Sermon preached the Fourth Sunday in Advent

Church of the Advent, Boston

Fourth Sunday in Advent, Year A: Isaiah 7:10-16; Ps. 80:1-7; Romans 1:1-7; Matthew 1:18-25

I wish you a Merry Christmas.

If you are traveling over Christmas, please know all my best wishes for a merry Christmas and a safe return to us.

If you are in Chicago, please know an invitation here to the altar of your church for Christmas – an invitation to come home for Christmas. If you are a visitor with us this Christmas, please be at home here for the holiday.

There are two things in today’s Collect and Scripture readings that I especially love. Yes, yes, I know it is good for a preacher to talk about something that appears uncongenial. But it is also good in life to be able to put into words some things and people we love.

Well, I have a special love, what the French call or used to call anyway, a special devotion, for our collect today. In my home parish, the Church of the Advent in Boston, today’s collect used to be said every Sunday with the clergy and choir and acolytes before entering the church for the eleven o’clock.

The Church of the Advent was the parish that sponsored me for ordination, where I met Eve – the rector presented me for ordination both to the diaconate and priesthood, and preached at my ordination to the priesthood, and officiated at Eve and my wedding. My closest friend in seminary, God rest his soul, also came from that parish.

Purify our conscience, Almighty God, by your daily visitation, that your Son Jesus Christ, at his coming, may find in us a mansion prepared for himself; who lives and reigns with you, in the unity of the Holy Spirit, one God, now and for ever. Amen.

May Jesus at his coming find in us a mansion prepared for himself … St. Teresa of Avila did a holy spin on this, writing of our making an interior castle, Castillo interior for God. St. Paul tells us that our bodies are temples of the Holy Spirit. A mansion – a castle – a temple – this wonderful imagery that God comes to live with us and within us, unseen, in the Holy Spirit.

And when I use words “mansion” and “castle” and “temple” I deeply believe that God comes to every human life by grace, even to the most broken life. Even the most broken human being is of infinite value and dignity in the eyes of God their creator, and they are a dwelling place where God is present.

God comes to the interior place where we think and feel, and dream and fear and hope and face choices and make decisions and choices and have vision – are given things to dream and envision.

God speaks to Joseph twice in Matthew’s Christmas story. In today’s Gospel God tells Joseph not to be afraid to take Mary as his wife, for the child is from the Holy Spirit.

And later, God will tell Joseph to take Mary and the newborn baby and go down into Egypt until old King Herod was dead. So they went – the child who would grow up to care so much for people in trouble and on the outs had the experience as a baby of being a refugee in a foreign land.

I believe God gives God’s church vision – vision for the future. A particular manageable vision given this parish this past year was to have a new curate, and to have Danielle come. That vision was given to a whole community, a diversity of people.

God spoke in some of the ways God speaks to God’s people -- through the tradition of the church, by means of the tradition of the church: the ancient tradition of the church that we have ordained priests, and the tradition of having what we would call in Chicago in 2010, a professional educated trained clergy. Those are modern words. In Constantinople in 400 in the historical time of St. John Chrysostom they had a “professional educated trained clergy.” I simply mean that if someone is in Northwestern Hospital there is an expectation one of is priests will go, in a place where lots of people are highly trained and educated people, and know what we are doing and do it.

God gives new vision through the expectations of God’s people and those expectations may be rooted in long practice and development of practice – and may also have elements that are new and startling (neither Ray Webster nor Danielle Thompson approached ordination with any idea of ending up in Chicago, Illinois).

Danielle’s ordination was a dream and vision come true, for us as a parish – as a community of the people of God – and for her, on her journey, on her and Josh’s journey.

May God the Holy Spirit give each one of us vision in Jesus Christ that God’s loves us and is present with us in him. I believe God gives us this Supper of Bread and Wine to be a very tangible visible – something indeed that can be tasted and eaten -- sign of God’s love for us and presence with us in him. God gives us the signs – the sacraments – as visible and tangible vision of what God has to say to us. God gives us Bread and Wine to say that God is present.

Present. That brings me to the second of things in today’s Propers that I especially love. The great statement from the Book of the Prophet Isaiah:

"Look, the virgin shall conceive and bear a son, and they shall name him Emmanuel," which means, "God is with us."

I am using the word “vision” a lot, but the tradition of the church reminds us that we most probably will not see a vision, will not hear a voice. God gives us Jesus and his stories, set in the context of the great library of books which is the Bible, and gives us this Eucharist to speak to us in ways we can hear and see and touch – but when God comes to the mansion within us, God meets us in the silence and darkness. Darkness and blackness is used in two quite different ways in the Bible, the opposition of dark and light, yes, but also the cloud over the presence of God in the Hebrew Bible – the image of the meeting when we do not see and are called to simply trust, even if it is the smallest bit of trust, the size Jesus said of the smallest of seeds, the mustard seed. To trust God is with us, in him. Even if life breaks and then we look up at the cross and see he has been through it before us, and is with us.

And on the threshold of Christmas, here at the altar of God, may I say a word of great thanks to God for my life as priest, and for my life as a priest here at St. Chrysostom’s – for my wife and family, for friends, for colleagues, for fellow clergy. May I say a word of thanks to God, and of love for this parish family.

Merry Christmas, may it be merry in God’s love for each one in Jesus Christ.

Sermon preached by the Rev. Raymond Webster at St. Chrysostom's Episcopal Church in Chicago, IL on Dec. 19, 2010 at 8:00am and 11:00am

Sermon preached on the Second Sunday in Advent

THE SEVEN GIFTS OF THE HOLY SPIRIT

Ordination to the diaconate of the Rev. Danielle Thompson (kneeling on the left), Christ Church Cathedral, Nashville, Tennessee, June 2010 – The Bishop of Tennessee is officiating. During the ordination the hymn “Come, Holy Ghost” was sung, which will be quoted below. 

Second Sunday in Advent, Year A:

Isaiah 11:1-10; Psalm 72:1-7, 18-19; Romans 15:4-13; Matthew 3:1-12

Our blog is focusing on reading Matthew’s Gospel. From time to time, however, there are other passages appointed to be read on which the preacher will focus.  The first reading this Sunday from Isaiah (11:1-10) is of unusual importance in Christian history. 

The passage opens with the reference to Jesse. Jesse was King David’s father, and Matthew emphasizes Jesus is a descendant of David. A Jesse Tree (which you may find in some stained glass windows in England) is Jesus’ genealogical chart, his family tree. 

And the passage ends with the wonderful verses – the wolf living with the lamb – which are a vision of peace. I think of the American Quaker painter Edward Hicks’ Peaceable Kingdom.

Isaiah 11:2-3 is the source of the Seven Gifts of the Holy Spirit: 

The spirit of the LORD shall rest on him,

the spirit of wisdom and understanding,

the spirit of counsel and might,

the spirit of knowledge and the fear of the LORD. 

The attentive reader will note that there are six gifts on this list. When St. Jerome translated the Bible into Latin a seventh appeared on the list: pietas, piety. Anyone who knows translators know they sometimes use more than one word to translate something. Pietas is the faithful living out of one’s duties and responsibilities – for us who are disciples of Jesus, faithfully living out our discipleship. Faithfully living out our baptismal promise to follow Jesus. 

In the Middle Ages the church loved to make lists of seven, a good Biblical number. There were the Seven Deadly Sins, and the Seven Works of Mercy – also taking a Biblical list, from Jesus’ words in Matthew 25, to feed the hungry, give water to the thirsty, clothe the naked, visit the sick and the prisoner, welcome the stranger – to which was added giving a respectful burial to the dead.

God the Holy Spirit, who is God present us, unseen, who gives us gifts to give. In Thomas Aquinas and indeed in the list in Isaiah, the first gift of the seven is wisdom – the gift of knowing we are loved by God, and knowing how to love. 

The Rev. Danielle Thompson will be ordained a priest here in St. Chrysostom’s Church on Monday, December 13, at 6:00 PM by the Bishop of Tennessee. 

At every ordination of every Episcopal priest, and deacon, and bishop, the Book of Common Prayer has the person being ordained say: 

… I solemnly declare that I do believe the Holy Scriptures of the Old and New Testaments to be the Word of God, and to contain all things necessary to
salvation;

(Book of Common Prayer, page 526) 

And there is silence while the person signs this oath.

And then just before the ordination by the bishop (or, in the case of a bishop, by the bishops) the whole congregation sings the ancient hymn Veni, Creator Spiritus. The Prayer Book directs: The hymn, Veni Creator Spiritus, or the hymn, Veni Sancte Spiritus, is sung.

At Danielle’s ordination Richard Hoskins has chosen that we use the words and music at Hymn 504. There are several translations authorized today. Hymn 504 uses the words translated by John Cosin (1594-1672).

John Cosin was a Cambridge don – head of one of the colleges, Peterhouse (a current fellow of Peterhouse was a regular attender at our nine o’clock with his daughter during a sabbatical year). John Cosin went into exile in France with the Royal Family after the defeat and execution of Charles I by Cromwell. He came back at the Restoration of Charles II in 1660 and these words we will sing were printed in the 1662 Book of Common Prayer. The only hymn – the only words to a hymn – to appear in the Prayer Book. 

This hymn (or another translation of this hymn) was sung before the ordination of every Episcopal bishop, priest and deacon you know or have ever known:

Come Holy Ghost, our souls inspire,

And lighten with celestial fire.

Thou the anointing spirit art,.

Who dost thy seven-fold gifts impart. 

“thy seven-fold gifts” refers of course to the Seven Gifts of the Holy Spirit. 

In my home parish in Boston, the Church of the Advent – the parish that sponsored me for ordination, and where I met Eve – there are seven brass lamps that hang in front of the High Altar, each with a candle burning in it – symbolizing these Seven Gifts of the Holy

Spirit. 

Church of the Advent, Boston -- the seven lamps in front of the high altar

When I first came to St. Chrysostom’s, Chicago in 1993. the Rt. Rev. John M. Burgess, then retired Bishop of Massachusetts wrote me a letter. Bishop Burgess ordained me both as a deacon and a priest. He wrote that I would “need every gift of the Holy Spirit” for ministry in this great city. 

The Holy Spirit is given to each one of us. God comes to dwell within us, making our innermost place in our bodies God’s temple. “Do you not know that your bodies are temples of the Holy Spirit?” wrote Paul. May God give each one of us – may we realize God does give each one of us – the gifts of the Holy Spirit, and first and last the gift of the wisdom to know and trust God’s love and to love one another, and those in need at the heart of a great city. 

Sermon preached by the Rev. Raymond Webster at St. Chrysostom's Episcopal Church in Chicago, IL on Dec. 5, 2010 at 5:15pm