Sermon on Palm Sunday at Cathedral Church of St Paul, Des
Moines—13 April 2014
The invitation is simple and it is clear. The prophet Isaiah
asks, “Who will contend with me?” and invites us to “stand together.” The
Apostle Paul says, “Have this mind in you that was in Jesus Christ.” We are
asked to let God’s whispering in our ear be the first thing we hear on waking,
linking our daily life with our faith. The question is, how connected is our
faith as it impacts our daily decisions and thinking and thus our behavior? And
the hope is that we respond in setting our faces like flint toward the way of
the cross, and walk the way of Jesus and let Jesus walk our way in return. Thus
we are set up to encounter the Passion, not just with our ears but with our
imaginative capacity to participate.
So the Deacon declares the Passion, not just the Gospel, of
our Lord Jesus Christ according to Matthew. And Paul invites us to listen as
those who have the same mind as was in Jesus Christ. I have never made it a
secret that the passage from Philippians is one of my favorites. “Favorite”
feels a little sentimental and does not do justice to the theological impact of
the passage, nor its intensity and challenge. We are asked to “empty ourselves”
and to enter in to the experience of the other and to serve sacrificially. God
calls us not to hold on to what we think we have; but to let it go and make
room to love and to serve.
The Archbishop of Canterbury touched on this in his speech
to those of us gathered at the recent Conference on Reclaiming the Gospel of Peace. He talked about the importance of walking with those who face violence, and
quoted Philippians 2: 5-11. A fellow bishop shared how she had not found this
passage particularly helpful because the interpretation assumes a privileged
position from the beginning. “There are people”, she reminded me, “who feel
quite empty from the start.” My interpretation or attraction to this verse
probably stems from my male and dominant position in society.
I see however that that might be precisely why I am drawn to
it. This is what the Spirit needs to say to the likes of me to pull me further
into the engagement with the Gospel and the Passion of Christ. But what about
you? Perhaps you echo the views of my friend and feel empty all ready, or on
the margins or without much to “give up”. Nevertheless, I believe we all have
signature verses through which God speaks to us and draws us closer to God. I
invite you to look to other words and ways of Jesus that call you to have the
mind in you which was in Jesus Christ.
Maybe you are drawn to the episode with the woman at the
well, or the woman taken in adultery as you hear the words, “Where are your
accusers? Go and sin no more.” Perhaps it is the booming voice of the Sermon on
the Mount as Jesus reverses all our values claiming the blessedness of
peacemakers, and meek, and poor spirits. One way or another, God calls us in
signatory ways and I wonder which Scriptures are yours. With what does God wake
you in the morning and whisper in your ear and heart and invite you to stand
with Him?
Whatever it is, “have this mind in you which was in Jesus
Christ.”
The various ways on entering into this invitation are, in
fact, health aspects of the Body of Christ. For it means that we need each
other to be able, together and collectively, to manifest the full mind of
Christ. We need to give one another opportunity to receive our insights and
thus pursue such a Mind. In fact, this need to work together; this
interdependency among us to be the Body of Christ; this impossibility of having
a go-it-alone faith; may still be the greatest gift the Church can give to the
world. It may be our way of creating room to serve and offer ourselves for the
sake of the common good.
As I have said, these past few days I have been thinking
about the role of the Church in proclaiming the Gospel of Peace. One part of
this was to consider what it means to promote safer and more sensible gun laws
to reduce gun violence. This whole Conference, in fact, came from the
initiative which now includes 45 bishops as a response to the Sandy Hook killings a year last December. But the gun strategizing was only one part of a much
deeper issue. More serious is the capacity of us all to enter into the profound
significance of the Passion of Christ through which God brings peace and
reconciliation. How can we connect with the fundamentals of the Passion of
Christ so that it determines how we should live, especially in a violence-riddled
world, which includes the violence of our own thought processes? How can we be
awakened by the Passion and listen to its lessons as both teachers and
learners?
The Passion stands at the center of our identity as
Christian people and of the cause that is the Gospel we serve and proclaim.
“God so loved the world that He gave His only begotten Son … not to condemn the
world but that the world may be saved.”
Each year we enter Holy Week with an opportunity to review
how God’s gift of reconciliation is at work; and each year the world gives us a
challenging scenario. How, for example, is it at work on the borders of Russia
and the Ukraine; or in the very heart of Christ’s Passion in Jerusalem and around
the Middle East? How is it a work in the divided Churches throughout the
Christian faith drawing us together to make us one? How is it at work in our
own abilities to uphold each other’s dignity or to share our wealth, or to
promote the honoring of each other as the living icons of the God of Love? How
is it at work in our own thought processes and reactivity to things that go on
around us? On Saturday as I flew home from the Conference on Peace, I sat next
to a man who had his bible out. I did not choose to engage him, but left him to
his study. He then took out a manuscript and I decided he must be a Seminary
professor or something. As we were gathering our things to leave the plane I
noticed some notes entitled “The triumphal entry – John 12” and so asked him if
that was his sermon for Sunday. “Yes,” he said, “what’s yours?” I said
Philippians 2: 5-11 omitting that my text was “have this mind in you.” I tried
to explain how I was hoping to prepare people for the whole week of liturgy
before us, and received the response, “Just give them Jesus!” How can such a
simple phrase make you feel so small in a hurry? Yet it is what we do to each
other with our good intentions when we are not aware of the turmoil within us.
I obviously have residual turmoil from the incident as I think I have shared it
half a dozen times since!
Philippians 2: 5-11 is not just about the emptying. Or,
rather, it does not leave us there. It is an invitation to a process which ends
up in triumph or in exaltation. Christ’s triumphant entry was His emptying Himself.
It is about servant hood—entering into the place of one another and into the
sense of self of the other. It is about knowing each other as we would want to
be known— through the eyes and the safety of love. It is also a passage, as I say,
that leads to exaltation—about a Name that is above every Name, that at the
Name of Jesus every knee shall bow and every tongue confess Him as Lord. That
exaltation carries over to those who dare to bear that same Name as followers
of Christ.
This is today’s invitation. Take this week as steadily and
deliberately as you can. Be counter cultural and a little subversive, and do as
little work as you can get away with, and spend more time in contemplation and
reflection on the meaning of this week. Be intentional about acknowledging
Christ’s Name in you. Find your Signatory verses, and let God take you where
you need to go to know the mind of Christ and have such a mind formed in you—all
for God’s purpose and for your joy!
Amen
Sermon at Easter Vigil, Cathedral Church of St Paul, Des
Moines, Iowa—19 April 2014
In a few minutes or so, I am going to be asking you a few
questions for which you have scripted answers. I will ask: Do you believe in
God the Father; do you believe in God the Son; and do you believe in God the
Holy Spirit? As I say, the answers are scripted, but you would not be the first
to stay silent for that part of the response you may be having difficulty with.
Nor would you be the only one who may go along with the scripted “yes” and be
crossing your fingers behind your back! If, however, you can say “yes,” I will
then challenge you to pursue further gathering for study, worship and prayer in
relationship with this God in whom you believe. Finally I will ask you, if you
so believe, to engage in behavior which aligns with faith in such a God—recognizing
and resisting evil, honoring Christ in each other and upholding each one’s
dignity, and working for justice and peace among all.
But first, however, we are presented with some even more
fundamental questions about our thoughts about God. For the Scriptures that
make up this Vigil stretch not only our imaginations, but also our sense of
credulity. There is a new TV series called Cosmos,
which has already begun to disturb the spirits of certain fundamentalist
churches who have called for its boycott. I can imagine that any devotees of
the program among you here may be a little uncomfortable with the account of
Creation that we have just read. Likewise, Abraham’s adventure with his son
Isaac seems absolutely cruel on the part of God. And it does not need to be
pointed out that the Egyptians hardly enjoyed the experience at the Red Sea;
though it is to be applauded that in the Haggadah we
used for the Seder
on Monday evening there was
reference to the fact that the joy of the Israelites was tempered by their
sorrow of the loss of life among the Egyptians. “As is always the case when
human life is lost in the cause of God’s purposes.”
These are difficult passages for post-modern or post-post-modern
minds. We recognize the fact perhaps when we change the title of lector or
reader in the list of liturgical participants to “storytellers.” For, Ezekiel
does give us a way into the other three readings simply because we receive it
as a prophetic vision which tells a truth rather than a piece of narrated
history. Ezekiel was a prophet and worked in the realm of dreams and visions.
God used his creative imagination to depict an unlikely event, which depicted
something that, in reality, happened—the restoring of Israel out of dry death
of exile into the living reality of a renewed people of God. We love the image
of the dry bones—dem bones, dem bones, dem dry bones—as they rattle to life. We
do not expect it to be an event that actually happened but what it represented
truly did. Israel was restored from exile and began work on the second Temple
of God in Jerusalem.
If we were to consider each passage in a similar light, what
we have before us are imaginative narratives that seek to address profound
questions of fundamental importance:
Questions
of origin: Where do we come from?
Questions
of destiny: To what end or purpose are we to live?
Questions
of assurance: To what can we hold onto as sure
anchors in this life?
anchors in this life?
Questions
of hope and restoration: In whom or what do we
place our hope and sense of the future?
place our hope and sense of the future?
Each question centers and points to a different attribute of
God—Creator, Provider, Savior and Life-giver or Restorer. In truth, you are
never going to find the complete facts behind Creation or what transpired
historically between God, Abraham and Isaac on that mountain, or with Moses and
the people of Israel as they stood on the Red Sea beach as the Egyptians drove
toward them. In fact, you don’t ask for proof for the prophet’s vision of the
valley of dry bones and yet what happened in the restoration of Israel after
exile was the exact manifestation of the prophecy of dry bones—a dried up,
defeated, dismantled faith community and its rituals—which came back to life.
Speaking for myself, I must say that what I need to know is
where do I come from—that this human capacity for conscious awareness and to
dream into the future even of eternity itself and beyond my living days is not
a passing thing confined only to the short span of time I or any of us
experience. I want to know that it is tied to a deep origin of all of life, and
as such is connected throughout all of nature and has its roots stemming deep
from the heart of God. Secondly, I need to know that I can entrust my very
destiny to such a God. That even promises cannot be held onto as though they are
entitlements in this life—no matter what I think God may have offered me;
nothing is certain and yet God says, “Trust Me!”
That was Abraham’s experience and dilemma. His own future
had been depicted in one of those walks with God in which God had said that he
would be a father of many nations. This was promised by God in the miraculous
birth of Isaac by Sarah even when she was way beyond the time for child-bearing;
and clearly such a promise rested on Isaac’s survival. Yet the test on Mt
Moriah was of Abraham’s willingness to trust the One who promises even as
seemingly casting aside or sacrificing the only clear source of that promises’
fulfillment! (Now some find explanation in understanding that Mt Moriah was the
ancient location of what we now know as Calvary, thus justifying God’s action
in terms of foreshadowing what would happen with Jesus.) We cannot, however,
avoid the point that we are invited to hold loosely even that which we believe
is promised by God as a manifestation of our trust in God. Promise does not
mean entitlement. This becomes even more significant for those many who are
full of promise are taken from us before it seems that promise is brought to
full bloom. For them, perhaps the lamb is not found in a bush but on the throne
depicted in that realm which is yet to come.
Thirdly, I need to believe in God’s ability to rescue and,
fourthly, to restore. Each question points us forward ever deeper into the
significance of this night. For if creation baffles us, if Abraham’s sacrifice
of Isaac troubles us, if the Red Sea crossing confuses us; what do we say about
the dry bones that live—and not only the dry bones of Israel, but the dry bones
of the Man of Sorrows whose beaten, dried up and bloodied body was laid in a
tomb for three days only to be declared alive this very night. We have sat with
the storytellers so that they could prepare us for this news, and for this new
reality in which dead men come to life. God our creator, provider, our savior,
and life-giving restorer reveals God’s greatest miracle as God invites us to
believe in the Risen Christ, and through Him in our own eternal life! We are being made ready through the stories we
have heard for this ultimate revelation. And in it all our questions are
invited for a response.
With this declaration and revelation God grants us freedom:
-
Freedom to enjoy creation with gratitude as
gift, and with careful concern as receivers of such a gift. We recognize that
coming from one source, we are connected with all of nature and with that is
responsibility and sensitivity;
-
Freedom to yield our most precious giftedness
and promise for God’s call and destiny which is always to be found in a way of
compassionate and loving service of our fellow human beings;
-
Freedom to trust that God knows our impediments
and the obstacles which we may face in our way forward, as well as the dangers
which threaten to overrun us, and will assure of open possibilities when caught
between what may seem like the “devil and the deep blue (or red) sea”;
-
And finally, Freedom to be new persons in Christ
with an eternal future, with a forgiven and released past, to be able to shake
off its limits and walk as renewed children of God—born again if you like—into
a restored present.
Tonight is intended to stretch our faith and our
imagination. It is done in an atmosphere of transcendent praise and worship
inviting us to lose ourselves in what we hear and experience in this moment of
receiving the Risen Lord of Glory. Give yourself to this moment as God has
given of God’s self to us!
Grasp hold of your origins in God and be thankful for your
creation. Acknowledge your destiny as best discovered not in what promises you
hold God to, but in yielding up even the same promises in recognition of God’s
ability to provide for you. Allow God to be your Savior as you face the
obstacles to your living in God’s call of love. And finally, claim your newness
as a Child of God and see yourself being drawn deeper and deeper into a life
that is constantly being renewed and transformed with lots of wonderful stories
that make up the ongoing life of God’s resurrection people.
Amen
