless, but as reparative, restorative, redeeming, resurrecting. He shines the light of truth upon our foolishness and flaws, like a physician diagnosing our disease. And then He cuts it out of us, helping us all to heal, guiding us in His good grace to hale and hearty wholeness. Perfect justice culminates in mercy, and perfect mercy offers opportunity to right our many wrongs, to heal what we have harmed.</p><p>So much of Christianity in our own day and age seems to me the selling of “get out of jail free” cards. Oh, God is wrathful and vengeful and hungry for blood—unless! Unless you say the magic word or do the proper work or tithe until the preacher gets his private jet. We want a God who is good to us but wicked toward our enemies, hostile to our outgroups, to all those folks who don’t think or act or smell or vote in ways we would prefer. And so, much of religion is anxiety about joining the proper team, entering the righteous club.</p><p>But such is not the way of faith. Faith doesn’t mean that if we check a certain box, then we opt for the mercy package rather than the justice route. No. Faith for us means that in Jesus Christ we have seen the heart of God, God in the flesh. God for us is Jesus. And Jesus, in His teachings, in His life and death and rising, embodies in His humanity the perfect love of God. We must understand: Jesus doesn’t save us from God. He is God!</p><p>And everyone here knows, or darn well ought to know, that Jesus’ life was merciful and just, truthful and compassionate, rebuking the sinner and forgiving the repentant. Jesus Christ is not a schizophrenic. He isn’t just one day and merciful the next. Rather, He embodies both, perfectly; for both are true, and He is Truth.</p><p>That’s why in faith we do not fear God’s judgment. It isn’t simply because we’ve managed to avoid it while others will have to face it. No, it’s because we have seen in Jesus Christ that the judgment of God <i>is</i> His mercy, and His mercy <i>is</i> His judgment. Whatever befalls us, God is for us. Whatever we suffer, we are loved. God doesn’t make bad things happen. If He could do that, He wouldn’t be God. Rather, He is with us, beside us, within us, suffering all for our sake in the Spirit and Body of Christ.</p><p>Goodness can be scary. That much at least we know. “Abashed, the Devil stood and felt how awful goodness is.” Yet such pious fear is the revelation of our own hearts, our own evil, our own need for healing, not of any wickedness in God. Christ is always for us. Christ is always with us. Christ will ever guide us to our home. His Way may not be easy; it leads us to His Cross. Yet beyond the Cross and empty tomb we join in His Resurrection. And there the only pain shall be the burning up of dross.</p><p>So much of this world is beyond our understanding; so much of ourselves as well, and all we seem to suffer here. I have no easy answers, save to say it’s a broken world. But we know in Christ that God is good; in Him we have all that we need. Christ is our light in the darkness, our life in the midst of the grave. We surrender to His Spirit. He shall love us until we are human again. He shall love us and make us all whole.</p><p>“40 days more and Nineveh shall be overthrown!” —not in wrath and anguish, but in repentance and rebirth.</p><p>In the Name of the Father and of the +Son and of the Holy Spirit. Amen.</p><p><br /></p><p><br /></p><p><br /></p><p><i>If you would like to contribute to St Peter’s ministry online, <a href="https://secure.myvanco.com/L-Z9EG/home">you may do so here</a>, and we would thank God for your generosity</i>.</p>RDGStouthttp://www.blogger.com/profile/03099242575796693843noreply@blogger.com1tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-2444606381145909980.post-55272658903273607492024-01-10T09:59:00.000-08:002024-01-15T08:21:09.890-08:00The Experience of Religion<br /><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEhsnQiy6iaNZkVSLvlNSPamMTWpchDYE9L00KGbeRWRmERy1A5wO7bAVKS68KuuD8QQTKrpNcWYszAsgOcMGq4FZh6hyphenhyphen9Na_FgIZzSgopLlcK-PojlPgKFfgPz3tlOFCUzVo77C1mE5KkGtXQdRrBtl0r91J38mzCHgxGUYIa-ESMadF9XdTChiAD1zV4c/s1104/69b50a70384293bae12bfecda52c93fa.jpg" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" data-original-height="1104" data-original-width="736" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEhsnQiy6iaNZkVSLvlNSPamMTWpchDYE9L00KGbeRWRmERy1A5wO7bAVKS68KuuD8QQTKrpNcWYszAsgOcMGq4FZh6hyphenhyphen9Na_FgIZzSgopLlcK-PojlPgKFfgPz3tlOFCUzVo77C1mE5KkGtXQdRrBtl0r91J38mzCHgxGUYIa-ESMadF9XdTChiAD1zV4c/s16000/69b50a70384293bae12bfecda52c93fa.jpg" /></a></div><p><b>Propers:</b> <a href="https://lectionary.library.vanderbilt.edu/texts.php?id=61">The Second Sunday after the Epiphany</a>, AD 2024 B</p><p><b>Homily:</b></p><p>Lord, we pray for the preacher, for You know his sins are great.</p><p>Grace, mercy, and peace to you from God our Father and from our Lord and Savior Jesus Christ. Amen.</p><p>We all want to be known. We all want to be understood. We all want to be loved. And we all want to be reassured that we are not alone. Religious experience is the realization or fulfillment of these natural human desires. For some it comes as a flash in the night. For others it develops over decades of patience, prayer, meditation, and struggle. But the spiritual person, the spiritual life, is one that sooner or later outlives fear.</p><p>All this religious talk of salvation, liberation, enlightenment, eternal life, is all at root our attempt to put into words that indescribable experience, that transcendent revelation, that we were never alone, that we have always been loved, and that we are better known than we could ever know ourselves. And with that comes joy and peace and love and release. Sometimes we only get glimpses, as though in the shards of a shattered mirror. But that moment of communion, that flash of religious ecstasy, keeps us going, and we constantly try to get back to it, to see ever upon the horizon of life the dawning of eternity.</p><p>The singing, the Sacraments, the stories, the service that we offer to each other and our community, all of this churchy stuff is the Christian attempt to break eternity into time, to live with the remembrance of religious experience in every moment of every day. It’s not easy. But we do it because it’s real, more real than anything else. We do it because it’s true, and good, and right, and beautiful. We do it because it makes us human.</p><p>And we stumble, of course. We falter; we fail; we fall. We do not always live up to our calling to witness to our world this truth at reality’s root. Our inability to be infinite, to love as we are loved, to forgive as we are forgiven, we call sin, literally “falling short.” Yet this does not change the truth: that we are known, we are loved, we are forgiven, we are home. And so each night before bed, each Sunday before worship, we return to the promise, to the waters of our Baptism, immersing ourselves in eternity.</p><p>And we rise again: absolved, resurrected, renewed; ever trying to live out the promise of our faith; ever failing to infuse adequately into our words and our works the Spirit who burns in our breast. Failure is part of the program, you see: finite creatures attempting to express infinity. Yet somehow the Spirit gets through. Somehow the Word works nonetheless. And even our most majestic failures God can redeem in His grace.</p><p>That to me is the most wearying part of Christianity, of religion writ large, whether you’re cleric or lay or what-have-you: to taste that perfect, ineffable Truth, only then to return to the daily grind, to slogging it out within a fallen broken world, within a fallen broken flesh. The holiest of us resolve this seeming conflict, harmonizing heaven and earth. They see how in faith they are one and the same, how the finite contains the infinite: God in a splash of water, God in a bite of bread. The rest of us must ever turn to fall and rise again.</p><p>Without going into detail—and so that you are not tempted to cart me off to the funny farm—I must confess that I have seen wondrous things in my ministry and in my life. I have seen what I know to be miracles. I have seen creatures that weren’t supposed to be there. These experiences were as real to me as this one is here and now, standing amidst this congregation, preaching this sermon. They were the sort of glimpses of a deeper world for which believers and skeptics alike might pray or beg to have.</p><p>And yet! When they were over, they immediately began to fade from my mind, like a dream upon waking. One starts to rationalize, to explain away, to misremember. We inundate the miraculous with the mundane. I have to remind myself those things were real. And so we can all know, truly know, that we are infinitely understood and infinitely loved and eternally never alone. And yet we seem to forget. How easy it is to live as though religion were not true! As though we were unloved and unlovely and all by ourselves.</p><p>We know that isn’t true, and yet we live as though it were! We must support each other. We must remind each other. We must forgive each other, be Jesus for each other. We have to give ourselves the Christ for in the Christ is God!</p><p>Our psalm for this morning, the hundred thirty-ninth, is ancient: 2000, 3000 years old. It is also timeless. Jewish legend, Jewish tradition, holds that it was written by Adam, and Adam of course is us all. We all sing this psalm, in our souls, in our lives. We always have.</p><p><i>O Lord, you have searched me and known me. You know when I sit down and when I rise up; you discern my thoughts from far away. You search out my path and my lying down, and are acquainted with all my ways. Even before a word is on my tongue, O Lord, you know it completely. You hem me in, behind and before, and lay your hand upon me. Such knowledge is too wonderful for me; it is so high that I cannot attain it.</i></p><p><i>For it was you who formed my inward parts; you knit me together in my mother’s womb. I praise you, for I am fearfully and wonderfully made. Wonderful are your works; that I know very well. My frame was not hidden from you, when I was being made in secret, intricately woven in the depths of the earth.</i></p><p><i>Your eyes beheld my unformed substance. In your book were written all the days that were formed for me, when none of them as yet existed. How weighty to me are your thoughts, O God! How vast is the sum of them! I try to count them—they are more than the sand; I come to the end—I am still with you</i>.</p><p>You are known, better than you know yourself. You are understood, by the One who formed and framed you, every sinew and synapse. You are loved, more deeply than you could ever comprehend. And you have never been alone, not before birth, not even after death. And most importantly, you know this. Down in your soul, in the divine spark of the Spirit, in the quiet of your heart, you know that this is true: that power and property, fame and shame, are fleeting and hollow within. Everything you need, you have, you have always had.</p><p>That’s why Nathanael seems so gobsmacked in our Gospel, when Christ tells him what by rights he oughtn’t know. It isn’t about some fig tree; it’s about the revelation, the revealing, the remembering, that Jesus knows Nathanael, and loves him, that he has never been alone. And he responds in religious ecstasy. “Rabbi, you are the Son of God!” he cries out. “You are the King of Israel!”</p><p>And Jesus replies with that knowing smile, “You will see greater things than these. You will see heaven opened and the angels of God ascending and descending upon the Son of Man.” I have such plans for you, He says, and this shall be only the start.</p><p>We are here today, my brothers and sisters, together to remember, together to reveal, together to reaffirm the promise, that God has called us by whatever means to witness to His truth, to live His life of love, to show the world a human being who has no fear of hell. I know how easy it can be for us to forget, to get bogged down by the daily grind, to grow discouraged at the news and the state of our society, to be broken by our losses and our grief. Hear me! You are known. You are loved. You will never be alone.</p><p>And you already know this is true. In Jesus, it has always been true.</p><p>Cling to that, and you’ll outlive the world. Cling to Christ, and you can never die.</p><p>In the Name of the Father and of the +Son and of the Holy Spirit. Amen.</p><div><br /></div><div><br /></div><div><br /></div><div><i>If you would like to contribute to St Peter’s ministry online, <a href="https://secure.myvanco.com/L-Z9EG/home">you may do so here</a>, and we would thank God for your generosity.</i></div>RDGStouthttp://www.blogger.com/profile/03099242575796693843noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-2444606381145909980.post-49293750436405527952024-01-09T10:09:00.000-08:002024-01-09T11:55:11.525-08:00Sacred Text<br /><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEhmNEKPMhZUcrhyWHUPGtr3HQvRNu1s_vIPBcaTXYkYg8ays-x49iBGlZ2cT8SBTUn4ODBTHdMhEu6pap_rEG50qTidNLWJaiV-BqIoSFZeF1ki_sLU8fDufaN1-Z94yt3D7HLa8KUOzY3pG0ZHT4__y3cVi-BgkE6WyX5iuDTlKIjfxieszW_InmFmaCU/s900/Sacred%20Text.jpg" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" data-original-height="900" data-original-width="600" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEhmNEKPMhZUcrhyWHUPGtr3HQvRNu1s_vIPBcaTXYkYg8ays-x49iBGlZ2cT8SBTUn4ODBTHdMhEu6pap_rEG50qTidNLWJaiV-BqIoSFZeF1ki_sLU8fDufaN1-Z94yt3D7HLa8KUOzY3pG0ZHT4__y3cVi-BgkE6WyX5iuDTlKIjfxieszW_InmFmaCU/s16000/Sacred%20Text.jpg" /></a></div><span style="font-size: x-small;"><div style="text-align: center;">Keeper of the Sacred Texts, by <a href="https://www.deviantart.com/acidjazzguitarist/art/Keeper-Of-The-Sacred-Texts-951431148">Acid Jazz Guitarist</a></div><div style="text-align: center;"><br /></div></span><p style="text-align: center;"><b>Pastor’s Epistle—February 2024</b></p><p><i>In the beginning was the Word, and the Word was with God, and the Word was God</i>.</p><p>—John 1:1</p><p><i>All scripture is inspired by God and is useful for teaching, for reproof, for correction, and for training in righteousness</i>.</p><p>—2 Timothy 3:16</p><p>Last night our daughters informed me that they had finally grown too old for me to read to them at bedtime. Granted, the younger was in a grumpy mood, having generally gotten too little sleep over the holiday break. But as they are in fifth and seventh grade respectively, I can’t say that they’re entirely off-base. I knew this day would come.</p><p>Our son was in seventh grade when he likewise asked me to stop reading to him, and I still view that as something of a bittersweet milestone. Together we had read about medieval Japan and World War I and chocolate factories and New England whaling and the Native American invention of lacrosse. I miss those bedside adventures.</p><p>For as long as I can remember, books have been holy to me. Credit this to my parents, both lifelong educators, and especially to my mother, who read to me from day one—and who taught me to read on my own when, at three years of age, I grew frustrated with my inability to do so. Frugal as they were when I was growing up, my parents never skimped on books. It was one expense that they were ever happy to indulge.</p><p>Books are astonishing things. They transcend space and time. A person living today, anywhere in the world, can pick up the complete works of Plato and be taught, directly, by the father of Western philosophy. Thucydides, a general in the Peloponnesian War, has left us his eyewitness analysis of that momentous conflict. We hear in his own words Caesar’s account of his conquest of Gaul. Shakespeare, the greatest of all English playwrights, is available to all, and in innumerable adaptations.</p><p>With internet access, a library card, and nose for used books, one can for a pittance accrue an education that would be the absolute envy of any previous human generation. Frederick Douglass worked as a porter to learn the letters of the alphabet. Abraham Lincoln walked miles in the snow to borrow a volume of law. John Wycliffe died a martyr so that people could read the Scriptures in their own language. They would weep for joy to see the works at our disposal. We can learn almost literally anything.</p><p>It is true that the greatest of humanity’s teachers—Socrates, the Buddha, the Christ—left no writings of their own, yet their disciples certainly did. You can hear their words, if not from their lips, then from the pens of those who knew them best. How then can one hold a Bible and not be overcome with awe? Voices now thousands of years old, as fresh as they were when first spoken! Emperors, poets, sages, soldiers, still alive in their texts!</p><p>In Chinese spirituality, paper is understood as deeply mystical. Paper makes real that which has no form or body: marriages, borders, degrees, laws, taxes, ownership. Thus a paper trail seems to exist halfway between the physical and the ephemeral. Think of our birth certificates, death certificates, drivers’ licenses, social security cards. Without proper documentation it’s difficult to prove that we exist. Writing makes us real.</p><p>Such is how I often view the Bible: not as some inerrant text dictated by an angel, nor as golden plates descending from on high, but as the living record of one people’s difficult, ecstatic, confusing, enlightening, and ever-evolving relationship with God—one people’s story, and so the story of us all. For indeed, it is the very particularity of a text, so human in all its respects, that establishes its universality.</p><p>When we read the stories of Adam, Abraham, Moses, David, Solomon, Isaiah, and the rest, they become our own: as much our own as they were Jesus Christ’s. We study the Hebrew Scriptures because they were important to our Lord, because they made Him who He was, an integral part of His Incarnation. Jesus became human for our sake, not by taking on humanity in the abstract, but by becoming this one specific Man, within His particular place and time, in His particular culture and language and family and faith.</p><p>The point of Christianity is to be conformed to Christ, and to do so we must read the stories He read, know the history He knew, understand the context in which He was born and raised. Whenever Christians read the sacred Scriptures, our primary concern should not be its historicity or even authorial intent but to <i>read Jesus in it</i>: both how He might have read it, and how others find Him in it. For us the Bible is the record of the life of Jesus Christ, and that includes the parts of it that were written centuries before His birth.</p><p>Here I seek to steer us between Scylla and Charybdis. On the one hand, I do not want Christians to limit our educations only to the pages of our Bibles. All truth is God’s truth, after all, and it is our duty to seek the Christ in all that is beautiful, good, and true. “Test all things and keep the good,” as St Paul has enjoined us. Any given Christian ought to be as open-minded, well-read, and teachable as his or her situation will allow.</p><p>On the other hand, the Bible is our home. We may visit worlds unknown, exploring every venue of knowledge in every conceivable publication, but we return to the Scriptures of our people, the Scriptures of our Lord. I love novels and histories and philosophy and poetry and the sacred writings of other faith traditions. But it’s the Bible that I strive to read in each and every day, at Matins and at Vespers, our morning and evening prayers. With Christ as our anchor, we can voyage anywhere.</p><p>Remember that reading the Bible and interpreting the Bible are two very different if inseparable tasks. Historically the Church has ever encouraged Christians to interpret any given text in many different ways, and to do so within a community. We must turn it like a diamond, examining its facets. The Bible’s infallibility rests not upon any single-minded literalistic interpretation, but solely on the fact that the Scriptures give us Jesus, and Jesus Christ will never fail.</p><p>Read the Bible. Hold it sacred. And through it, read everything else.</p><p>In Jesus. Amen.</p><div><br /></div><div><br /></div><div><br /></div><div><i>If you would like to contribute to St Peter’s ministry online, <a href="https://secure.myvanco.com/L-Z9EG/home">you may do so here</a>, and we would thank God for your generosity</i>.</div>RDGStouthttp://www.blogger.com/profile/03099242575796693843noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-2444606381145909980.post-78406125415173844472024-01-03T10:33:00.000-08:002024-01-08T07:18:34.558-08:00Samsara<br /><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEjAdkoiQANudZZ46K-8Ujd2ToFasCca-xn5ovlwckI5LXm0a8zNzCVJx_ndaJrik8gjcZqm4UqCsvjGnskCxY-aWRf-DuF-5V2RqB_RYiVPxtkrT8CzK0YhUz-hILQ66tYUm4Ol6yQz11WYb3nQ-RJEZqW871AcPUWCp8bDHrf1oK7ZYmgdkQysDDnAVOg/s1210/Dharma%20Moon,%20Wheel%20of%20Life.jpg" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" data-original-height="1210" data-original-width="862" height="1064" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEjAdkoiQANudZZ46K-8Ujd2ToFasCca-xn5ovlwckI5LXm0a8zNzCVJx_ndaJrik8gjcZqm4UqCsvjGnskCxY-aWRf-DuF-5V2RqB_RYiVPxtkrT8CzK0YhUz-hILQ66tYUm4Ol6yQz11WYb3nQ-RJEZqW871AcPUWCp8bDHrf1oK7ZYmgdkQysDDnAVOg/w758-h1064/Dharma%20Moon,%20Wheel%20of%20Life.jpg" width="758" /></a></div><span style="font-size: x-small;"><div style="text-align: center;">Wheel of Life, by <a href="https://www.dharmamoon.com/wheel-of-life">Dharma Moon</a></div></span><p><b>Propers:</b> <a href="https://lectionary.library.vanderbilt.edu/texts.php?id=60">The Baptism of Our Lord</a>, AD 2024 B</p><p><b>Homily:</b></p><p>Lord, we pray for the preacher, for You know his sins are great.</p><p>Grace, mercy, and peace to you from God our Father and from our Lord and Savior Jesus Christ. Amen.</p><p>Years ago, I read of a Sufi mystic who taught to his disciples the theory of reincarnation. This would be neither noteworthy nor unusual were he of a karmic faith, a Hindu or a Buddhist or a Jain. But Sufis are Muslim, an Abrahamic faith, similar to our own. They generally do not believe in the transmigration of souls.</p><p>The notion of reincarnation has always left a bad taste in my mouth. I don’t like the idea of forgetting. The things that I’ve learned, the people I love, they make me who I am. Nor would I be enamored of having to do all of this again, of starting over from scratch. In fairness, those faiths that believe in reincarnation are all attempting to escape it. The karmics call it samsara, the endless cycle of life, death, and rebirth that makes up our world here below. It’s basically their version of damnation, and they want out.</p><p>Those who manage to escape the cycle, to achieve union with Truth or with God, are known as arhats or as buddhas. They are free; they are eternal. Yet some take the bodhisattva vow, to return to samsara until all of sentient life achieves enlightenment, until all are saved. The paradox is that even as the bodhisattvas leave the highest heaven to return to lower realms, they bring their salvation with them. In sacrificing heavenly bliss for the betterment of all, they are, if anything, even holier, even freer, than they were before.</p><p>The way to the Kingdom of Heaven, in other words, is to give it all up for love. “For whoever would save his life will lose it, and whoever loses his life for my sake will find it.”</p><p>The twist for that Sufi—that Muslim who taught reincarnation—came one day when he finally said to his students, “Don’t you understand? All this talk of reincarnation, of life and death and rebirth, all of that happens to each of us within a single lifetime.” You, me, all of us, are constantly, daily, dying and being reborn. It’s the only way any of us can coherently speak of our lives.</p><p>Are you the same person whom you were back in high school? Are you the same person whom you were as a baby? Are you even the same person whom you were when you got up this morning? And of course the answer is yes—but also no. We are all of us an intermixing of breakage and continuity. If we weren’t at once both the same, yet also different, from whom we used to be, then we would never change, never grow, and never be alive. The soul is not the self, but it’s not no-self either.</p><p>Every moment of every day, we are faced with choices. There are myriad possibilities laid out before us on every step of the way, a thousand paths which we could take. Yet we must choose but one. We can only walk one at a time. And so to actualize that possibility, to pick one option and to make it real, we must then sacrifice all of the others. We must kill the person we might have been to be the person we are. Life is made up of our choices, and every choice is a sacrifice, a cycle of death and rebirth. That’s samsara.</p><p>Today, my brothers and sisters, we celebrate the Baptism of Our Lord, a clearly momentous event in all four canonical gospels. It marks the beginning of Jesus’ public ministry, such that His cousin and Forerunner John shall ever after be known as John the Baptist. Water has a role to play in every major religion, every spiritual system. It cleanses us, nourishes us. As rain it gives life to the earth. As rivers it connects our communities. As the sea it both terrifies and enchants, offering treasures and monsters and storms.</p><p>We are born through water. We live by water. We drown in water. It is life and death and renewal. How then could it not be religious? Baptism is an ablution, a religious and ritual bath. In the time of Jesus, it could signify the entry of someone into the Jewish community. It served as a conversion, a once and done rebirth. Other denominations treated it as a daily affair, a priestly washing and purification. John baptizes for repentance, for a turning back to God, turning to the coming of the Christ.</p><p>When Jesus shows up to be baptized by John, something miraculous happens. The heavens are torn asunder; the Holy Spirit descends; the voice of the Lord thunders, “This is My Son, the beloved.” Clearly Jesus’ Baptism isn’t your run-of-the-mill repentance. Christ doesn’t need to be turned toward Himself. Nor must He be made into a Jew: He’s been Jewish since His birth and His bris. His Baptism, then, does not change Jesus, but Jesus changes baptism.</p><p>He has entered into the waters of life and death and rebirth. He has entered into the chaos of our world. Jesus is indeed our bodhisattva, the one come down from heaven in order to save us all. Yet He’s no mere mortal escaped from samsara. Christ is our God in the flesh. And as He enters, heaven comes with Him. The sky is sundered. The Spirit descends. The voice of God echoes above the waters once again. This here is our new Genesis, our new beginning and birth. Here God walks again with Adam, with all of humankind.</p><p>Christ joins us in the waters of our Baptism. Here we have His Spirit and His Word. Here we are drowned in our sins, drowned in our pride, to rise again with the Name and Breath of Jesus Christ within us. His Spirit burns as fire in our lungs and blood and souls. We are baptized into Jesus’ death and Resurrection, baptized into His eternal life already begun. It is once and done, forever accomplished; you cannot expunge the mark that you bear. Yet ours is a daily drowning, ever returning to these waters, ever rising forgiven again.</p><p>Baptism is birth and death and resurrection, and so is Christian life. We are forever being crucified, forever being raised. That’s what it is to be human. And no-one is more human than the Christ.</p><p>Things have really been a mess lately, haven’t they? Economically, politically, pandemically. We hear of wars and rumors of wars, earthquakes and fires. We’re dealing with stresses and uncertainties, with societal and spiritual collapse. And just here in our area we’ve taken some heavy hits of late. We’ve lost neighbors and brothers and sons; dealt with surgeries and cancers, incarcerations and dementia. This world is always shifting, around, beneath, above us. The only thing that’s permanent is change.</p><p>For those in mourning, for those who are suffering, I have no magic bullet. I cannot tell you that it’s all part of some cosmic plan. I would never say that life is not so bad as it may seem. Life is hard. Love is hard. It is death and resurrection every day. We live in an age of loneliness, isolation, insecurity, and rootlessness, shouldering great burdens by ourselves. Silver and gold I do not have, but what I have I give you: Jesus Christ has entered our world and brought salvation with Him! He is all I have to offer, and all that we could need.</p><p>Bad things don’t happen because they’re supposed to happen, or because God wants them to happen. Bad things happen because this is a broken world, a fallen world which does not operate in the ways we know it ought. We don’t need platitudes or simple solutions or self-help plans. We need a savior! Someone down here in the mud and the blood who can raise us all up from the dead, snatch us from samsara. “Wretched man that I am, who will deliver me from this body of death?”</p><p>Jesus Christ has entered the chat. He has broken into samsara and torn wide the curtain of heaven. He has plunged with us into the waters of life and death and rebirth. He has seized our sin in His own two hands and throttled the serpent in hell. Everything that you have suffered He will suffer too, with you and for you and in you. And He will do it for love of you; because evil is His enemy, injustice is His foe, death is His nemesis. And it cannot escape Him! That which harms His children, He will set aflame.</p><p>Christ has joined us in the waters. He descends to break the tomb. He rises to hallow the heavens. And all the fallen angels, all the powers of the cosmos, all the gods who would oppress us, He has trampled beneath His pierced and sandaled feet. Christ is with you. He will save you. He will save us all! Amidst the storms of change and chance He stands as Light and Life. And everything that we have lost shall be restored at last. For there is nowhere Christ won’t go to bring His children home.</p><p>In the Name of the Father and of the +Son and of the Holy Spirit. Amen.</p><p><br /></p><p><br /></p><p><br /></p><p><i>If you would like to contribute to St Peter’s ministry online, <a href="https://secure.myvanco.com/L-Z9EG/home">you may do so here</a>, and we would thank God for your generosity</i>.</p>RDGStouthttp://www.blogger.com/profile/03099242575796693843noreply@blogger.com0