FIFTH SUNDAY IN LENT Year B Ss. Peter & Paul Portland March 25, 2012
+++++
Jesus, crucified, despised and suffering, you made yourself one with us. Help us to follow you and bear the shame. Amen.
[from a sermon 3/16/97] +++++
Phillips Brooks, author of “O Little Town of Bethlehem,” and briefly Bishop of Massachusetts, was also responsible for one of the masterpieces of American 19th century church architecture: Trinity Church in Boston’s Copley Square. Brooks played a very direct role in Trinity’s design. However, there is one feature of Brooks’ design that is visible only to those who preach in Trinity Church. Brooks had these words carved on the inside of Trinity’s pulpit: “Sir, we would see Jesus.”
This quotation from today’s Gospel was also used as the text for a sermon given at a new Rector’s Induction that I once heard – also in Massachusetts! * They are, of course, the words that “some Greeks” spoke to Philip when both they and Jesus and his disciples were on their way to Jerusalem.
The Greeks were more than likely non-Jews who were fascinated by Judaism’s antiquity and its profound ethical teaching. They were known as “God-fearers,” and they were numerous in the first century. Many of these “God-fearers” would have converted to Judaism had it not been for the requirement of circumcision. Along with Jesus and his disciples, the “God- fearers” were on their way to celebrate Passover in Jerusalem. But Jesus was also on his way to suffer, die on the cross, and be raised again.
When Philip reported to Jesus that the Greeks had asked to see him, Jesus exclaimed, “The hour has come for the Son of Man to be glorified.” Often, I’ve thought that Jesus is evading the questions and inquiry made by the Greeks, but this is a major turning point in John’s gospel. Scholars tell us that John is divided into the “Book of Signs” and the “Book of Glory.” In the “Book of Signs” – the first part of John – Jesus performs seven miracles that John refers to as signs. They begin when Jesus turns water into wine at the wedding feast at Cana and culminate with Jesus’ greatest miracle: raising Lazarus from the dead. Throughout the “Book of Signs” Jesus makes enigmatic references to his “hour” or “time” and says that it has not yet come. When his mother tells him that the revelers at the wedding feast have run out of wine, he says, “My hour has not yet come.” In John 7:8,
Jesus tells his disciples that he will not go to Jerusalem for the Feast of Booths because his “time has not yet fully come.”
But when the Greeks asked to see Jesus, he knew that the hour had come for him to be glorified. As Jesus amplifies his strange comment about the hour of his glorification having come, we realize that Jesus’ idea of glory and our idea of glory are radically different. For Jesus, to be glorified was to embrace the cross, the epitome of suffering:
“Unless a grain of wheat falls into the earth and dies, it remains just a single grain; but if it dies, it bears much fruit. ... Now my soul is troubled. And what should I say – ‘Father, save me from this hour’? No, it is for this reason that I have come to this hour. ... And I, when I am lifted up from the earth, will draw all people to myself.”
Because non-Jews such as the Greeks were seeking to meet Jesus, he knew that his mission was no longer restricted to Israel but had become universal. It was time for him to be lifted up – that is, crucified – so that all people could be drawn to him.
For us, glory is about having more: more money, more prestige, more power.
For Jesus, glory was about giving more, and he demonstrates this throughout John’s gospel, but nowhere more vividly than in the final chapters. Jesus gives himself to his friends by washing their feet. Then he gives himself to the world by dying on the cross.
It is the completion of the great arc of self-emptying that began with the opening verses of John. The cosmic Word by which God spoke creation into being descends from on high and is clothed with flesh, “and we beheld his glory.” The Word Incarnate heals the sick, feeds the multitude, raises the dead, and finally completes his task by dying on the cross, and only then resumes the glory that is rightfully his. As Mother Karen has said, “The whole ministry of Jesus, and thus the whole ministry of the church, is cruciform in shape.” **
“Sir, we would see Jesus.” Phillips Brooks knew that everyone who steps into a pulpit and presumes to preach the gospel needs to think about those words, because the great temptation of preaching is to give our hearers something other than Jesus. “We would see Jesus,” our listeners plead, and we give them our learning, comments on the day’s news, a witty joke or two, but too often there is little of Jesus in our preaching.
But it is not only preachers who do this. All around us are people who want to see Jesus. Do they see him in us? Do they see the Servant- Lord who washed the feet of his friends? Do they see the prophet who cleansed the Temple? Do they see the healer who made the blind to see? If we are to let people see Jesus in us, then we must go ourselves and sit at his feet, let him heal us, feed upon his body broken for us, and above all stand at the cross and wonder as the Word that spoke out of the void lapses into silence and death.
A few years ago, a rabbi at a large Reform synagogue published an editorial in the local newspaper on Christmas Day. He said, “I like Christmas, and I like Christians. My only problem with both is that they need more Jesus.”
Precisely. Sometimes those who are outside the circle of the church can see and name our problems far better than we can. We all need a lot more Jesus. It’s not only a problem for preachers; it’s a problem for every one of us who are called by the name of Christian.
“Sir, we would see Jesus,” the Greeks said to Philip. We, too, need to see Jesus, so that when others want to see Jesus, they can see him in us.
As the old spiritual puts it:
iii In the morning when I rise, iii Give me Jesus. iii Oh, when I am alone, iii Give me Jesus. iii Oh, when I come to die, iii Give me Jesus. Refrain: You can have all the world, But give me Jesus. [In Key of C, starts on A]
J. Barry Vaughn in Sermons That Work, for Lent 5B, 3/29/09, adapted * At the Induction of Tom Schulze as Rector of Trinity, Stoughton, MA, October __, 1976 by Andy Mead, then Curate at All Ss, Ashmont, Boston ** Quoted in Synthesis for 3/25/12.
archived musings and preachments
Friday, March 30, 2012
Sunday, March 11, 2012
breaking the rules
3 Lent B 2012
Exodus 20: 1-17; Ps 19; 1 Cor 1: 18-25; John 2: 13-22
It is said that, at some Buddhist temples, a new candidate is presented with the document containing the Rule of the temple. “Here are the temple rules” says the abbot. “Know when to keep them, and know when to break them.”
Learning this kind of wisdom is the task of a lifetime. It is not simply a matter of picking and choosing to suite our own tastes. Most of us break rules when it would be best if we did not. And most of us keep rules when we should be breaking them.
Today’s Hebrew scripture is very familiar to us! The Decalogue, the so-called “Ten Commandments”, used to be read each Sunday at Episcopal Eucharist, used to be posted on every church school classroom wall, and even today traditionalist people fight to have them posted in public places.
I think the Commandments as symbol of a law-based approach to life bears more power than the words themselves. The actual text of the Commandments is pretty baseline for most people I know. Don’t kill people, don’t take stuff that does not belong to you—even in an age which feels detached from some portions of basic decent behavior, the Commandments are entry-level rules. Do we break them in our imaginations or our desires? Yes probably, and Jesus himself tells us to be honest about those desires. Do most of us more or less keep them in waking life? Yes, for the most part.
That’s a good thing really. It’s good that we hold to basic standards of behavior. Al kids need to learn this, even if today the language of what they learn is a little different from the stately cadences of King James English. Be decent, be compassionate, place yourself in the shoes of another, do not fall into greed or violence. The very basic behavior outlined in the Commandments gets re-stated in many places today, and the results are pretty much the same. Do not let your reptilian brain, your base desires, run over other people or rule yourself.
But, is that all there is? Is our life in the end only about acting decently and behaving morally?
I hope not. The Bible itself hopes not. The text of the Commandments holds a stark clue that simply doing right is not what it is about. “I am the Lord your God—no gods besides me—I am jealous.”
Ancient Jewish practice did not believe that doing good things would make God love us. It was God who acted first, by having pity on slaves and rescuing them from captivity. He took them away to the desert so he could romance them, so he could knit them to the divine self and make them his own people. The Commandments and the rest of the text that follows is a marriage contract, a free gift and a way of life that marries God to people and people to God. The mystery and the awe of this life lived together can be sensed in what is not said, in the wind that passes through the empty space between the stark words.
That mystery comes to fuller flower in St. Paul’s words.
God was not done when he chose one people and romanced them, binding them to himself. God wanted more, more love and more people to live the divine heart and revel in the divine compassion. And so the divine passion burst forth like floodwater from a broken dam. Neither religious signs nor accumulated wisdom is enough to express the divine love. Only in the crucified Christ is the fullness of the divine love and the divine mystery made visible and poured out. Live in this Christ, a foolish path without sign or proof. But here, Christian who hungers for truth and meaning and God, here your search and your hunger will be filled.
And once you have been filled with God, God’s love and inspiration will break the rules.
Jesus did nothing but break the rules big-time in today’s Gospel. Jesus interrupted the business of religion at the Temple, interfered with authorized arrangements that let people make donations and offer sacrifices. He violently overthrew the tables, the places where religious business was contracted and where people arranged for rituals that made them feel as if all was safe and secure and right with God. Religion-as-usual becomes chaos and is named as unclean, and the very body and life of the one who tossed out business-as-usual will be the new Temple, rising to life as the Temple is destroyed.
Know when to keep the rules, and when to break them.
Richard Rohr in Falling Upward speaks of how rules and procedures are very necessary to the first half of life. We are disciplining ourselves and building a future, and so clear guidelines and ways to keep us in check are vital.
But in the second half of life, we leave behind the tightly defined world that we have constructed and lived by and enter into one which is larger and more unpredictable. We let go of our anxiety to do things right, and by walking other paths we discover a deeper and hidden wisdom of God. For when we give ourselves, abandon ourselves, to the divine will and the divine passion, then we ourselves are freed to do and say things that seem outrageous, but are born of a deeper wisdom. To lead is to serve. To die is to live. Love your enemies.
So love the commandments of God, those words and ways and codes by which God first taught us that the world is larger than our petty and selfish desires. Through the discipline of law and canon and rule, we learn to live not for ourselves alone, but for God and for the community around us. But love even more the mad, outrageous foolishness of God, who calls us in Christ to be more and bigger than just the rule-obeyer, the one who always does things right.
When we are freed to inhabit the mad, overwhelming mercy and passion of God, then we find a different way, a way of the deepest self-gift and the most profound abandonment to God’s upside-down, rule-breaking mercy. We walk willingly into the foolish wisdom and the rule-breaking passion for justice that marks out the children of God.
Exodus 20: 1-17; Ps 19; 1 Cor 1: 18-25; John 2: 13-22
It is said that, at some Buddhist temples, a new candidate is presented with the document containing the Rule of the temple. “Here are the temple rules” says the abbot. “Know when to keep them, and know when to break them.”
Learning this kind of wisdom is the task of a lifetime. It is not simply a matter of picking and choosing to suite our own tastes. Most of us break rules when it would be best if we did not. And most of us keep rules when we should be breaking them.
Today’s Hebrew scripture is very familiar to us! The Decalogue, the so-called “Ten Commandments”, used to be read each Sunday at Episcopal Eucharist, used to be posted on every church school classroom wall, and even today traditionalist people fight to have them posted in public places.
I think the Commandments as symbol of a law-based approach to life bears more power than the words themselves. The actual text of the Commandments is pretty baseline for most people I know. Don’t kill people, don’t take stuff that does not belong to you—even in an age which feels detached from some portions of basic decent behavior, the Commandments are entry-level rules. Do we break them in our imaginations or our desires? Yes probably, and Jesus himself tells us to be honest about those desires. Do most of us more or less keep them in waking life? Yes, for the most part.
That’s a good thing really. It’s good that we hold to basic standards of behavior. Al kids need to learn this, even if today the language of what they learn is a little different from the stately cadences of King James English. Be decent, be compassionate, place yourself in the shoes of another, do not fall into greed or violence. The very basic behavior outlined in the Commandments gets re-stated in many places today, and the results are pretty much the same. Do not let your reptilian brain, your base desires, run over other people or rule yourself.
But, is that all there is? Is our life in the end only about acting decently and behaving morally?
I hope not. The Bible itself hopes not. The text of the Commandments holds a stark clue that simply doing right is not what it is about. “I am the Lord your God—no gods besides me—I am jealous.”
Ancient Jewish practice did not believe that doing good things would make God love us. It was God who acted first, by having pity on slaves and rescuing them from captivity. He took them away to the desert so he could romance them, so he could knit them to the divine self and make them his own people. The Commandments and the rest of the text that follows is a marriage contract, a free gift and a way of life that marries God to people and people to God. The mystery and the awe of this life lived together can be sensed in what is not said, in the wind that passes through the empty space between the stark words.
That mystery comes to fuller flower in St. Paul’s words.
God was not done when he chose one people and romanced them, binding them to himself. God wanted more, more love and more people to live the divine heart and revel in the divine compassion. And so the divine passion burst forth like floodwater from a broken dam. Neither religious signs nor accumulated wisdom is enough to express the divine love. Only in the crucified Christ is the fullness of the divine love and the divine mystery made visible and poured out. Live in this Christ, a foolish path without sign or proof. But here, Christian who hungers for truth and meaning and God, here your search and your hunger will be filled.
And once you have been filled with God, God’s love and inspiration will break the rules.
Jesus did nothing but break the rules big-time in today’s Gospel. Jesus interrupted the business of religion at the Temple, interfered with authorized arrangements that let people make donations and offer sacrifices. He violently overthrew the tables, the places where religious business was contracted and where people arranged for rituals that made them feel as if all was safe and secure and right with God. Religion-as-usual becomes chaos and is named as unclean, and the very body and life of the one who tossed out business-as-usual will be the new Temple, rising to life as the Temple is destroyed.
Know when to keep the rules, and when to break them.
Richard Rohr in Falling Upward speaks of how rules and procedures are very necessary to the first half of life. We are disciplining ourselves and building a future, and so clear guidelines and ways to keep us in check are vital.
But in the second half of life, we leave behind the tightly defined world that we have constructed and lived by and enter into one which is larger and more unpredictable. We let go of our anxiety to do things right, and by walking other paths we discover a deeper and hidden wisdom of God. For when we give ourselves, abandon ourselves, to the divine will and the divine passion, then we ourselves are freed to do and say things that seem outrageous, but are born of a deeper wisdom. To lead is to serve. To die is to live. Love your enemies.
So love the commandments of God, those words and ways and codes by which God first taught us that the world is larger than our petty and selfish desires. Through the discipline of law and canon and rule, we learn to live not for ourselves alone, but for God and for the community around us. But love even more the mad, outrageous foolishness of God, who calls us in Christ to be more and bigger than just the rule-obeyer, the one who always does things right.
When we are freed to inhabit the mad, overwhelming mercy and passion of God, then we find a different way, a way of the deepest self-gift and the most profound abandonment to God’s upside-down, rule-breaking mercy. We walk willingly into the foolish wisdom and the rule-breaking passion for justice that marks out the children of God.
Subscribe to:
Posts (Atom)