Ray's Oct. 23 commentary

The first reading is Deuteronomy 34:1-12

We began reading the story of Moses, back on Sunday, August 21, from the first chapter of the Book of Exodus. Today we come to the end of the story of Moses – to the story of the death of Moses – in the last chapter of the Book of Deuteronomy.

This is the ending of the fifth book of the Bible – the ending of the five books which are the Torah for our Jewish brothers and sisters.

In the timeline or chronology of the first five books of the Bible, the people of Israel have been out in the wilderness for forty years since they were freed from slavery in Egypt.

They are within sight of the promised land, about to enter the promised land.

Moses, who God called to be the leader of the people, who God made use of as God’s instrument to bring the people into freedom, is not going to enter the promised land. That will be for another leader, Joshua.

The people of Israel had been slaves in Egypt, and over the forty years in the wilderness they had been formed as a free people. Not a perfect people. Not a people who didn’t make mistakes. But they had learned the skills needed to survive and be free. They were formed as a people.

So God will form you and me as disciples of Jesus – our primary identity.

Moses laid hands on Joshua, the leader who would bring the people into the promised land. The bishop will ordain Ben Varnum to the transitional diaconate on November 1 here in St. Chrysostom’s. The moment of ordination is when the bishops lays his (or her) hands on the ordinand’s head. This is the ancient custom directly out of the Hebrew Bible.

Joshua is described as full of the spirit of wisdom. So may we all be. I remember that in Thomas Aquinas the first gift of the Holy Spirit is wisdom. This comes from Isaiah 11:2 where wisdom is the first of the list of gifts of the Spirit, the list which became the Seven Gifts of the Holy Spirit.

The last verses of the first lesson are a wonderful tribute to Moses. For me the most moving phrase is that the Lord knew Moses face to face: Moses, whom the Lord knew face to face is the translation in the King James Version.

When we come before God, God is unseen, as though hidden in the cloud, that great image from these readings from the Hebrew Bible. Yet we know the face of God in Jesus Christ. And a great theme of these readings is the presence of God with us – unseen but with us. Who loves us.

Today’s Gospel reading is from Matthew 22:34-46.

We are coming close to the end of our reading from Matthew’s Gospel. Our last reading will be on the Sunday before Thanksgiving, the Last Sunday after Pentecost from Matthew 25, the great passage that when we feed the hungry or give water to the thirsty, or visit the sick or the prisoner, or welcome the stranger, or clothe the naked, we serve Christ himself.

And in chapter 26 we begin the story of the cross of Jesus. Johann Sebastian Bach began the St. Matthew Passion with the first story in chapter 26, the anointing of Jesus. Then comes the Last Supper and the prayer in the Garden of Gethsemane and then the arrest of Jesus. This is only four chapters away. Three chapters to our final reading from Matthew (in Advent we begin reading from Mark).

In today’s great passage Jesus is asked which commandment is the greatest and Jesus gives the summary of the law, quoting two verses from Deuteronomy. I know by heart the King James translation, found in the Book of Common Prayer, page 324:

Thou shalt love the Lord thy God with all thy heart, and with
all thy soul, and with all thy mind. This is the first and great
commandment. And the second is like unto it: Thou shalt
love thy neighbor as thyself. On these two commandments
hang all the Law and the Prophets.

And here is a clear call to us to follow Jesus as his disciples on his way of self-giving love: loving God and loving one another.

God's things (sermon on Matthew 22)

If you got your hands on one of the oldest prayer books, put together in the sixteenth century, you would find a service of baptism with these instructions: “The pastors … should oft admonish the people, that they defer not the baptism of infants any longer than the Sunday, or other holy day, next after the child be born ….” (Gibson, The First and Second Prayer Books of Edward VI, 242).  In other words, for many, many years in our church when you had a baby you were expected to bring him or her to the font the very next time that the congregation gathered publicly – no more than 6 or 7 days later.  Now there were practical reasons for this in Elizabethan England: infant mortality was such that people were encouraged to baptize their children swiftly.  And also, parish registers, the big books where we still keep track of all of your baptisms, were the primary way of recording any birth in a given town.  But … in the hearts and minds of those people, and in our imaginations as we read those old instructions years and years since, there’s a spiritual reason far surpassing the practical.  It’s put best by a new mother I know who said, “I wish we could go straight from the hospital to the church to baptize my son – I just want to give him back to God.” 

As the parent of a toddler, I now think about that mother’s moving words in an entirely disillusioned way – I would actually like God to do some babysitting for me every day around 5:00 PM.  But what she was trying to express – and I think you all know this and have felt it in some way about some person or thing in your life – was a deep sense of thankfulness.  More than that, though.  What this new parent felt, what somebody newly in love feels, even what somebody who experiences a loss, tragedy, or has to adapt to any kind of “new normal” might feel, is a life-altering sense of gratuity.  That everything we have right now, right this minute, is an astounding, shocking gift.  That we don’t merit anything: we can’t earn the right to be loved just as we don’t deserve to be unloved; we can’t earn the right to do work that suits us just as we don’t deserve to be jobless or without a calling in life; we can’t earn the right to health just as we don’t deserve to be sick or injured.  We can’t earn the right to be alive, and we certainly don’t deserve to have our lives diminished by the powers of sin.  All of this is kind of a mind-bender, I realize, but the point, again, is gratuity.  Grace.  We are creatures surrounded on all sides by beautiful and terrifying gifts that come our way whether we want them or not.  There is nothing we can do to change that; what we can change is whether we know it and what we do about it.  And that’s what Jesus and his opponents are talking about today. 

There’s no friendly conversation between these two parties.  You hear it right there in Matthew’s telling of the story: the legal experts and the teachers who hate the empire get together with this other group of people who have befriended it in order to trap Jesus in the perfect riddle – a riddle we still don’t know what to do with today.  One of them poses the question: is it lawful to pay taxes to the emperor or not?  If Jesus says ‘no’ he offends the Herodians, the friends of the empire.  If he says ‘yes’ he offends the Pharisees, its critics.  Both groups can make his life miserable.  Being divine and all, Jesus knows what’s going on, so he gives the perfect response to the perfect riddle.  “Show me the money,” he says.  And then he looks to the mark on the coin, the imprint that the money bears.  “That’s Caesar’s face on this coin.  So I guess it’s his.  Render unto Caesar the things that are Caesar’s and to God the things that are God’s.” 

So the takeaway here could be that Jesus is too clever by half.  He effortlessly avoids the trap, making these people look silly in the process.  And in doing so, he gives anyone who wants to dismiss this story the answer that they need: Jesus is dealing shrewdly with troublemakers and is not trying to tell us what to do with our money.  End of story – let’s move on to the next parable. 

 If that’s your take on it you would be sort of right.  Jesus isn’t telling us what to do with our money here … because he’s telling us what to do with our entire lives.  His response to his opponents operates on a couple of levels.  One level is a statement that is smart and gets him out of a bind.   The other level is a challenge that can inspire attraction, repulsion, or curiosity in those who hear it: give to the emperor what belongs to the emperor.  Give to God what belongs to God.  And whose, by the way, are you? 

We could spend an entire morning talking about what it does or doesn’t mean to belong to an empire, or what an empire looks like in our time.  But a more important question for at this moment is do we belong to God, and what does that mean for us?  This is where the knowing and doing enter the picture, because the definite answer is, Yes.  You belong to God.  And there are two ways we can talk about that.  First, you exist.  Everything that lives, everything that has breath is part of God’s ongoing creative process that has never, ever ended.  The seven days of creation aren’t finite – they’re eternal, and we are as fresh and as surprising to God as Adam and Eve when they were brand new.   You are one of God’s things in the same, immediate sort of way that they were.  You belong to God.

Second, some of you were given back to God – when you were too young to take vows or make promises for yourself, the people entrusted with your care acknowledged in a public ceremony who the author of your life really is.  A few of you out there did this on your own – you came to the waters of baptism as an adult and spoke for yourself, publicly, stating, in effect, “I am not my own.”  And what happens to us in baptism?  What do we do to drive that point home?  We name you, we wash you, but we also seal you: we mark you as Christ’s own forever, making a sign on your forehead that represents the permanent, indelible mark on your soul that can never, ever be taken away.  Just as Jesus asked to see the coin, if he were to ask to see you – if you stepped forward and he asked whose mark was on you, he would see his own cross shining back at him.   You belong to God. 

So it’s not up to you to decide that – it’s up to you to know it.  Then it’s up to you to live like it.  And what does that entail?  Again, there are two ways to talk about this.  Knowing that you belong to God and living like it entails both a loosing and a binding.  It is freeing and it is obligating.  Think about all of the things that want to claim us: work is often the first thing that comes to mind.  Right behind work is money, and hunkering over money is empire – not nation states, per se, but the coalescence of all of the forces in the world that seem irresistible, and all-determining, and trap people in ways of life that are unsustainable.  And on a micro-level, each of us has some other Caesar vying for us: unhealthy relationships, addiction, perfectionism, anxiety, or indifference.  Those things are real, and your experience of them is real, but their claim on you is a lie.  It’s an illusion.  You belong to God, with no option for lease or mortgage.  You are marked as Christ’s own.  He sets you free to walk through this world not as a captive, but as a child of God.     

Yet freedom isn’t the same thing as independence.  You belong to God and so you do God’s work, which is to take care of all of these amazing gifts.  Again, it’s as though we never left the garden, and God is showing us this new world, every day, entrusting it to our care.  All of this hit home for me in a big way this past summer, when my son and I visited parishioners high up on the top of a nearby apartment building.  Joshua was supposed to be swimming, but was running laps around the roof, and as I chased him around the corner of the poolhouse for the first time, I stopped dead in my tracks: all around us I could suddenly see the city shooting up toward heaven, so solid; so magic; so crawling with life, stretching out one side as far as a person could see while on the other side this magnificent lake, this primeval body of water that used to cover the very earth beneath our feet right now spread itself out to unseen shores with more cities where more human lives were moving and changing and beginning and ending, and then in the middle of all of it was this one little child, and  I realized, “Oh my God.  None of this is ours.  These buildings, the very work of our hands – none of it belongs to us.  These beaches, these planes, these cars and churches and hospitals.  These trees and fish and people.  All of this is such a gift.  All of this is pure gratuity.  Even this little boy, this little person who consumes my life – even he doesn’t belong to me.  I am just somebody God is using to hold him right now.  It all belongs to God.” 

When you know that you are God’s – when you can really feel it - the only response is to care.  To care for God’s gifts, to steward God’s city, to hold God’s people.  And that is what living like you belong to God entails.  You treat everything that surrounds you – this place, this earth, the people you’ve been given, and your own body – as though you were holding it all lightly, like you hold a newborn baby, tending to it all for God.  Confident but gentle, seeking only the good, recognizing in all else a fellow creature, or a fellow creation, undeniably aware that you and all that you behold are God’s things. 

Let us pray:  O God, whose gifts surround us and whose grace is the very breath in our lungs: open our eyes to the truth about our lives and to the depth of our calling in you so that the good things you have made might be yours and yours alone, for all the world to know.  In God’s holy name we pray, Amen.

Sermon preached by the Rev. Danielle Thompson at St. Chrysostom's Episcopal Church in Chicago, IL on Sunday, Oct. 16, 2011.

Our angry God?

God is not all sweetness and light.  This week’s story of the Golden Calf (Exodus 32) and the Parable of the Wedding Banquet (Matthew 22) feature an angry God and an angry king who represents God.  Passages of Scripture that depict God’s “wrath” appear throughout both the Old and New Testaments – and Christians have never had an easy time grappling with them!   

Biblical scholar Gary A. Herion puts the two classic questions around our angry God well:

1. In the “wrath” stories, is God really mad, or are the biblical authors just using figures of speech?
2. If God is really mad, is it a part of God’s personality, “co-equal” to Love, or is it a passing phase?

Here’s a few guidelines to help us puzzle through these issues:

Passion v. Pathos: Passion describes loose, uncontrolled, radiant emotion that we might call “irrational.”  Pathos is emotion directed toward a particular situation, and is related to ethos, which has to do with moral norms.  In Scripture, God’s anger has the character of pathos and is provoked mainly by covenant-breaking: human straying and acts of injustice.  In Exodus, God’s pathos is directed toward Moses when he initially refuses to stand up to the Egyptians, and toward the Egyptians when they persecute the Israelites.  More than any other Ancient Near Eastern deity, the Hebrew God is no capricious, nor is Yahweh inherently wrathful.

Angry Kings: God is often depicted as a king in the Old and New Testaments, not only because the metaphor is apt (God is Lord over Israel), but because metaphors themselves allowed pious Jewish people to avoid using the divine name.  Ancient Near Eastern kings often expressed their “wrath” formally, in writing.  When a king wrote that he was angry, he was being provoked by an external event – something that required him to exercise his power and express his displeasure in a way that offered no apologies.  Wrath was his “royal prerogative.”  Could the same be said for God’s wrath in Scripture? 

Wrath in the New Testament: In Matthew, which we will read in worship until late November, God is never depicted as wrathful.  John the Baptist does, however, mention a “day of wrath.”  This day, ironically, is when God will conquer all wrath.  The adversity that humans experience just by being alive – not because God, in God’s wrath, punishes misdeeds – will be no more. 

New Testament wrath is more at home in Revelation, where, again, it is associated less with God and more with a coming day of judgment and setting-right.  Wrath, therefore, is never some free-floating thing but is occasioned by injustice and broken relationships. 

Bibliography: Freedman, David Noel, ed. The Anchor Bible Dictionary, v.6 (New York: Doubleday, 1992), 989-998.  

(Danielle Thompson)

Looking ahead to Exodus 20 (commentary by Ray Webster)

St. Catherine’s Monastery at the foot of Mount Sinai
The first reading is Exodus 20:1-4, 7-9, 12-20

Moses led the people of Israel in the wilderness to the mountain where Moses had encountered God in the Burning Bush.

A word about Mount Sinai and St. Catherine’s Monastery

We do not know which mountain was the Mount Sinai in the Book of Exodus. Tradition identifies it as Mount Sinai in the Sinai peninsula, pictured below (in a photo from Wikipedia). Whether or not this was the actual mountain climbed by Moses, it is typical of the region.

And I note that at the bottom of the photo you will see the ancient Greek Orthodox Monastery of St. Catherine’s. St. Catherine’s was so very much out in the middle of nowhere, that it was by-passed by wars and internal church disputes, with the result that it is a major treasure house of Byzantine art and manuscripts. St. Catherine’s web site is: www.sinaimonastery.com/en/index.php?lid=1

One of the most ancient manuscripts of the Bible came from St. Catherine’s, and is known as the Codex Sinaticus, or Sinai edition as it were, and it too has its own web site: http://codexsinaiticus.org/en/

Well, whether or not the mountain which today bears the name Mount Sinai was the actual one Moses climbed – what the Greek Orthodox tradition calls by the wonderful phrase the God trodden mountain – it is certainly typical of the region.

God gives Moses the Ten Commandments

In chapter 19 of the Book of Exodus, God called Moses up the mountain. A thick cloud descended on the mountain, that great image of the presence of God – an image I find especially appropriate for God who exists and is with us, is unseen, as though within the cloud. And in today’s lesson we have the Ten Commandments given by God. All ten are in the lesson, although the passage has been abbreviated. has been pointed out over the centuries, the first four of the Ten Commandments have to do with God, and the next six to do with our ethics.

The first

The first commandment is that the God who brought us out of slavery, who delivered us is to be our only God. No other gods. This one only. Not even number one – but the only one.

The second

Number two is that we are not to make any idols or worship any. Only God, and that God is not seen.

Whether or not this commandment meant or means for Christians to not make art showing Biblical characters or Christ has been a hot topic of controversy over the centuries. In the church we have a copy of an icon of St. John Chrysostom from Hagia Sophia in Istanbul. The reason it came from the 9^th century when he lived at the beginning of the 5^th is that in between there were the iconoclasts, the icon breakers. A reason St. Catherine’s in Sinai is such a treasure trove is that it was so off the beaten track the iconoclasts apparently forgot about it. But then the Greek Orthodox decided that because Christ took on human flesh and blood – was incarnate – it was OK to make representations of him.

At the top of this post is a great icon of Christ from St. Catherine’s, which I deeply love:

The third

We are not to misuse the Name of God. Take the Name in vain, swearing. (The Quaker hesitation to take an oath is based on another quote from Jesus, let your yes be a yes and your no be a no – two American presidents affirmed rather than swore).

The fourth

We are to remember the Sabbath day and keep it holy. In Exodus the explanation is given that God created the world in six days and rested on the seventh. In the explanation in Deuteronomy 5 there is the interesting statement that it is because you were slaves in Egypt and God brought you out and therefore told you to keep this. It is to be a day of Sabbath, a day of rest, a day remembering God the deliverer. Sabbath is to be time with God – a key part of a spiritual life, a life of discipleship.

The fifth

Honor your father and your mother.

The sixth

You shall not murder. (A very good example that translation involves interpretation, for the King James Version is famously Thou shalt not kill.)

The seventh

You shall not commit adultery.

The eighth

You shall not steal.

The ninth

You shall not bear false witness against your neighbor.

The tenth

You shall not covet what is your neighbor’s.

Here is the great foundation of the Law – the ethics of Israel.

The summary of the Law

Jesus summed up it with two quotes from Deuteronomy in Matthew, that you shall love the love your God and your neighbor as yourself. On these two hang all the law and the prophets of Israel. There is a very familiar quotation of this in the Book of Common Prayer on page 324:

Hear what our Lord Jesus Christ saith: Thou shalt love the Lord thy God with all thy heart, and with all thy soul, and with all thy mind. This is the first and great commandment. And the second is like unto it: Thou shalt love thy neighbor as thyself. On these two commandments hang all the Law and the Prophets.

(Ray Webster)

Poured Out

Sept. 25 sermon on Philippians 2:1-13

Susan is a mother of four.  Every breakfast, lunch, and dinner, she piles a table with food, corrals her kids in one room, wrangles them into seats, and loads their plates.  Once everybody is served, she wanders around the table with a milk jug in her hand, filling empty glasses, topping off half-full glasses, cutting everybody off at thirds because milk is expensive, and these kids drink it like water.  Susan never sits.  When all is done and the children run away, she clears the table and gets down to dishes.  She eats leftovers as she works.  If you knew her, you would see that she is tired.  You'd be able to tell that something is missing, something is too much, some piece of Susan is getting lost in the shuffle of her life.  She tells herself, "This is just how it is - I've got a lot of kids, I've got a lot to do," but she knows other mothers, other fathers who seem to take it all in stride - or, at least they laugh a little more than she does.  All around her the world grinds on, and Susan feels as though she's being poured out, day by day, like that gallon of milk. 

Depending on where she goes looking for it, Susan might not find a lot of help in the Christian tradition where "pouring out" is concerned.  The idea that self-effacement, self-erasure, or self-abnegation is required to be a disciple is one that's been taught and preached in many times and places.  There are popular understandings of the idea: the lyrics to a catchy devotional song repeat, "Less of me and more of him."  A famous hymn gets at this idea some with the chorus, "Have thine own way" and the image of a person being like malleable clay.  The apostle Paul wrote of himself, more than once, "I am being poured out like a drink offering.” 

It's often around Paul's letters that issues about self-sacrifice come up.  Paul writes to a lot of people that are being persecuted, so that accounts for some of it.   But Paul's christology - his teaching about who Jesus is and how Jesus works - can be hard to understand.  Today, he writes to a small church in Greece, and recites his own hymn that describes what it's like to have the mind of Christ:  "he emptied himself, taking the form of a slave, being born in human likeness ..."  Paul continues, "he humbled himself and became obedient to the point of death - even death on a cross." 

For many people who first heard Paul’s words this song wasn't just telling a story about Jesus.  It solved a huge theological problem.  The very earliest Christians may have known people who actually knew Jesus, but they didn't have any sort of a developed way of thinking about how it was that he was God.  They relied on people like Paul, on the stories about Jesus that became our Gospels, and on their experiences of the Holy Spirit in worship to help them understand who this man was and what he meant for them.  So here, in this song, was a clue: Jesus emptied himself and took on human form.  He purged himself of all divine attributes like knowing everything, seeing everything, or having all power, and took on the limitations of human knowledge, human sight, and human power.  In doing so, he suffered.  He poured himself out.  He became something other than what he was and gave up what he had a right to in order to save us.  If you follow this - and, quite frankly, we're diving in to some deep stuff here - it means that Jesus didn't simply die once on the cross to release us from our sins ... he sacrificed his essential self at his birth by being incarnated and becoming a person.

So that's a very clever way to solve a metaphysical quandary.  You pour out the God, fill up on human, and you've got a God-man.  It explained how two such opposite things as divine and human being could be united in one person.  It explained confusing things, like how Jesus didn't save himself from being killed. 

But it sends you down a tricky road if you're looking to be a disciple - because Paul is telling us to be like this, right?  Paul wants us to have the same mind in us that was in Christ.  So here begins not only a theological tradition - a particular way of thinking about how Jesus is God - but an attitude tradition.  Here begins a way of thinking about how Christians should regard themselves and their suffering that has hard consequences.  For it suggests to be like Jesus we have to empty ourselves - we have to pour ourselves out.  And if, for Jesus, that meant that he sacrificed his identity, giving up his divine self in order to live for us, then how can we be concerned with maintaining our selves?  How can you count yourself as a person worth preservation or protection if self-emptying, being poured out, is the defining pattern of life in Christ?  

This is a critique that feminist and liberation theologians who write about poor or oppressed groups of people have leveled against the idea of Jesus' self-emptying because it's been used in the past to keep people "in their place."  You want to fight for freedom and equality?  Well Jesus took the form of a servant.  You want to think more highly of yourself?  Jesus humbled himself.  You can even set the big issues of marginalized groups of people aside, and we all know somebody whose personal faith tells them that it's ok if they suffer because Jesus suffered; or they won't stick up for themselves because Jesus was lowly and meek.  There are Susan’s in this world who brush aside this horrifying feeling that they are losing themselves because nothing has convinced them that they are worth finding. 

It may not seem like this is something a gathering of people like us would have such trouble with.  Mainline Christians - people who are not Roman Catholic or Orthodox or Protestant Fundamentalists - don't really go in for self-abnegation or self-obliteration these days.  A lot of us may even be here this morning because of that.  I, for one, was drawn to a tradition like ours because I hated feeling like I was such a lump of clay, needing to be molded into another shape.  I hated being guilty all of the time and having the sense that I should be poured out and something else should be poured into me.

But here, this gathering of friends and neighbors, this larger community outside these walls?  We just do self-emptying a little differently.  We pour ourselves out every day like drink offerings on all kinds of altars.  Ask the attorney crouched over a brief at 3:00 AM whether she knows about self-emptying.  Ask the parent for whom "stay-at-home" means board meetings and sports and fundraisers and committees and rarely setting foot inside the four walls of a house.  Ask the analyst and trader as their stomachs plummet with the economy.  Ask the person who worries that she has to perform well enough at work or at parties or who worries that he has to look good enough and have good enough things in order to be loved whether they know what it feels like to have self pouring out of you like milk, or to feel self draining out of you like water. 

In August, I attended a conference where a presenter told the story of sitting with a group of leaders of huge churches, all of whom confessed that their personal lives were falling apart.  They found it hard to pray, they worked all the time, and they couldn't remember why they had gotten into ministry in the first place.  They were depleted, completely drained.  These men and women had vision, direction, talent, prestige, money - and they were totally bereft. 

At the same conference, an international aid worker told the story of a pastor in Ethiopia during a time of state persecution of the church.  Like the apostle Paul, he had no family but wandered the countryside tending to these little churches, taking whatever food or money was given to him.  He was captured one day while preaching and thrown in prison.  Three times he was scheduled to be executed, and each time the electrical apparatus failed, so finally he was released and banished from the village.  On his way out of town, this aid worker met him, and knowing that the man had just escaped death, asked where he was going.  "I'm on my way to preach a funeral," the pastor nodded, and locked arms with another friend as they took off over the hill.  This pastor was wounded, threatened, probably physically hungry - but he was full. 

And that's the thing.  He was full.  The Ethiopian pastor was living in an immediate and perspective-enhancing situation and was being spiritually fed in a way that allowed him to go out, day by day, and offer himself to the world without losing himself.  He was a character - he was full and vibrant, not erased or effaced, and yet he gave of himself, he donated his spirit freely.  He could pour himself out because he was constantly drinking something in.

That's the thing about Jesus' self-emptying, too.  The idea that Jesus sacrificed a part of himself to be like us results in a tidy theological package, but shies away from the bold claim of our faith that Jesus offered his whole self on behalf of humanity.  His self-emptying was a giving of his whole self, God giving everything for us.  Jesus didn't empty himself of God; he poured all of himself out in love and service for us because he was drinking freely from his Father all of the time. 

So then there's us, and our self-emptying.  We may not always feel like Jesus calls us to self-abnegation, but our lives often look like we're in a race to pour ourselves out.  We work hard, we meet all sorts of obligations, we keep up the pace and give time, money, and energy to all kinds of people in all kinds of ways.  But we can't pour ourselves out without drinking something in.  To be sure, God always gives us the grace we need to keep going - but that's manna for the day, which you can't store up.  That's water from the rock, which is a miracle - a temporary solution to the problem of thirst.  We're come here, to places like this, because we're thirsty, and because we're hungry, and we need something that lasts.  Week after week we come back because we believe that in these books and these prayers and this music and this food and this fellowship we will find living water and bread from heaven.  And we must.  We must find it here.  God has brought us together to feed us, and being a disciple doesn't mean starving yourself to emptiness - it means eating God's food while your appetite for it grows and grows and grows. 

God doesn’t want you to hoard yourself or measure yourself out sparingly.  God does want all of you – but God wants you to give yourself for the things that give you life; and God wants you, not the husk of you that’s left after you’ve been emptied out.  And many of us probably want that too: we want to give ourselves to God, or at least we want to start to understand what that look likes.  But it’s our selves we give to God, standing up like the resurrection people we are.  There is a message of comfort for everybody who feels like Susan, that even when you lose yourself you’re never lost by God.  But there’s a message of hope that is stronger: there is food and drink that will keep you full, and when you find it, you can give as freely as you receive. 

(The Rev. Danielle Thompson, preacher)

Kenosis, anyone?

Normally, Ray and I spend a lot of time digging around in the Gospels.  Then this past summer, we decided to focus on the Old Testament readings about Creation, Abraham’s family, and Moses.  So what about those poor Epistles (“letters”)?  What about those twisty-turny passages of Scripture snuck in-between the two big readings that are sometimes so theologically opaque and sometimes so amazingly on-point? 

This Sunday is the perfect opportunity to let the Epistle shine.  Paul’s Letter to the Philippians (members of a church in Philippi – today Filippoi, Greece).  Philippians is actually a sort of love story: in Paul’s words you can detect the depth of friendship between him and the church, despite some conflict.  But you can also read about the depth of love that Jesus has for the world in the portion of Chapter 2 that we read this week, which is sometimes called “The Kenotic Hymn.”

Excerpt from Philippians 2:1-13:

Let the same mind be in you that was in Christ Jesus, 

who, though he was in the form of God,

did not regard equality with God

as something to be exploited,

but emptied himself,

taking the form of a slave,

being born in human likeness.

And being found in human form,

he humbled himself

and became obedient to the point of death--

even death on a cross.

Therefore God also highly exalted him

and gave him the name

that is above every name,

so that at the name of Jesus

every knee should bend,

in heaven and on earth and under the earth,

and every tongue should confess

that Jesus Christ is Lord,

to the glory of God the Father.

Why is this called a Hymn?

In certain passages of Scripture, notably in Paul’s letters and in the Gospel of Luke, it’s possible to pick up on sayings, phrases, and repeated statements that have a different ring to them.  People who study the history and effect of worship (liturgical scholars) can identify some of these passages as hymns, liturgical responses or statements, doxologies (formal expressions of praise), etc.  Though we don’t know for sure whether Philippians 2:5-11 was actually a hymn, it may be an example of a component of early Christian worship buried in our Scripture. 

What is “Kenotic”?

Kenotic refers to kenosis, a Greek word that denotes emptying.  The classic idea here is that Jesus emptied himself of divine attributes in order to assume human form.  It’s a way to describe the Incarnation, or how God became human.  A modified version of kenosis – and one that I think is more helpful – suggests that Jesus didn’t actually shed himself of divinity, but had an attitude of complete humility.  Humility here has more to do with regarding others as great rather than regarding yourself as insufficient.  Jesus emptied himself of self-regard and self-seeking, pouring himself out in love and service to others.

The opposite of kenosis is pleroma, which means “fullness.”  Having emptied himself in service to others, Jesus was nevertheless full of God’s grace. 

Why does it matter?

Philippians is about patterns.  Paul in general is about patterns.  Jesus is a template and we pattern our life on him not by looking at what he did and imitating it, but by joining ourselves to him and becoming one body with him.  Baptism is the way we begin to do this and the Eucharist sustains us in it.  But the pattern of that life is emptying and filling; kenosis and pleroma; death and resurrection.  We begin to see Jesus’ life laid over everything and we begin to feel our own lives taking its shape: emptying and filling; kenosis and pleroma; death and resurrection. 

(Danielle Thompson)

 

The Bible text of the Gospel lesson is from the New Revised Standard Version Bible, copyright 1989 by the Division of Christian Education of the National Council of the Churches of Christ in the USA, and used by permission.

Bread that the Lord has given (September 18 sermon by Raymond Webster)

Exodus 16The people are free. In our first reading today (Exodus 16:2-15), we find the Hebrew people on the other side of the Red Sea. Free.

We have been reading these past Sundays the stories of how God acted in history to deliver the Jewish people, to save them slavery. It is the Passover story, the formative story of Judaism. We have been remembering these stories, and they echo in all sorts of ways in the stories of Jesus, which we also remember. And as we remember, God draws near to us and speaks God’s Word.

We have remembered how God spoke from the Burning Bush and sent Moses to stand before Pharaoh and say, “Let my people go” – those words of such importance in the history of Chicago and Illinois and our country -- biblical words fundamental to the abolition of slavery. In classic Christian theology, we believe God has created each human being and each is of infinite value – and the church is called to be a voice for the value and God given rights – “endowed by their Creator with certain inalienable rights.” As Moses spoke God’s Word “Let my people go” the church in our time is to speak that Word, God’s Word of the value and dignity of each one.

And then how Pharaoh refused to let the people go, and God sent the ten plagues on Egypt.

And then how God had them sacrifice a lamb and sprinkle the blood on the doorposts so the angel would pass over the houses of the Hebrew slaves the night of that most terrible of the ten plagues, the last and most terrible, the killing of the first born in Egypt. And then Pharaoh let them go.

And then changed his mind, and went after them, and the Hebrews found themselves at the shore of the Red Sea – trapped, stuck – and God parted the waters and they walked through on dry land. The Egyptian horsemen followed, and the waters closed over them.

And the people stood on the further shore, free. God had delivered the people. We read this story last Sunday, the great passage we read every year at the Easter Vigil (the one lesson we are required to read at the Easter Vigil) for it looks to how God acted in history in Jesus Christ to save us from sin and death. And last Sunday we also read the great song of thankfulness of Moses and Miriam – I love the detail that Miriam took up her tambourine to sing -- God has thrown the horse and its rider into the sea.

And today we come to the very next story. The people are free. Saved by God. Safe. Free. And what happens?

They wake up to the fact that they are out in the middle of nowhere, totally ill equipped to live in the wilderness, unprepared for this survival exercise they find themselves on.

And they complained. OK, they were hungry. Always good to begin with our real needs and who we really are and what we really need. They were human beings who were hungry, and had no food and not a clue as to how to get any.

They would learn how to get food. Over the next forty years wandering in the wilderness they would learn. A whole new generation or two would be raised up who learned how to survive. Their parents had learned how to survive as slaves. Never downplay the skills and sacrifices needed to survive in what must have been often degrading and terrifying situations. But now they were embarking on a whole new training course as a people.

For the moment, where they honestly were was scared and angry and clueless and they complained.

And God who saved them, provided food. I have no idea how God did this – I know what quails are, and they appeared all over the place at night, but the manna is a mysterious substance. Well, what manna was, this was not the way God was going to do it over the long run. This was a miracle of feeding just for the moment. There is a detail in the story that I love -- the detail that if they tried to keep the manna – take a doggy bag home for the next day – it would go bad. I love the earthy King James Version that someone kept and it bred worms and stank. (Exodus 16:20) This was not something to store into barns, there weren’t any barns, this wasn’t for the long run, this was not how it was going to be.

The miracle for the long run would be the people learning how to feed themselves, how to be free and feed themselves. God would inspire them to do that, inspire their leaders to learn how to do that – maybe Moses’ long time as a shepherd precisely out in the middle of nowhere gave him knowledge and skills for teaching the people how to get food, how to take care of animals who would provide food.

And God who provided food in the wilderness would also provide the deepest feeding we need – the rich bread of the Word we find in all the ensuing stories and poetry and hymns of the Scriptures. God would feed. And form God’s people by God’s Word, by feeding them, feeding us, feeding us today.

God who had acted in history to free them and save them, would now form them.

God will form us as disciples of Jesus

Just so, God who has acted in history in Jesus Christ to save us, will form us as disciples of Jesus.

You may well say, whoa, wait a minute. Did you just say I am a disciple of Jesus? I thought that was Peter and John and Matthew, two thousand years ago.

Yes, it was. They were the first disciples. Jesus called them to follow him.

And I believe deeply God calls you to follow Jesus just as truly.

God calls us to follow Jesus day by day on his way of self-giving love, as his disciples.

By the Holy Spirit dwelling in each one of us, God gives each one rich gifts for discipleship. Gives you rich gifts.

I always remember that in Thomas Aquinas the first gift of the Holy Spirit is wisdom, the wisdom to know we are loved by God, the wisdom to know how to love.

What does it mean to be a disciple of Jesus?

I am trying to make a list of what makes a disciple. Perhaps it is my French Cartesian side.

There is a whole movement in parishes of our diocese at this time to make a simple list of the basics of being an Anglican. I am a big fan of this movement and the clergy and parishes involved and of the Rev. Clarence Langdon is who is sort of godfather of this movement! And this list is my contribution, although I am quick to add that what is on the list is from the Bible – the Bible is on the list! – and from the Prayer Book and our tradition.

Making a list, checking it more than twice, in order to invite you to the discipleship God call you to embrace. The mission of our parish is to make disciples. So what does discipleship mean?

Being a disciple means listening to the Word of God. Listening to the Bible read here in church, listening to what the preacher hears, listening to what you hear within you. I believe the Holy Spirit dwelling inside you (that inner place within your mind and heart is the Temple of the Spirit) will light up images and words and passages. Or give you things to wrestle with, like Jacob wrestling through the night with God.

One of the great principles of the Reformation was to put the Bible in the hands of the laity, to read and meditate on and pray about, and listen for God’s Word to you of how much God loves you. May the Holy Spirit give you light and wisdom to glimpse that and trust it. And offer God thanks and love in return.

Being a disciple means coming regularly to Holy Communion. Here God feeds us, both in the bread, and in the entire liturgy – music and prayers and word. Here the bread is placed in our hands as a tangible sign that God is with us, present with us, loving us with the love we see in Jesus – the love that is the bread of my life.

Being a disciple means regularly asking God’s forgiveness which we do in the prayer of confession and being forgiven.

On this day we remember the Hebrew people out in the wilderness without a clue as to how to feed themselves, we remember the great theme running through the Hebrew Bible and into the Gospel teachings of Jesus and the New Testament, the consistent theme of helping those who are hungry, feeding the widow and orphan, feeding the helpless. An essential part of being a disciple of Jesus is helping others – serving Christ as we serve those in need (Matthew 25). May we have wisdom and vision to broaden that to the myriad ways human beings can be helped, from shelters to hospices to hospitals to schools.

One of the mysteries of human life is that when we help others we are fed ourselves.

Discipleship means our ethical and political choices. In our tradition we value freedom to make those choices as a positive spiritual value – we are called to be mature free disciples, with consciences formed by worship and prayer and reading the Word of God. The Holy Spirit living within us will guide our consciences. In a modern democracy, it is not for the church organization to tell people who to vote for, but it is for the preacher to say that these decisions are part of our discipleship. Part of our responsibility. And our tradition tells us we are free to make those decisions. This obviously opens us to diversity of opinion in the church which I believe is healthy in a free society and church.

Being a disciple means discerning, listening for, looking for what God wants us to do and to be. How am I obedient to the call to follow Jesus on his way of self-giving love as a free and mature person?

Being a disciples mean taking our share in building the community of the church – gathered by God here around Jesus’ table and altar. Sharing joys and sorrows, welcoming the newcomer.

Being a disciple means our giving.

It means building a home, whether single or with four kids – a place of refuge and renewal, a place of hospitality. (When I say that, I am using “home” in its widest sense – many urban people practice hospitality within their residence, others elsewhere – that is simply a personal choice). May the place we live be sometimes a place of prayer. Remember that in the Sermon on the Mount here in Matthew Jesus said when you pray go into your room and shut the door.

Being a disciple means finding places to be still and quiet and pray. It can be anywhere. God will be there with you, hidden as though within the cloud, yes. And truly there.

Being a disciples means taking care of oneself – discipleship can be a long distance run (and I pray it will be for you). Discipleship may mean laying down our life, as Bonhoeffer did, like a fire fighter. If that hour comes may God give us courage and strength. God may also call us to the long distance run. On the way we need to find the things that feed us – the things we have a sense God makes use of to feed us. The beauty of the world – art, music, poetry – sport, running along the lakefront in the early morning. You are free to make your own list, find your own things, free to be open to the Spirit leading you to what feeds, to things that feed you, to things by which God feeds you.

How much God loves you. Loves you and me and invites us to a way of life – our mission is to extend the invitation to this way of life. To follow Jesus as his disciple day by day. And to trust at the very center of who we are – faith at the center -- God’s love for us in him, love which nothing can break.

(This sermon was preached by the Rev. Raymond Webster, Rector, in St. Chrysostom’s Church, Chicago, Illinois on Sunday, September 18, 2011, the Fourteenth Sunday after Pentecost.)

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