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 Transfiguration Sunday

LET’S BUILD HUTS!

Sunday of the Transfiguration - February 14, 2010

Today is the Sunday of the Transfiguration, which every year both closes out the season of Epiphany and helps usher in the season Lent.  And perhaps apropos of little, but sort of humorous, is this blurb from an essay on the Transfiguration by the writer Mary Gordon:

“I heard this story for many years, probably well into adulthood, before I thought to question the sense of the word ‘transfiguration.’  Some of my cousins lived in a parish in Brooklyn called Transfiguration.  In the way of those times, the sacred word was made ordinary.  ’Where do you go to school?’  ’Transfiguration.’  ’God, we have to play Transfiguration next week.  They’re the division champs.’ “

Maybe slightly better than this, a friend of mine used to work at the Church of the Transfiguration down on E. 29^th Street in Manhattan, and relished calling it, simply, “The Fig.”

What makes these offhanded references all the more ridiculous is that this is such a huge, climactic event in the Gospels.  The Transfiguration refers to the story in all three Gospels – Matthew, Mark, and Luke – in which Jesus takes some of his disciples up a mountain in Galilee and is “transfigured” before their eyes.  It’s not clear what actually happened here, but the description in Luke’s Gospel draws heavily on the language and imagery a mystical experience: the thick cloud, bright dazzling light, a liminal space somewhere between waking and dreaming, and this mixture of fear and wonder in the disciples’ reactions.

Fittingly, the two Old Testament figures that appear here with Jesus, Moses and Elijah, also had mystical encounters with God – Moses when he went up on Mount Horeb and into a thick, enveloping cloud, where he saw God, and, a lot like Jesus in this passage, descended the mountain a radiant face.  And then Elijah, who out in the desert encountered God in a heavy wind and a raging fire, but most of all a still small voice – perhaps like the voice that Jesus heard from heaven here.

So the story ranks Jesus right up there with those important Jewish figures and serves as a kind of theological climax of the Gospels - hardly deserving of the shorthand “Fig!”

But shifting away from the experience itself, I want to turn now to the part of the passage that has always fascinated me the most: Peter’s response to whatever it was that took place.  The story tells us that “Just as they were leaving him, Peter said to Jesus, “Master it is good for us to be here; let us make three dwellings, one for you, one for Moses, and one for Elijah” – not knowing what he said.”

This word “dwelling” is an interesting one, liable to be translated in all sorts of ways depending on which version of the Bible you’re reading.  And how you interpret it affects how you think Peter was responding.

We just read from the Revised Standard Version, which translates it as “dwelling.” That’s a common translation of the word, the thought being that Peter was trying to set up a structure like the dwellings (or “booths”) that the Jews erected at their yearly Festival of Booths (the holiday that celebrates the end of their wilderness wanderings).  So Peter was being a devout Jew, and understood this event in the context of his Jewish tradition.

Somewhat similar to that, the King James translates it “tabernacle,” which almost makes it sound as if Peter wants to perform an act of worship in response to these three figures.

The Evangelical New International Version, which is the version of the Bible that I grew up with, calls it a “shelter,” which just makes it sound like he wants to protect the moment.  And that’s often where interpreters, especially preachers, go with this: that Peter wanted that wonderful but ephemeral experience to last when, of course, it couldn’t.

Last year I happened to come across another translation that made me think about what Peter is doing here in still a slightly different way.  It was in Edith Wharton’s memoir “A Backward Glance” about growing up in Gilded Age New York.  As she explains in her memoir, Wharton learned German as a child by reading the German Bible, and she especially remembered this passage because, in the German – and I assume she’s referring to the Luther Bible - “dwelling” is translated as “Hutte,” the German word for hut or cottage.

Let me just read the section because it’s so charming:

“She also taught me (out of the NT) how to read German; and in our Bible reading I came across a phrase which has always delighted me because of the quaint contrast between its impulsive German Gemutlichkeit and the majestic phraseology of our Authorized Version.  When, on the Mount of the Transfiguration, the disciples cry out ‘Lord it is good for us to be here; if Thou wilt, let us make here three tabernacles, the German version causes them to say “So lasset uns Hutten bauen!”  [i.e. “Let’s build huts!”]  And then she continues “The cry suggested to me something fresh and leafy and adventurous, like “The Swiss Family Robinson.”

I like the direction she takes this in – that Peter’s was an adventurous, spontaneous and childlike response of joy when he offered to build these huts.  But for me, “Hutten” conjures not just adventure but also comfort.  I pictured a squat chalet deep in the black forest with smoke streaming from its chimney and candles in every window – just the kind of place you never want to leave.

The kind of place Peter often longed for in the Gospels.

One scene that comes to mind in connection with this one comes at the end of Luke’s’ Gospel, when Jesus is being tried before the Sandhedrin (or Jewish court), and Peter meanwhile is outside in the courtyard warming himself before the fire, as if still seeking to be comfortable even as the world around him is falling apart.  Maybe in that moment he was even wondering why Jesus never let him build that hut and just stay there.

But, of course, following Christ means leaving our huts and going into the tangled, gnarled forest of the world where we can actually see and then meet the needs of the world – not to mention learn some important things about ourselves that we might not if we always stayed tucked away in our safe huts.

Next week, our image will shift from forest to desert, but both are places of risk and suffering - of our own and others – and exactly the sort of places Christ calls us to go.

Homily for Candlemas

Homily for Candlemas - February 7, 2010

Today we’re celebrating Candlemas, which, in the usual way of St. Nick’s, we’ve informally transferred from its proper day on February 2.  And this is one of those lovely Christian traditions that seems to have pre-Christian origins.  Candlemas falls each year right at the midpoint between the winter equinox and the summer solstice, when the days start to get longer.  One of the ways that was celebrated was with festivals of fire and light dedicated to the sun or to a particular deity.

Because these festivals seem to have been especially popular in Rome, the bishop of Rome converted it into a Christian holiday in the 4th century.  And he was clever about it. The popular candle processions remained, but the light now represented the light of Christ.  It also became the day on which all the candles for the church year were to be blessed.  For its Biblical basis, our story for today, in which Mary and Joseph take Jesus to the Jewish Temple and present him to the old priest, Simeon, was also added to the day’s festivities.

It’s interesting that, as Christianity spread out and different traditions within it developed, those different traditions each focused on distinct parts of today’s story for their celebration of Candlemas.

For instance, in the Roman Catholic Church, Candlemas is also known as the Feast of the Purification.  Roman Catholics focus on the beginning of the story, where Mary appears in the Temple for her rites of purification.  According to the Jewish laws that Mary would have followed, a woman had to wait forty days after giving birth before she could leave her home, after which she had to present herself for her ritual purification.  (As I think I said last year, think of it sort of like a less enlightened version of our maternity leave!)

In Protestant Churches, Candlemas is also called The Presentation of Our Lord, which comes from the next part of our passage where Mary presents Jesus to the priest.  This practice also harks back to Jewish laws, which required that a mother and father hand their baby over to the priest, who then had to be paid before giving their child back.  I’ve always thought this would be an interesting way to raise money for St. Nicks … except that it was mostly symbolic, and they had an overly generous sliding scale.  For instance, if you were rich, you had to give a lamb as ransom to the priest, but if you were poor, like Joseph and Mary, you only had to give the priest two turtledoves.  (We much prefer pledges here.)

Finally, there’s the Eastern Orthodox tradition, which calls today “The Meeting.”  This is a reference to the last part of the story, in which the priest Simeon sees the child Jesus and burst out into the song that became known as the “Song of Simeon.”  Which, by the way, is what we  just read in the procession, and is used in the morning and evening prayer services of all our traditions.

So that’s how this came to be a Christian festival, and although emphases of the story differ across traditions, many have retained some sort of blessing of candles and, in many cases, also a procession of candles more or less like the one we did this morning.

I guess every year I’m struck by something new in this service.  This year it was the theme of passing on of God’s love  from one generation to the next: the young parents Mary and Joseph to their son Jesus, but especially Simeon, the old man who sees in Jesus light for the future and sort of passes the torch in this moment.

Someday we’ll be the Simeon figure, having to relinquish our light to those who come after us.  May be do it half as graciously as he did, with faith that those who follow us will carry on our work as well if not better than we could.

But for now, we’re the ones to whom the light has been passed - from Simeon to Jesus to the disciples to their followers and all the way down to us: we have the responsibility to bear Christ’s light to the world.

One of my favorite prayers in the Prayer Book, which we say on special saints days, reads: “[We give you thanks] For the wonderful grace and virtue declared in all your saints, who have been the chosen vessels of your grace, and the lights of the world in their generations.”

In the Protestant sense of us all being saints, today’s celebration reminds us that we are the lights of the world in our generations.  And as we carry these candles home, or just watch the days lengthen and the light linger, let’s resolve to shine our lights as brightly as we can - for others and for God.

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.