With a 525-mile weekend during which I had a funeral in Ames
followed by an ordination in Fort Madison on Saturday, and a celebration of new
ministry in Burlington the next afternoon, I joked about knowing where I was by
the time I would arrive on Sunday morning for the visitation at St. Michael's Mount Pleasant.
In the manner of a self-fulfilling prophecy, I managed, of course, to call the
congregation of Mount Pleasant “St Matthew’s” instead of “St Michael’s.” I gave
them permission to say that I had come to them that morning thinking I was in
Iowa Falls! Ironically, in a “physician heal thyself” moment the previous
evening I had just preached to the new priest and deacon of St Luke’s Fort Madison of the importance of preserving time and space for the nurture of their
inner lives. I added that the first people to know whether a musical artist has
slackened off on practicing is his or her audience.
It was, in fact, a remarkable couple of days of grace and
joy, capped off by the time with the people of St Michael’s. They had agreed to
meet for fellowship before worship, and were ready for conversation as I
arrived. They had also decided to hold the meal back until after worship—lunch
instead of brunch. They were excited
about the two adults who were being confirmed. Both had found the church later
in life, through the intervention of friends who had traveled the same route.
Another person was reaffirming her faith after twenty years away from the
church. I invited the confirmands to share their stories with the gathered
group, and their openness set the tone. Everyone seemed to know them and be
invested joyfully in their spiritual journey.
We compared the opportunities for sharing the faith that the
early church enjoyed in their cultural context with our own. We wondered about
the questions people are asking about spiritual life today, and I said that as
a bishop I felt more isolated from that discovery than I ever did as a priest
or lay person. One person said that he/she had been attending a lot of funerals these days and
realized that he/she
did not know how to put his/her
own funeral together. That led to a discussion about the role of the priest in
helping that process, but also about taking the opportunity in the choices one
makes to think about the issues of life that you proudly embrace and would want
to be expressed at your death. The conversation got deeper as another person
spoke about his/her personal struggle with God and a perceived cruel streak
that God seems to indulge in. All of this was articulated within a deep inner
faith and trust, but the honesty was in saying that it doesn’t always feel so
comforting or even just.
Finally, the topic of a recent article in Iowa Connections—arguing that small
churches were toxic or pollutants in that they were more predisposed to
conflict than larger churches—came up. I gave a couple of examples of what I
thought the writer was thinking from some stories I had heard from elsewhere
just that week. For example: A new person volunteers to bring something for
coffee hour and is met by a regular who has thought no one had signed up and so
stepped in as usual to save the day. When the regular met the new volunteer he/she
simply and innocently said that everything was sorted out and your offering is
not needed, but thanks anyway! That
congregation lost a new member quite quickly. In other words you tend to bump
into each other more readily when the community is small. In a larger setting,
you can always go off into a corner and mumble and not be noticed. On issues of
greater significance—inclusivity, changes in liturgy, etc.—smaller community
gets a keener sense of the impact of new decisions on its members, especially
its mainstays, and may behave more conservatively even than the majority of its
members’ positions.
We moved on to begin listing the values of a small
community; one particular aspect was that they could make a difference in the
scheme of things by getting behind a global need as one single force. I thought
of the creation of prayer beads which came out of our small churches, including,
I believe, Mt Pleasant. St Michael’s
were the first congregation I came across in my early days who were attempting
to organize their ministry configuration as a circle of ministry, and which was
a forerunner to the ministry development model.
I encouraged a leading member of the congregation to pen a response to
the article though we had to find another copy of Iowa Connections for him/her, as he/she had thrown his/her own away
in anger!
The openness of our conversation flowed into the worship as
I had hoped, and the tears in the eyes of the confirmands and the joy on their
faces lifted us all. There was even an opportunity to speckle the sermon with
connections to the conversation topics we had just engaged, including a moment
as we came to the great questions of the Baptismal Covenant to pause and give
an explanation on how, I believe, the Holy Spirit is addressed in the Apostles
Creed. One of the conversation pieces was why did the Holy Spirit seem to get such
short shift in the Creed—just one line! My theory is that the Holy Spirit Is
known for her work within us—hence is evidenced beyond the one liner “I believe
in the Holy Spirit” in the action of the Spirit in creating one HOLY catholic
and apostolic Church; a communion of HOLY ones (saints); the forgiveness of
sins (Jesus said, “Receive the Spirit whosoever sins you remit are remitted…”);
and is the giver of life everlasting, raising our bodies (we receive, remember,
the same Spirit who raised Jesus from the dead according to Paul).
After my “apostolic intervention” we went on to promise to
attend to the apostles’ teaching! The person who had raised the question gave
me a thumbs-up from the back of the Church as a thank you.
I appreciated the prayers that followed me around this
weekend by those who knew my schedule and also that we were dodging some tricky
winter conditions.
It was a marvelous couple of days—starting off with the
celebration of thanksgiving for the life and ministry of Father Doug Haviland,
chaplain at ISU from 1962-1991, at St. John's Ames. I chose to let his own words speak to us—delving
through his sermons from Epiphany through Pentecost. It was an enormous
privilege to encounter his wisdom and erudition. And through it all he was a
voice for the Gospel in an age that is growing increasingly unaware of its
deeper spiritual needs. He lived through the sixties and all the revolutions
that have now settled as norms. He challenged his students and the Church to
another timeless standard centered on Christ, and he continued to do so up to
his final days. Having lost a son in the World Trade Towers on 9/11, he said
that the issue of evil was not something we could address at our leisure, but
needed to be confronted urgently and earnestly; and as its origins reside in
the human heart, only Jesus offers the complete or final response. I hope we
will find a way to let his voice live on for the wider audience our modern
technology can embrace.
Finally, the ordinations of Bonnie Wilkerson, priest, and
Kelly Shields, deacon, at St Luke’s Fort Madison marked the first second-generation
Ministry Development Team. I noted that the words of Simeon in the Nunc
Dimittis were probably glorious to the ears of retiring priest and deacon, Lyle
Brown and Marilyn Weintzen. Seeing some twenty-somethings sharing in the
service, I wondered if team three was on the horizon.
The weekend ended in Burlington and the new
ministry celebration of Pat Cashman and the people of Christ Church. The focus was not only on that relationship
but also the fruit of ministry in that we combined the service with the
baptismal liturgy, baptizing the grandson of the church administrator, and
confirming a recent adult member. I was grateful to see clergy from the area
turn out to support the congregation and their new rector, especially in
weather that was dubious at best. My self-fulfilled prophecy of a weekend of
forgetfulness did have other manifestations. I had to return to the hotel in Mount
Pleasant to pick up my overnight bag that I had left in the room, and then back
to St Michael’s where I had left my crozier! It was a shock to open up the
crozier case at Christ Church and see it empty; always a first time for
everything. What does a bishop do with his/her hands in procession without the
crozier? In Long Island I am told you had better be blessing the people as you
go. I am not sure how that would go down in Iowa. In the end there was no
reason to rush back for the Super Bowl—it was over by the time I got to Ottumwa
on my way back to Des Moines.
In Thanksgiving for
the Life of The Reverend Douglas Brant Haviland, St. John's, Ames; 1 February 2014
Readings: Job 19: 21-27a;
Romans 8: 31-34, 37-38; John 1: 1-18
“None of us can escape
the judgment that will conclude our lives. At that moment the dynamic of our
lives will become clear and we will need the intercession of the One who
remained obedient to the end. The love enacted in Jesus is the power—the
dynamic—that can save us… Let us pray for the mercy of God.”
These are the words from an Easter sermon by the man whose
life as gift we celebrate and give thanks for this day. You remember Doug as a husband and life companion of 63 years; as a wonderful father and the
family cook; as a brother shared not only in the gift of life, but also in the
heartbreak of tragedy as you suffered the rare experience of losing children in
two of the most iconic tragedies in US history. I came to sit with Doug in
church on the 10th commemoration of 9/11; in Doug’s name we sit with
you as we recognize the double significance of this day.
Of such things, Fr Doug said: “The suffering of life seems
to draw people together more effectively than their great achievements and
moments of triumph. When human pride is strengthened [the] distance between us
easily expands. But when we descend into the shadows and finally reach the
valley of death we discover that we are all brothers and sisters sharing one
common end. There is a dark point of death where we all join hands and form a
common circle.”
And yet he concluded that there was a deeper place of unity
than shared sorrow, and that was the gift of the Spirit who helps us see that, “Jesus,
not death, is the center of human life.”
We all gather to remember a man of faith, of hope, of sharp
insight and compassion for the human condition. He was a man open to the spiritual
life across the world—always ready to walk with people in their spiritual quest
rather than try and convert or mold them into his image of what faith should
be.
The past few days I
have been greatly humbled to walk with Fr. Doug among his own words—words that
I hope will find the light of day in a more permanent form. Many of his words
live on in lives transformed by conversion of the kind Doug honored. And you
are here today to give thanks for that.
As a father Doug might have appeared a soft target to this
children, he could be pushed too far. As a priest and apologist for the
Christian Gospel he was the same.
He believed that human diversity comes from the nature of
God. He said: “True unity is not a simple denial of diversity. The Creator God
we claim to worship created a universe of rich variety; so we cannot expect
complete uniformity… A demand for uniformity applies to you free spirits as well
as old conservatives. Spirit-filled charismatics can be as rigid in their own
way as die-hard ritualists (among whom he included what he called “The poor
Episcopal Church when it advances the notion that liturgy must be done one way
and one only.”). “Acceptable diversity must be rooted in the divine nature we
claim to worship.”
Born in 1926 and raised Presbyterian in the Catskill
Mountains of New York, it was his finding of Betty at college that brought him
into the Episcopal Church and produced the gift of his call to the priesthood.
Betty’s own musicality and the music of the Church helped this process. He
caught the tail-end of World War II serving in the Navy “working a crane” in
Guam. He served as priest in St Andrew’s Schroon Lake, and came to Iowa to be
chaplain at Iowa State University in 1962 from having been Rector at St James
Church in Southwest Harbor, Maine. He served as Chaplain from 1962 to his
retirement in 1991.
About those days at ISU, and at St
David’s, Elliott Blackburn fondly remembers how he and his wife Hilary would
sit with Doug and Betty trying to have “post-Friday fish-fry conversation” as
the children scurried around them.
Elliott went on to describe those days of the sixties:
“The late
60s were crazy times, theologically as well as socially. Bishop Pike kept
things stirred up and there was the rumor of the "Death of God"
coming across the pond from England. There were the rumblings of changes to the
Prayer Book, made real in the 1967 little green book. And then there were civil
rights and poverty protests and, of course, protests against the war in
Vietnam, the increase in the use of drugs, the sexual revolution and the
general Hippy spirit. It was good to have a friend and colleague like Doug in
those days. Doug had a way of being a thoughtful, careful and orthodox thinker,
but one who was also a true liberal, that is, one who is open to truth whatever
its source. I'm sure that his quiet, deliberate, thorough way of thinking
through those events were frustrating to some who were all for immediate
action, but he and his way of being and thinking were a holy, sometimes
humorous and truly Anglican presence, especially in an academic community. I
know that he gave guidance and balance to us clergy, and I'm sure that he did
also to the members of St. John's and St. David's and through them to the
university and Ames community. I'm grateful for having Doug as a friend and
colleague in those days. It's easy to picture him now, in God's Kingdom, having
very deliberate questions and conversations with St. Paul and other writers of
Holy Scripture, as well as being a father, son, and friend to those who are
there before him.”
Don’t be misled, Doug’s was not a perfect life—after all, he
was a devoted fan of the Boston Red Sox. A proud moment came in 2005, or
whenever it was, when he could don his Red Sox cap in celebration of their
breaking the Babe Ruth curse in winning the World Series. As he would say later
about a totally other affair, “fanatics always have difficulty with the larger
view.”
His scholarly ways are evidenced by his library that rather
than include the kind of scattered reading which most of our lives might
betray, reveals a life devoted to following through on his passions—book
shelves, not just occasional books, fully devoted to Dante, for example, or
John Henry Newman, or the Metaphysical poets. Doug followed a theme to its end.
His curiosity and incessant reading left its influence upon his own children
who found the freedom to pursue their own inquisitive and creative purposes.
This capacity for focus also led to the recognition of curiosity’s limits. He
once said, in a Trinity Sunday sermon, “Trinity Sunday was a feast day in which
preachers were often tempted to overreach!”
Reflecting on an attempt to offer a bible study on the Book
of Revelation, he excused himself to Betty by saying that he was young at the
time and didn’t know any better.
He began his professional life as a high school teacher and
never stopped teaching. Some of you owe your love of George Herbert or of Dante
to his addresses on the Christian classics. He called George Herbert the finest
example of an Anglican theologian. Dante, however, was his greatest focus. Dante’s thought permeated his own. Every Lent he would read Purgatory [the second part of Dante’s Divine Comedy, following Inferno and preceding Paradiso], which he saw as the journey
of restoration of faith. “There is nothing punitive”, he said, “about the
discipline necessary to gain the prize we were all created to achieve—the final
plan of entering heaven.” He
considered the whole of Dante’s Divine Comedy as a reflection on the Prologue of St John’s Gospel, which we read as the
Gospel today. It was the light shining in the darkness and the darkness unable
to snuff it out.
The darkest day for Betty and Doug, and their whole family,
came on 9/11, when their son Tim was caught in the World Trade Towers. It sharpened Doug’s view of evil and he
was unequivocal about evil’s source.
“The war on terrorism”, he said, “that we inaugurated in the
aftermath of 9/11 disaster has placed a new significance on the nature of evil
and our way of coping with it has taken on a new urgency. What are the roots of
evil and how do we uncover and eradicate them? [of this question] We can no
longer speculate in a leisurely manner—but must deal with it and find some
answers. The war on terror can alleviate some of these consequences [of evil] and bring temporal relief—but it cannot strike the origins of evil.
Unfortunately, they reside in the human heart where our freedom to choose has
been turned against us and against our Maker and Loving Master. The undoing of
this false choice can only be done by Jesus on our behalf.”
For Fr Doug the continental divide of the Christian year was
Trinity Sunday. It pointed back to the story of what we had been given in
revelation from Advent through to the Day of Pentecost; and it pointed forward
through the long season of Pentecost to what we could apply. “The dual process
of considering and the applying what we have learned from our encounter with
Jesus will always be the substance of a Christian life,” he said in a Trinity
Sunday sermon.
Fr Doug preached what he lived. He abhorred cheap grace and
self-central Christianity. He feared that we had so humanized Jesus—making into
our own warm fuzzy—that we had, in fact, de-humanized Him as we promoted our
overly soft-centered and self-catering versions of faith. He preferred the
shorter ending to the Gospel of Mark in which the women fled for fear on
encountering the resurrection. For faith in the Resurrected Christ did not just
assure us of heaven, it took you into tackling the hard things of this life—embracing
your cross in the midst of life’s sufferings.
Doug applied what he had received in revelation. And no
greater challenge was posed than in embracing the question of forgiveness after
9/11. On the kitchen wall of the Haviland’s home is the Prayer of St Francis.
It is honored because it was a source that forced them forward to forgiveness. “You
don’t do,” Doug said, “but you let God work through you.”
And so today we give thanks for such a life and we will
shortly come together around the words of that same prayer as our own act of
re-dedication to let God work through us.
Fr Doug was a great polemicist for the Christian faith. He
was very aware of evil but even more so that the Cross of Christ stands central
in our faith and lives to dismantle it. “Religious
fundamentalists can only see life from their own point of view – they lack the
largeness of vision. Combine that with the destructive power of modern
technology and we find ourselves in a world of growing fear.” These are
words from the last decade of his life – from a man who never ceased to learn
and apply faith’s lessons even to his final days.
He continued; “In such
a world, heaven ceases to be a pious consolation or a projection of wishful
thinking. Either there is a restoration of love which is the reality of heaven
or evil has the final word. Either there is a transcendental Presence that can
carry us beyond the absence of meaning, or we live in a hopeless world. .. As
the slain Lamb, Jesus was torn from us by fear and despair… As the Risen
Christ, Jesus is the heavenly King who will gather to Himself his fellow
innocent victims.”
To that same Lamb of God now upon the Throne
To the One from whose Love nothing can separate us
To the Eternal Word so eloquently expressed through the life
of His servant and priest Douglas, we now commend our own beloved.
Amen
Sermon at the Ordination of Bonnie Wilkerson and Kelly
Shields, St Luke’s, Fort Madison; 1 February, 2014
Readings:
Ecclesiasticus 39:1-8: Ephesians 4:7, 11-16 ; Luke 12: 35-38
I can imagine that there are at least two individuals here
tonight who identify with tomorrow’s gospel characters from the story of The
Presentation. There we come across two holy people—Simeon and Anna—who have
waited longingly for the appearance of the Messiah. We have grown to know
Simeon through the hymn that came from his lips: “Now let thy servant depart in
peace. For mine eyes have seen thy salvation.” I hear it being recited by Lyle
and Barbara as they look upon Bonnie, and by Marilyn as she thinks about Kelley.
And it is alright to be that way. For you have done a good thing. You stepped
up to participate in the first Ministry Development Team even though you were
beyond mandatory retirement age before you were ordained! You sent me your
retirement letters the next day and we have been going along year-by-year. Now,
however, you have passed on your leadership to another, to a second-generation
Ministry Development Team. And am I wrong to spot signs of potential team
number three in the young people participating today in the service?
Nothing much will change in terms of any of your
opportunities to continue to serve with the people of Fort Madison as priests
and deacons, but there is a real sense of joy in seeing the process of
developing ministry move into a second generation. I think back to when my own
parish of St Barnabas’ called a second team. It was going to be much more
interesting than the first in that we had invited a series of congregational
meetings to establish our mutual sense of God’s mission and our community
needs. We nominated persons to the team according to a series of perceived
mission needs and we came up with some fascinating ministry titles. We thought
of our multicultural setting and called someone to be a multicultural
missioner. We had need for a more intentional coordinator for family ministry.
Someone came up with a ministry resource person—stewardship and fund-raising,
in effect. The one that caused me personal threat was that of liturgical
designer. After all, that had been my job, and the congregation called my wife
to the task! All of these positions were non-ordained, and the congregation was
willing to set aside funds for continuing education for each person in their
specific categories.
The team never fully materialized. Donna and I were called
to Iowa; the multicultural missioner and his wife, who was also a catechist,
found a job in New Mexico. Illness struck others. By a series of natural
events, the team evaporated. It was a time only to dream, it seems. To see what
could have been, and yet know what still can be if we seek to arrange our
common life around serving the Kingdom of God.
Recently I have found myself preaching other people’s texts—by
that I mean I have been given texts by the ordinands and then have to guess why
they might have chosen these readings. I must say that these are quite unusual
readings for the occasion—all except Paul’s words in Ephesians and his picture
of the ongoing work of Christ as activity of a Body made up of many parts but
called to a unity, a working as one in mature order. I am also assuming the
Gospel passage from Luke inviting us to wait and be ready, dressed for action,
is more about the diaconate as we read, “blessed are the servants whom the
master finds alert.” The passage from Ecclesiasticus, however, is a challenge.
Ecclesiasticus comes from that period of time in between the two Great
Testaments of Holy Scripture, possibly from the second century before Christ.
It associates finding wisdom as a prerequisite to understanding God’s way of
salvation.
Bring them all together and we hear a call common to each—namely
to pay attention to your inner preparedness.
And perhaps this is where the Spirit wishes to challenge you, and all of
us. For you are busy people, poised for action. There is an irony in my seeing
this on a weekend in which I am running from one end of the diocese to the
other presiding at four very different occasions. I hear the words: “Physician,
heal yourself.”
The truth is that there is never going to be an end to the
work you can do. Soon we will ask you to care for young and old, rich and poor,
sick and the healthy. There will always be a new need, another project. And as
ordained persons, even working within an understanding of being a team
developing the ministry of one another, we are good at jumping in until we
don’t know where we end and the other begins. You can’t afford to do that. None
of us can. God’s word to us tonight is saying pay attention to the inner journey – the way of gathered wisdom. Don’t be tossed to and fro. But be anchored
in that which builds up the Body of Christ. Be inwardly alert. So let me
give you a series of imperatives:
- Study how things can work properly together and what promotes growth. That may require learning to speak truth in love when you tempt each other to do otherwise or to do too much.
- Find what your part of the whole might be and learn to articulate it and then be true to it. Let others discern what this might be in you, and do the same for them. This is ministry development. Celebrate the gifts of God you each are to the whole, and that equip each of you to the common work of ministry.
- Keep the margins soft for that way you also are able to keep the soil turned over and fruitful. Maintain the growth as a people by ever reaching outward, and always having room for God’s new thing and new one.
I remember a conversation with a spiritual
director in which, for whatever reason, I was talking about “having a good
mind.” “Had a good mind,” my director said, “for you just told me you had
stopped reading for personal refreshment.” He then went on to ask and answer
the question, “Who is the first to notice when a recital pianist has cut back
on his or her practice time? The audience!”
Be wary therefore of spiritual
auto-pilot—especially in this demanding business. Pay attention to paying
attention. So I thank you for choosing this emphasis within the Scriptures. You
probably know better than any of us how these might be words of the Spirit to
you. It will assure you of the joy of the bridegroom that you are ready when He
comes—a joy that Simeon and Anna experienced, the joy of being and serving in
the company of such a Loving God.
Amen
Sermon at St. Michael's, Mount Pleasant, and Christ Church, Burlington; 2 February 2014
Sermon at St. Michael's, Mount Pleasant, and Christ Church, Burlington; 2 February 2014
Readings: Malachi 3:1-4 ;Hebrews 2: 20-18;
Luke 2: 22-40
It is rare for us to celebrate the Presentation of Jesus in
the temple—just one of two glimpses of his life before we see Him ready for
God’s mission at the River Jordan. Where then do we place our focus?
The fulfilling of all righteousness within the Jewish faith
tradition of His time is of significance for us. As commentator Fred Craddock notes:
“The new that has come in Christ is God’s old promises fulfilled.” This was a
time waited for by a historical people: The coming of this child would be a
sign to so many based on their reading of their Holy Scriptures and their
understanding of God’s promises. It is intended to remind us that our faith
tradition is rooted in revelation. As Paul says in Romans, chapters 11-13, that
if God judged the Chosen for their unfaithfulness, how much more readily would
God cast aside the wild branch of us Gentiles whom God grafted onto the vine of
Promise for similar presumptuousness.
Jesus was brought by His family into the Temple as was the
custom of the day. Through the very miracle of Incarnation—God’s method of
salvation—the Holy One had to embrace a period of vulnerable dependency upon
His parents. He trusted, and thus God trusted through Him, others to do the
right thing by the Child on whom His mother had been so long pondering since
His birth. And so we realize today how dependent so many of us have been that
our parents would do the right thing by us as they brought us to baptism, just
as Mauricio’s parents, grandparents and Godparents do today (during the Christ
Church Burlington celebration of new ministry, with baptism and confirmation).
Jesus embraced the tradition of His day and of His people.
It is worth our pausing and giving thanks for how we came to be where we are
today because someone recognized that our faith is not only about our choice,
but also God’s first reaching out to us through the gift of sacrament. Simply
noting these things shifts our perspective on faith. It makes our spiritual
lives more about receiving what God gives to us than taking what we feel we
need from God. We become revelation-centered and not simply my-spiritual-journey
centered. As we seek, we are met by the One who can lead us into our full
meaning and purpose.
So it is no small thing that Mary and Joseph “did right” by
Jesus, nor that our parents followed suit in so many cases. It was only after
my own confirmation that I realized what a blessing my parents sought for me in
bringing me to baptism as an infant. I had awakened to faith later as a
Methodist and decided that this was the decisive moment of salvation for me and
for everyone. We all had to be “born again” in a sudden and decisive way. I had
dismissed my parents’ action as empty ritual. How wrong I realized was, and how
arrogant. God was honoring their obedience and it took my confirmation—casual as
I approached it at the time—to bring me into a conscious knowledge of what it
means to be part of the Catholic tradition that stretched over the centuries.
The saints in the stained-glass windows and represented by the stone statues
seemed to come alive on that day. It was not really about me at all. We are
invited to respond to a long line of divine revelation which is rooted back in
the same tradition that Mary and Joseph faithfully followed. God first loves us
before we know to love God.
Secondly, it is significant and compatible with Luke’s
emphasis throughout his Gospel that we notice the offering Mary and Joseph made
at the Temple. Two pigeons were the offering of those who lived in poverty.
As the Prayer Book reminds us (BCP page 826): “Almighty and most
Merciful God, we remember before you all poor and neglected persons whom it would
be easy for us to forget...Grant this, Father, for the love of your Son, who
for our sake became poor, Jesus Christ our Lord.” In fact, the Prayer Book got
it slightly wrong—Jesus did not BECOME poor. He was born into poverty. He was
poor from the outset. His family could only afford the cheapest end of the
sacrificial menu; but it was an offering as effective as any of its more
expensive counterparts.
-
Jesus identified with the religious journey of
the People among whom He was born.
-
Jesus entered this life without privilege, born
into the vulnerability and humility of the poor.
Finally, it is significant that there were witnesses whose
joy overflowed at what they recognized.
Simeon and Anna had held onto God’s ankles for decades interceding for the coming of the Anointed One. Something leapt within them as Jesus was carried into the Temple. It was not the priest who noticed. He was busy fulfilling his religious duty. No one called the head office for the High Priest to come down; nor was there a back chorus of angelic hosts—that had been reserved for a more select group on that very first night of revelation.
Simeon and Anna had held onto God’s ankles for decades interceding for the coming of the Anointed One. Something leapt within them as Jesus was carried into the Temple. It was not the priest who noticed. He was busy fulfilling his religious duty. No one called the head office for the High Priest to come down; nor was there a back chorus of angelic hosts—that had been reserved for a more select group on that very first night of revelation.
It was out of quiet, intense and incessant prayer that the
moment became clear for those two elders who had waited so long. “Now let your
servant depart in peace,” says Simeon, “for my eyes have seen Thy salvation.”
We are invited to sing this joy every evening at our night prayer. For Simeon
this was a statement of readiness to depart this life happy; we are invited to
find release in joyful recognition of God’s fulfilled promise in life.
In many ways it is more difficult to let ourselves enter
into the joy of God, of God’s promises fulfilled, of the gift of God’s Son, of
the new life in Him that the Spirit brings through baptism and in renewal. It
is more difficult to stand with Simeon and Anna in their amazement and delight
than it is to be preoccupied with the rigors of our religious duties, standing
with the Temple priests or the altar attendants or the pigeon sellers.
Often I may be with Simeon in his waiting phase but then not
notice that Jesus has come in. I pray however for an increasing awareness of
revelation received, enlightenment given and joy completed.
As you know I am in two places today—here on visitation this
morning, and later this afternoon at the celebration of new ministry at Christ
Church Burlington. I wondered how the Scriptures might speak differently for
each occasion. I am not convinced that they have to.
For whether our gathering is for visitation—and the renewal
that hopefully comes as we talk together about the state of our mission
together with God, and as we give thanks for new lives confirming their
baptismal vows—or whether we celebrate new ministry as people and Rector, with
its promise of new and renewed leaders across the whole body of the baptized in
Burlington, the themes of the Presentation apply.
- Be radical. Know your roots and live as a people embraced and directed by revelation, and be humble servants of a faith once delivered. God will do new things in and through you but remember that God’s new thing is always the fulfillment of God’s old promises.
- Begin as poor and as among the poor. Identify with the least among you—not in pity but as your own flesh and blood. Start with the acknowledgement of each other as bearers of the dignity of God who made you. Where it is being lost, work hard for its restoration, using all the tools of love that the Gospel and Spirit provide. We celebrate new ministry but as ministers in common—as ministers together, united as one Body and in a place where often it is a child, the innocent victim, the least among us, who takes the lead and calls us forward.
- Find the joy of Simon and Anna because you recognize that God is so good. Wait upon the Lord for that joy to come. Jesus laughing is a rare portrait but I have one on my wall. He is indulging in a huge belly laugh. Sometimes I have to ask “What are you laughing at?” and I think I hear a voice reply: “You.”
- “The joy of the Lord is my strength,” says Scripture. And so it is. Even if it carries us through the valley of the shadows. It is what makes us fear no evil, for its foundation is the rod and staff of God that comforts us.
So today, we can depart in peace even if it is to beat
through the ice and snow to get home for the Super Bowl, for our eyes have seen
the salvation of the Lord, prepared before the face of all people. It is a
light for us Gentile nations, whose origin and deliverance is the glory of (and
gift from) God’s people Israel.
Amen
