Church of St. Nicholas-on-the-Hudson

Tough Talk … Sort of (June 27, 2010)

I’ve taken lately to driving past the Presbyterian Church up on route 9D to read the sermon title for the coming Sunday, which the Rev. Lindsay Borden always has out by Monday afternoon (I can’t even think of a sermon title by Sunday after the sermon’s preached, much less by Monday a week before!).

Her sermon title for this week, which I especially liked, is “Tough Talk” named for the pretty hard things Jesus says to his would-be followers in this passage.  Biblical scholars count these among what they call the “hard sayings” of Jesus, because the demands Jesus makes are so steep.  But “hard sayings” doesn’t do it nearly as much justice as “tough talk.”

So, I’m also going to say a few words about Jesus’ “tough talk” here and particularly the context in which he says it, which is, I think where the real lesson lies. 

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Homily for Ascension Sunday 2010

May 16, 2010

Today is the Sunday of the Ascension.  Ascension is a very short season in the church that goes from last Thursday, which was the day of the Ascension, to next Sunday, Pentecost Sunday.  In fact, it’s so short that, if you skip just one Sunday, you’ve missed an entire church season!  (So you’re one of those people who feel guilty for missing a Sunday, I guess this isn’t the one to miss.)

Anyway, the Ascension refers to the event where Jesus, after wandering around the earth for forty days and appearing to the disciples in his resurrected body, was taken up into heaven as they all watched.

It’s not really a big event in the church year, and that might be because there was a lot of disagreement since the earliest days of the church as to whether the Ascension even took place.

For example, the Gospel writers Matthew, Mark and John don’t mention it at all, or seem to think of it as part of the resurrection.  It’s only Luke who has Jesus walk the earth for forty days after the resurrection (that’s where we get the forty-day tradition of Easter), after which he ascends into heaven from the Mount of Olives.

Interestingly, I learned a theory this past week that Luke added the Ascension event to put a stop to people’s claims that they were seeing the resurrected Jesus.  When I explained this theory to my husband Andrew, he said it sounded like trying to stop Elvis sightings or encores – a sort of “Elvis has left the building” situation. 

But seriously, it may well have served this purpose for the early Christians, some of whom were having sightings of Jesus that got downright strange and were using them for political gain over other Christian groups.

But more than that, having Jesus go up into heaven might have served a moral purpose, as well, by helping the disciples to stop clinging to their encounters and memories of Jesus and start doing the work that he wanted them to do.

I spent this past week looking at some of the art of the Ascension – a wonderful event as far as the art is concerned.  In one of my favorites, by the 14^th century Italian painter Giotto, Jesus looks like he just took a running leap and lifted himself off into space, while, to each side a train of angels radiates out almost like smoke from a rocket.

Others are more staid.  Like an anonymous 15^th century altar piece in which Jesus is just sort of effortlessly lifting off into the air.  Or a 15^th century piece by Andrea Mantegna, where Jesus stands on a small cloud-pedestal ringed all about by little red cherub heads.

Still others seem more outright ridiculous.  My favorite in this category is by Hans Seuss von Kulmbach, in which all you can see are Jesus’ sort of scrawny feet at the very top of the frame while the disciples look on.  (That’s the one I put on your covers.)

There’s even a whole genre of Ascension art in which imprints of Jesus’ footprints are on the rock that he ascends from – and, actually, if you go to the Shrine of the Ascension outside Jerusalem, there’s a rock with footprints in it that you can venerate. 

Anyway, and in general, almost all paintings of the Ascension seem to fall into two categories – those that direct our gaze upward, at Jesus and where he’s going; and those that direct our gaze downward, at the disciples and where they (and by extension, we) are going. 

And I think that sort of gets to the different ways the Ascension has been understood over the years.  It’s either an event that points us upward toward deliverance from this world; or downward to continue Christ’s work here on earth.

In the English tradition, Ascension Day is the last day of Rogation Week – the week when the priest would bless the fields for the coming year.  In some churches, this also involved gathering up a bunch of people from the parish (parish in England is a geographical designation for a large-ish area – like a town – rather than another name for a particular church); so they would gather up people from the parish to go around the boundaries of the parish and mark them with stones colored with white chalk.

The point of this practice was for the church to mark out its sphere of social obligation – anyone within those bounds who fell ill, needed financial help, or fell on hard times for whatever reason was entitled to help from the church.  Those outside the boundaries had another church to help.  But everyone should be provided for as needed.

Meaning that the Ascension was, above all, a day to be reminded of our moral obligation for the well being of others.  So maybe the Ascension reminds us that our gaze shouldn’t be up in heaven, but on those footsteps in the rock - footsteps that we are called to follow, and footsteps that lead us on the path to compassion, charity, and justice.  

Homily for Epiphany 2

Second Sunday after the Epiphany - January 17, 2010

Well, for starters this week, I want to remind you all that we priests don’t pick the readings for Sundays - they’re assigned by the national church.  Which I mention because the Gospel reading for today seems so insensitively out of sync with events this past week.

I sat down on Wednesday to start reading for this sermon at about same time that the news from Haiti started pouring in.  No doubt like many of you, I spent a good part of the day reading stories about people still trapped in rubble, their voices and breath fading; watching videos of severely injured people languishing in the street with nowhere to go; listening to reporters wondering aloud where all the ambulances were; and fuming at all the emergency aide boxes lined up just over the border in the Dominican Republic or overseas, with no way to get in.

Meanwhile, over on my other browser window, I was reading about the wedding at Cana - a joyous and extravagant event that seemed entirely disconnected with that I was watching and reading on the news.  Obviously Jesus would come into contact with a lot of victims of senseless violence, and would himself be one of them.  But this week, of all weeks, he’s at a party.  So the question I began to struggle with then and through the week is how you reconcile this story and these events.  And what eventually helped me was a closer look at the wedding at Cana.

The wedding at Cana is a fairly brief story from John’s Gospel, and scant in detail. Early in his ministry, Jesus, his mother, and his disciples go to a wedding in the village of Cana, about six miles from Nazareth where he grew up.  (I’ve actually been to Cana, where a Franciscan church now purports to sit on the site of the miracle - and where you can also drink free samples of Cana wine!  Let me just say Jesus’ must have tasted better.)   Partway through the wedding, they run out of wine.  So Mary, his mother, asks him to make some more wine, and he instructs some servants to fill six large jars with water, somehow turns it into wine, and the party goes on.

As I said, the story is a bit hazy on the details: for example, we don’t know whose wedding it was, why Jesus was invited, or, worst of all, how he managed to turn all that water into wine.  But it does tell us for whatever reason exactly how much wine he made: 180 gallons!  (Speaking of which, I read a wonderful new commentary on this, the first line of which began “For his very first miracle, Jesus showed a certain benevolence toward human failings.”  That’s next year’s sermon.) So, with all that wine, it was obviously a pretty good party.

That said, in the Gospel of John and in the Christian tradition, the story is about much more than just a good party.  It’s also meant to foreshadow darker events ahead in Jesus’ life.  The wine is a symbol of the crucifixion and Christ’s blood.  The empty vessels are a symbol of his self-emptying in death.  There was even a tradition of painting this scene to look like the Last Supper.  The Veronese on your programs is a great example of this.  On first glance it looks like a huge, riotous celebration is going on - and it is.  But when you look more closely, it also resembles the Last Supper, where Jesus said his final farewell to the disciples before his death.

So I guess seeing that this story has two sides, one happy the other tragic, makes it seem a lot less out of sync with the past week.  And I can think of maybe two messages to be taken from this story as we now see it.  First, it might remind us that, when tragedy strikes, we’re called to press on with life - to claim that much more insistently the joys that life can bring.

Second - and related to that - just as even the happiest events and people always have the slightest bit of sadness within them, so, too, tragedies always has the slightest bit of hope buried within. Like - and we’ve also seen examples like these this past week - moments of compassion that come out of such events.  Like the renewed sense of responsibility toward the poor that they inspire.  Like the perspective on our own problems that they provide.  Like the determination to make things right, finally, in Haiti - and in other places that need it.  Maybe the most faithful response in a time like this is to find and create these beautiful details, even in this tragic story.

Homily for Christmas 1

December 27, 2009

If church buildings could speak, then I think our little church would probably beg for some rest after last Thursday night’s service.   Actually, never mind the church – that’s probably how we all feel!  (Hence the lack of Sunday bulletins and the hay all over the floor here.)

Anyway, today, the first Sunday of Christmas, we can all get a little of that.  And I always like that we read this passage from John’s Gospel every Sunday after Christmas without fail, because it really appeals to that post-holiday urge to clean up and quiet down.

This is John’s version of the Nativity story, and once you know that, the first thing you probably notice is what isn’t here: there are no sheep, no shepherds, no crowded inns, no census.  There’s no Mary or Joseph, no hasty trips to Bethlehem nine months into Mary’s pregnancy, no vindictive Herod or wise men or manger or hay or cows or even an infant Jesus.   Unlike the other Gospels, it’s a very orderly account of how Jesus came to be.

The common thinking is that John wrote for a more philosophical audience, one that might have objected to the cruder aspects of the Nativity stories in the other Gospels.  So he set out to write this orderly version to sort of correct those.  It’s not my favorite of the three accounts we have in the Gospels, but I think we can all agree it has its place – perhaps no more so than today.

Along with its orderliness, there are a couple of other ways I find this passage reassuring, and I’m going to just point those out and leave it at that for today.

First is its scope.  If you read the opening chapter of all four Gospels, you’ll notice that, the later the Gospel was written, the further back into Jesus’ life it looks.  So, for instance, Mark was the first Gospel, and it picks up when Jesus is about 30 years old.  Luke is the next oldest, and it reaches back to Jesus’ infancy.  Matthew, the next to be written, goes back to Jesus’ ancestor David, who lived 1000 years earlier.  And finally John, the last Gospel, traces Jesus’ life all the way back to the beginning of time, placing it in this eternal, cosmic time frame.

John probably did this to appeal, again, to that philosophical audience, and while it can make the passage a little confusing, there’s also something very basic and appealing about what he’s doing here.

There’s a line by the American poet Franz Wright that reminds me a lot of this aspect of John’s story.  It’s from a poem in his collection Walking  to Martha’s Vineyard, and in it he urges the reader to, “Set the mind before the mirror of eternity and everything will work.”  Which is kind of what I imagine John trying to do to his readers: remind them that, if you consider your life and your problems in the context of eternity, then you’ll probably gain a much healthier – and maybe more hopeful – perspective on them.

“Set the mind before the mirror of eternity and everything will work.”

The other reason I find this passage reassuring is just a few lines from the end, where he says “From his fullness we have all received grace upon grace.”  In fact, by way of a little personal anecdote, I distinctly remember reading this passage in church at this time last year, and that line really jumping out at me for the first time after so many years of reading it.  (I also recall not liking my sermon manuscript all that much, and considered just repeating that line a few times and sitting down rather than slogging through what I’d written!)

But it’s really striking.  “Grace upon Grace.”  Grace is one of those things that, by its very definition, is superfluous and overly abundant, so the redundancy here is meant to make it jump out at us. The image that it conjures for me at this time of year is of warm blankets piled one upon the other so that you’re never in danger of being cold: “From his fullness, we have received grace upon grace.”

SO, order, perspective, and warmth – all  things we need at this time of the year, and all here in John’s Nativity.