Sermon: Begging forgiveness

After a long hiatus, the reason for which is explained in the sermon below, I've written my first sermon in well over two years. Hope you gain something from it.

Sermon for the First Sunday after Epiphany (Baptism of Jesus), Year C

Isaiah 43:1-7, Psalm 29, Acts 8:14-17, Luke 3:15-17, 21-22

Today we’re celebrating the Baptism of Jesus, part of the Christmas season leading up to Candlemas on Feb. 2nd. The events described in the Gospel today have an obvious personal reminder for me.

Back in 2010, here in this church something extraordinary happened right over there behind you – I had the great honor and pleasure of sponsoring Jon for his baptism. It was a moving and powerful experience, and I was deeply honored to be a part of it, welcoming Jon into the Church. I’m very glad and proud to see how he’s become such a pillar in our parish in the time since then.

In the process of that Easter Vigil 2010, not only was he baptized, but also in a sense this church we’re standing in now was itself baptized. It was the first service we celebrated in this church that we are truly blessed to have, the first baptism to be held in it, and the waters in the baptismal pool were in turn used to renew our own baptismal vows and to hallow the church long before it was formally consecrated by our bishop almost 18 months later.

It was also, however, in a way the beginning of the end for me, though of course I had no idea about it at the time. As you may remember, Jon was not the only person who was baptized that night. The other person, Michelle, and I developed a powerful attraction to each other, and my horrible guilt over what I felt was the final straw that led directly to the breakdown of my marriage. My life of apparent normality and seeming stability came crashing to an end not long after, seemingly without warning. My marriage fell apart, my family torn to pieces, and my own personal unhappiness, which until then had largely been hidden from the rest of the parish and the outside world for literally years, exploded into view for all to see. It was without a doubt the worst time of my life, and I’m still sorting through the emotional debris left over.

For a time I seriously considered leaving the parish and never coming back. But I didn’t want to abandon the place where I had invested so much of myself. So to try and reboot, to get out of the spotlight and let things calm down, I withdrew from my parish duties while still attending services. Those duties included doing something I really enjoyed, which was writing sermons for the English services. This is the first time I’ve preached since then, and I have to say, I feel very strange doing it precisely because of all those events that began around the time of that Easter Vigil. When writing this, I often wondered if I even belong up here.

So do I have any business talking to you about right and wrong, about moral issues? My moral example is damaged goods. Without putting too fine a point on it, I’m an adulterer, a sinner. I caused immense pain to my wife and kids and disappointed and shocked a lot of people. To top it off, Michelle and I later broke up, compounding the pain and uproar. I’ve had a hard enough time asking the forgiveness of the Church, but the hardest part of all has been to forgive myself. So I hardly feel like I should be up here now. And I also can’t help but wonder what would be going through the minds of my ex-wife or ex-girlfriend or my friends if they were here listening now, let alone what God thinks about all of it.

But maybe today’s Gospel has a ray of hope for me. In the Gospel, Jesus, the one human being without sin, the one person who ever lived who didn’t need baptism in any sense, that Jesus goes to John the Baptist and asks him for baptism. In the parallel reading in the Gospel of Matthew, John exclaims to Jesus that Jesus should be baptizing him, not the other way around.

Maybe it’s because of the name, but I can easily place myself in John’s shoes right now. I’m supposed to stand here and act all holy and wise and pretend I can teach you something in a sermon, when I feel like I’m the one who needs teaching and guidance most. To carry the metaphor further: The Church, like the local parish, is referred to as the Body of Christ, and at the Eucharist, we often say we receive the Sacrament so that we “may become what we have received, the Body of Christ”. In effect I’m John the Baptist standing here in front of Christ’s body – that would be you – and wondering what the Body of Christ wants with someone like me, because I certainly don’t feel worthy to do much of anything church-related. Like John, I’m here exclaiming, “who, me?!”

I have a wonderful book I love to read to the kids at bedtime, called Mungo and the Picture-Book Pirates. It’s about a little kid named Mungo who loves having a pirate story read to him multiple times every night. But the hero of the book, dashing Captain Horatio Fleet, gets tired of having to go through the motions of being the hero so many times in one evening. As he is leaving the book to go on a holiday, he tells Mungo that maybe Mungo should just go do it himself if he likes the book so much. Mungo exclaims, “Me?! I can’t do anything!” but is left with little choice but to save his favorite book from the evil pirates. So he jumps into the book and becomes the hero himself.

After much buckling of swashes, Mungo does indeed save the day from the dastardly pirates, and Captain Fleet returns from his holiday to give Mungo a medal. 

There is a parallel here. It’s not a perfect one, but it will do. Mungo is like John the Baptist – or me – and the hero, Jesus, or Captain Fleet, wants us to not just like him and admire him, but to follow in his footsteps, to save the day like he would. That’s what we’re here for in the Church. If we sit back and say, “I can’t do it” or “I’m not worthy” and let our guilt destroy us, then the paradox is that we only hurt ourselves while not solving anything or doing anybody any good. We have to forgive ourselves before seeking forgiveness from others, and we can do that by accepting God’s grace and peace within us. We can’t wish others peace and spread peace until we make peace inside and with ourselves and with God. God is there to help us by sending out His Holy Spirit, but that Spirit can’t do anything to guide us if we’re so bound up with our own problems that we fail to notice the dove coming down and filling us with grace. It’s a free gift, the gift of salvation, there for the taking if we just stop navel-gazing and beating up on ourselves.

Even the unworthiest person, the gravest sinner, can accept God’s grace and turn things for the better, doing God’s work. So I ask – beg – God and His Church to forgive me, but I especially ask God to help me forgive myself – and then I will have His grace within me, which I need to buckle swashes and swing to the rescue in His name. 

So what I can give you, even as unworthy as I am, is this: I ask you to forgive yourselves in the same way, and to forgive one another, so that we, like Mungo, can all set sail into the setting sun and see the waters off the coast of tomorrow – for as Jesus promised on the Cross as He died for our sins, tomorrow we sinners shall be with Him in Paradise. Amen.

On All Saints’, we are all saints

Note
This sermon was originally written for All Saints' Day in 2008, but since the liturgical year A is back, this is as good a time as any to repost it.

Sermon for All Saints’ Day, Year A

Revelation 7:9-17, Psalm 34, 1 John 3:1-3, Matthew 5:1-12

This being All Saints’ Day, the obvious question is, “what is a saint?” Most people probably think of saints being guys running around with halos around their heads. After all, that’s what you see in icons and paintings like the ones of Jesus and Mary hanging on the wall behind me.

So I brought my own halo tonight. Just some tinfoil, doesn’t look like much, but it’ll do. It looks much like the one in this picture:

Of course, I notice some of you giggling a little. A ring of tinfoil doesn’t make a saint, does it? The halo itself as a ring around someone’s head looks a little ridiculous. Did the saints of old really run around with rings around their heads?

So let’s do a little bit of art history here. The idea of the halo-as-ring is actually relatively new. A halo is more properly called a nimbus, and the original purpose of the halo in art was not to represent something like this ring of tinfoil, but this:

...a candle, or more particularly its radiant glow. Early artists, and indeed the authors of the Gospels or even Jesus Himself, tended to speak in symbols and metaphor, and the halo itself is a metaphor for the inner light.

Jesus is portrayed in the Transfiguration as being a figure of radiant light. In early hagiographies, saints are described as having faces shining, as if they themselves were lamps or lanterns. The artists of the Middle Ages weren’t interested in literal portrayals of people, so they made symbolic portrayals of an idealized, stylized world. Rather than try to paint a radiant glow, they resorted to painting gold disks or just circles, like this:

If you’ve ever seen the ring around the Moon on a wintry night, you’ll know exactly where they got that from. There’s the origin of the halo.

Fast-forward to the Renaissance, and artists like Giotto and da Vinci were slowly “rediscovering” perspective. Realism, rather than symbolism, was the order of the day. The problem is that in the course of time, artists – indeed everyone – had forgotten what the reasoning behind the icons was, and thought that the symbol was to be taken literally. So when they began to paint in perspective, they tried to paint the halo in perspective, as a disc attached to the back of the person’s head, like in this painting by Giotto:

...then later as a ring, like in this painting, where da Vinci is showing off his talent by painting softly glowing rings in perfect perspective.

The problem is only that they didn’t know what it was they were painting. In the passing of the centuries, the original purpose of the halo was forgotten, the whole mentality of the people had changed. The point had been lost with time.

The irony is that the quest for realism stunted our sense of reality as badly as those people of the Dark Ages ignorant of science. Today we are very literal in our way of thinking – a product of the Renaissance and Enlightenment, when we learned to use logic and science to achieve great things. The result is that our metaphors for people change as our environment changes. We are surrounded by machines and computers, and thus we compare ourselves to machines and computers. We don’t think in animalistic terms very well anymore. We don’t think in symbols well anymore, either. We have unwittingly degraded ourselves to machines. Modern medicine arguably treats people as a machine as well. A pain in your leg means your leg is broken and needs to be fixed. A pain in your heads means…well, we won’t go there.

So we need to not just be logical and rational, but to reconnect with more ancient ways of thinking, to rediscover how people thought in those days, as an additional tool to understand. That tool is symbolism.

The symbol we have here today in church is a powerful one. The symbol is the ultimate sacrifice by Jesus Christ for us. We celebrate that symbol in the form of the Eucharist, in the partaking in bread and wine that we believe become the Body and Blood of Christ – not in a literal mechanical sense, that is, you can’t take the consecrated bread and wine and put them under a microscope and see blood cells or skin cells. But in a symbolic sense. The reality behind those things is changed. Mere bread and wine become powerfully precious to us, representing God Himself and the sum of His Creation in our midst.

It is a serious mistake to say “well, it’s not literally true”. Symbols have power, because they explain things that other methods of communication can’t achieve. In the same way our bodies are more than mere machines, so too is this Universe of ours something more than mere molecules. It’s more than the sum of its parts. Symbols give us a glimpse of something else, of the inner light that infuses every particle of our world. The Universe itself lives and breathes, and we with it.

The letter of John that we read today says it in a very straightforward way. “We should be called children of God; and that is what we are. The reason the world does not know us is that it did not know him. […] When he is revealed, we will be like him, for we will see him as he is.” Holiness, or seeing God, is thus about seeing the totality of reality. Each of us alone is blind to the vast majority of reality. Each of us casts only a tiny bit of light into the darkness, because we only see just that tiny bit of truth. We don’t see the whole truth. And light is the essence of enlightenment.

God is revealed to us when we open our eyes wide, as wide as we can, fearless of the consequences of the truth. Each of us can share our little bit of light. Each of us carries with us a halo, our own nimbus – some brighter than others, but still, each one of us has it within us. Even though each of us may be little more than a small candle, our light put together – our shared Truth – makes the world ever brighter. We see more as we not only open our own eyes, but we learn to see with the eyes of others. Reality itself is transformed. All of that is communicated by the symbols of the Eucharist. Communion is God revealed.

In the Beatitudes we heard in the Gospel, Jesus reels off a list of all the people who are blessed. It is not an exclusive list. What Jesus is doing is reminding us that even the most downtrodden, pain-ridden, suffering, poor leper of a person carries blessings and truth within them. Every human being has value, no matter how low their station. We need to see through the eyes of everyone, not just through our own. No exceptions.

In the end, each and every one of us is a saint, or has saintliness within us. We celebrate All Saints’ to celebrate the limitless potential of our own sainthood, by remembering those who went before us.

So rather than look at things merely in literal terms, I’d like you to look at the world in symbolic terms. That’s when the poetry of Creation takes shape and begins to sing, with each of us a voice in the chorus. Then the vision expressed in Revelation will come true: For this reason they are before the throne of God, and worship him day and night within his temple, and the one who is seated on the throne will shelter them. They will hunger no more, and thirst no more; the sun will not strike them, nor any scorching heat; for the Lamb at the center of the throne will be their shepherd, and he will guide them to springs of the water of life, and God will wipe away every tear from their eyes. Amen.

Sermon archive

For some years, from late 2006 to mid-2010, I was responsible for planning and leading our monthly (at times twice monthly) English-language Anglican services in Hannover. While our priest celebrated the Eucharist, for various reasons I took over all the parts that involved reading or speaking a lot of English but didn't require a priest. That included the homilies. At first, our priest would read them beforehand, but after some time as I got more accustomed to it, he generally left me to my own devices.

Many people have asked for copies of the sermons, and I generally sent them as PDFs by e-mail, but I decided to also use this blog as an archive of some of my favorites. You can find all sermons on this blog by using the label or tag "sermon" -- the labels/tags are the lists of words you see under each blog entry, which you can click on to find other posts with that same tag. Or you can just click here to find all sermons in the archive. I will continue adding some from time to time, so you can keep checking back for more.

I hope you enjoy them and look forward to feedback, criticism, debate, and cries of astonishment at their sheer excellence.

These sermons are made available under the Creative Commons License Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 3.0 Unported.

Our prison walls: Sermon for the Seventh Sunday of Easter, Year C

Acts 16:16-34, Psalm 97, Revelation 22:12-14, 16-17, 20-21, John 17:20-26

There is something striking about the reading from the Acts of the Apostles. Paul and Silas end up in prison for no other reason than curing a woman of an affliction. Rather than complain about their suffering the consequences of their beliefs, Paul and Silas sit there, with their feet in the stocks, and sing songs praising God.

Not long ago, Elizabeth and I were at an ecumenical meeting for the World Day of Prayer, where all those present were supposed to imagine they were particular characters in this story, and tell the group what they were thinking at that precise moment in the story. Sad to say, but many of the attendees were trying to outdo each other with overly pious statements, with plenty of overacting to drive home their piety. I was doing my best not to let my eyes roll into the back of my head, and then I leaned over to Elizabeth, told her I imagined myself to be Silas, and thinking, “Damn, Paul, when’s the last time you trimmed your toenails?”

This highlights how people project things they want to see onto Bible stories, rather than finding what lies hidden within them. A straight pious reading is more likely to lead to a spiritual dead end. It’s just too pat, too simple, and in the end an empty message.

This reading has something extraordinary that the attendees simply ignored. Here are two people, Paul and Silas, who have been tossed into prison after being caned and flogged, with their feet in the stocks, apparently with no hope of escape or freedom. Yet here they are, cheerfully singing songs praising God, as if nothing was wrong. Even when the doors are opened wide, they sit there singing.

Of course, the simple pious reading is that God heard their prayers and destroyed the prison to set them free. But I think that’s too easy. For one thing, Paul and Silas don’t leave. Even though the prison door is standing wide open, they stay put. That should raise a red flag that something incredible is happening here. Something much, much deeper.

The deeper dimension is that the prison wasn’t a prison at all. It is only a prison if you let it be one. If you have enough faith, you can triumph over any adversity and turn it into something more, a blessing. Even sitting in a rotten cell, one can be free, because our minds and our hearts are free. No matter where we are, no matter what situation, we are as free as we want to be, and free to praise God, no matter the consequences. Jesus said, the truth will set you free, and indeed the bigger the picture, the smaller our problems are, and the more we can free ourselves from their burden. Paul and Silas didn’t leave that prison, because they were never in a prison to begin with.

[By way of illustration, Dietrich Bonhoeffer, a Christian who resisted the Nazi regime in Germany, wrote his famous poem while waiting to be executed. That right there should speak volumes.]

The thing is, we tend to build prisons all the time. By that I don’t mean the kind with bricks and mortar. I mean the spiritual kind. We imprison ourselves in all sorts of ways. Addiction, narcicissm, navel-gazing, chasing after fads and fashion, worrying about our place in society and our social station: All these things imprison us by shackling our minds to things that don’t really matter. We pursue these things, the pursuit of happiness, but in the end none of it will make you truly happy, and certainly not truly free. They are all crutches, things that we lean on. But because we lean on them too much, our spiritual muscles atrophy, and we forget just what it means to be free, to be truly free of everything.

We also tend to build prisons in other ways, by building walls that shut ourselves in, but also by building walls to keep others out. We human beings are great at dividing ourselves up, and placing other people into neat little compartments, then getting mad when someone doen’t quite fit into one of those drawers. We find things to fight about, to separate ourselves from the rest. American and Russian, white and black, Jew and Muslim and Christian, Redskins fans and Cowboys fans, and on and on. Borders are drawn that in reality only exist in our heads – they certainly aren’t visible from space.

This is most visible in the Church, and by that I mean the whole Church, the Body of Christ, the sum total of all the baptized, regardless of denomination. Why do we have so many denominations? What issues separate us? What causes us to call someone else a heretic and condemn them? What right do we have to do so?

Today’s Gospel gives us a powerful counterpoint. Jesus prays to God the Father that we should all be one, just as He and the Father are one. I would ask you to consider something you may not have thought of before: Maybe we are all one already. Only we are too blind to see it. We have placed ourselves inside our four little walls, and are comfortable with that holier-than-thou feeling that we’ve got it right, while the Roman Catholics or the Methodists or the Lutherans or the Orthodox or the Calvinists or whoever have it all wrong. The prison has become our home.

But we are all one through our baptism. The Bible makes no other definition. You are part of the Body of Christ as soon as you are baptized, no matter who performs that baptism. Certainly I believe that the Church has and should have a Catholic essence, I believe in honoring and maintaining Catholic tradition, I cherish the Church Fathers and so on. But I question whether the Church is truly divided, just because we human beings say it is. We invent hurdles to trip up others, be it transubstantiation, the apostolic succession, teachings on justification, on the proper interpretation of the Bible, women’s ordination, homosexuality, and no doubt someday we’ll end up arguing over whether Jesus was left-handed or right-handed and whether He buttered His toast on the top or the bottom.

Are all these things really that trivial? Many self-defined true believers would have you believe it. We have to be separate from all those others because...well, just because. Each of these bits of doctrine – or more precisely the abuse of them to sow discord and disunity – is another brick in the wall of our prison.

The point of dogma and doctrine is not to divide, but to unite. To invite, not force out. Christ wants us to be one, and indeed we are one – only we are so petty and short-sighted that we can’t see it, and come up with ever more inventive ways to stay in our prison home.

We can, however, be free of all of that, by thinking outside these walls that divide us, and not letting them get in the way of our love for God and one another. The prison is not our home. The love of God is. Amen.

Catalyst: Sermon for the Fifth Sunday of Easter, Year C

Acts 11:1-18, Psalm 148, Revelation 21:1-6, John 13:31-35

When we talk about religion, or about belief in general, one of the common criticisms is that religion supposedly seeks to divide the world. Critics of religion tell us that religion thrives off of division and fear, that it foments discord and creates problems, only to claim to solve them itself. How many times have you heard the tired claim that religion is the cause of all wars, for example?

Today’s readings offer an excellent counterpoint. True enough, the God of Israel we find in the Old Testament pretty clearly divided the world into Jew and Gentile – the People of Israel, and everyone else. That would seem to play into the hands of the critics. God set apart this one elite of people, so obviously God is an elitist jerk out to play us off against one another, right?

But the reading from Acts is the decisive turning point. At this point in the story, the Apostles were one and all observant Jews. They would have all been circumcised; they would have all obeyed the Law, kept the feasts, ate only kosher food and so on. They would also have normally refrained from contact with non-Jews – that is, with Gentiles. Us. Pretty divisive stuff. Since this was all God’s idea, clearly God is to blame for dividing us into Jew and Gentile – or so the critics would have you believe.

But Peter, who after the death and resurrection of Jesus has become in effect the earthly figurehead of the Christians, has a vision where he is encouraged to eat strange things. The animals on the cloth dropping from heaven are all quite explicitly things that Jews were not allowed to eat – hence the quote, “Get up, Peter; kill and eat; what God has made clean, you must not call profane”. Peter takes this as a message that it is time to not only consort with the unclean uncircumcised – i.e. Gentiles – but to actively love them. He realizes that God’s love is most certainly not just for Israel, that the unclean Gentile is not profane. He says, “If then God gave them the same gift that he gave us when we believed in the Lord Jesus Christ, who was I that I could hinder God?” So he realizes, this gift is not just for Israel at all. It is for all of humanity. And it is the task of all Christians to not just share this love amongst themselves, but with all human beings.

God gave Israel a special gift, the gift of being the first people to clearly hear and follow His voice. That gift is not one of division at all. It is more like choosing the right catalyst.

In chemistry, a “catalyst” is a substance or thing that is necessary to set off a reaction, to set a process in motion. A catalyst works by creating an alternate pathway for energy to flow, for electrons to be exchanged, to set different molecules in contact with one another that would otherwise avoid each other. A catalyst can also be an enzyme in the bloodstream, making it possible for the body to absorb nutrients that it needs to live. When the body introduces that enzyme, that catalyst, into the bloodstream, it is clearly not changing anything – it didn’t change its mind suddenly and abruptly decided to make enzymes for the sheer sake of making enzymes. Instead, it does so as part of a natural, necessary process. Our bodies need catalysts to even work, to grow, to prosper. It is the exact same principle in human history. God never changes His mind, but rather, at certain times a new stage of God’s plan opens up before us, as God adds another catalyst to the mix.

The catalyst in human history is the voice of the One God calling to Abraham from the tent of stars, which created the People of Israel. That catalyst reappears as the voice calling to Moses from the burning bush, welding the People of Israel together, so that they could enter the Promised Land. That same catalyst reappears as the One Savior Jesus Christ bringing the Apostles together, to start a chain reaction; He gave them the gift of Himself, so that they would give of themselves.

Peter stands here before the Jews, and once again acts as a catalyst. The Jews he lives with have accepted Jesus as Lord and Savior. But they still are blind to what the full meaning of this is. They criticize him for consorting with Gentiles, with the uncircumcised. But Peter tells them about his vision, of people liberated from those laws and strictures, and united under one God, no differences, no barriers, no walls, no borders, no bars on the windows. That vision of one people, one humanity, one God, is the ultimate vision of oneness – the very opposite, the antithesis of division.

In the Gospel, Jesus gives us His parting words, just before he is betrayed to certain death, after the Last Supper. He tells them, “I give you a new commandment, that you love one another. Just as I have loved you, you also should love one another. By this everyone will know that you are my disciples, if you have love for one another.” Where Moses was the catalyst welding Israel together, Jesus Christ is the catalyst to weld us all together, from all nations and peoples.

Far from religion dividing us, Jesus is telling us to love one another as He loves all of us. God loves us all infinitely. The great catalyst in the chemistry of human history is there not to cause explosions or discord or dissent, but to fuse us all together into one whole, to reconcile, to love, to share. There was never a change in plans because God or we human beings screwed up; instead, it was all part of God’s plan, as He added catalyst after catalyst to the mix to get the result He wants. That result is what we call the Kingdom of Heaven.

We see a glimpse of that goal, the Kingdom of Heaven at the end of time, in the Book of Revelation. ‘I heard a loud voice from the throne saying, “See, the home of God is among mortals. He will dwell with them as their God; they will be his peoples, and God himself will be with them; he will wipe every tear from their eyes. Death will be no more; mourning and crying and pain will be no more, for the first things have passed away.”’

This is what Jesus wants for us, and what the Will of God has always been and always shall be. An end to war, an end to pain, an end to suffering. But we are the keys to this. We are all catalysts if we care to be, catalysts for peace and justice. Each of us was added to the mix to fulfill our greater purpose. But we can only do it to the fullest if we obey that last commandment of Jesus. “Just as I have loved you, you also should love one another.” Everything we do, every waking moment of our lives, should be tested against that one sentence. We must let Jesus act as a catalyst in our hearts, so that we can act as a catalyst in our wider society.

When we do this, Jesus is working through us. We literally become the limbs and hands of Christ, the true Body of Christ. Jesus works His miracles through His body, and that’s us. And it’s Jesus who is seated on the throne saying, “See, I am making all things new”. With His help, we can make all things new, now and forever.

But there is a catch. Critics of religion have one thing dead-on: We as Christians have to live up to our fine words. All too often we Christians have made excuses for our failure to live up to the Gospel. Critics of religion love to point out the hypocrisy and moral failures of Christian leaders. Even many Christians like to feel just a little vindicated and more than a little Schadenfreude when the likes of Bishop Mixa or Käßmann are hoisted on their own petards – where they acted as great moralizers, their own moral failures weakened them. But here again is the answer for us – not to give up, to toss religion onto the scrapheap of history just because our leaders have failed us, but to try harder ourselves. The critics of religion do us a favor, by holding up a mirror and reminding us that we aren’t what we should be, by our own standards. What the world needs is not more self-proclaimed hypocritical self-serving Christians looking for a cheap ticket to Heaven. What it needs is real Christians – those who say what they mean and do what they say in the name of Jesus, whatever the consequences.

Imagine how impressed people are when they find a “real” Christian – someone who really does live as Jesus taught. Someone like, for example, Frère Roger of Taizé, a very simple and humble man who acted as a catalyst to reignite Christianity in Europe and worldwide. Before Taizé became well-known and popular, Christianity was arguably dying in Europe; arguably it is still very feeble. But Frère Roger’s personal credibility, his soul like a flame, his humility and care for others, was a catalyst that started a fire to reignite the spirit of the Church in Europe and far beyond.

Potential Frère Rogers are all around us. You and I could just as well do things as great as he did, passing on the fire of our conviction and love of one another. You might think that’s preposterous, but if you think hard about it, what’s stopping us from doing it? Only ourselves, our own narrow interests – nothing else. The answer to this is not “I can’t”, but “I’ll try my best”.

Each of us can be another catalyst that makes the vision of the Kingdom of Heaven come that much closer. When we drop our own cares and worries, when we forget about all the things that bother us, when we stop letting our own goals and desires dictate our lives, we gain the inner peace and resolve to spread the peace we suddenly find in ourselves. The true catalyst for this peace, inside and outside, as it always was and ever shall be, is love. Like it says in an old Beatles song, “and in the end, the love you take is equal to the love you make”. Amen.

Queens and quandaries: Sermon for Palm Sunday, Year C

Luke 19:28-40, Psalm 118:1-2+19-29, Isaiah 50:4-9a, Psalm 31:9-16, Philippians 2:5-11, Luke 23:1-49

When I was planning today’s service, one particular phrase leapt out at me. I’m a bit of a history junkie, particularly for English history; those of you familiar with English history may well have thought the same thing when hearing that particular phrase.

The phrase I have in mind is in the psalm we heard as we processed into the chapel, Psalm 118. The phrase is, “This is the LORD’s doing, and it is marvelous in our eyes.”

Legend has it that this was uttered by Princess Elizabeth, upon hearing that her Catholic sister Queen Mary had died, thus making Elizabeth Queen of England. There is a special resonance to them for Elizabeth, because during her sister’s reign, Elizabeth was a constant potential rival, as Protestants in England repeatedly started uprisings to overthrow Mary and install Elizabeth on the throne. Mary repeatedly and openly considered executing her own sister, to protect the Catholic faith in England. Elizabeth had to constantly swear her loyalty and grovel before her sister to spare her own life. So with Mary’s death, Elizabeth must have felt immensely relieved – while also facing the enormous burden of ruling a deeply divided England, at war with itself over religion.

I admire Elizabeth a great deal (though I should add that my daughter having that name is actually a coincidence). You see, most people, when thinking about the Church of England, think of her father, Henry VIII. But in reality Henry, aside from severing ties to the Pope, left little trace of influence on what Anglicanism became. His son Edward VI (again the name is a coincidence, I swear) tried to radically Protestantize the church; Mary succeeded him and re-catholicized it, reversing everything her father and brother had done; and finally came Elizabeth. More than anyone else, Queen Elizabeth I left her mark on the church. “This is the LORD’s doing, and it is marvelous in our eyes.”

The reason Elizabeth’s words resonate with me is because of her vision of the Church. She felt strongly that Christians should be united in one church, and also saw that the only way to do so was to tread the Via Media – the middle path between Catholic and Protestant, uniting the best of both. To this day we say of ourselves, we are Catholic and reformed.

There is a short poem attributed to Elizabeth that sums up her pragmatic way of seeing Truth in competing visions. It is about the Real Presence in the Eucharist, and goes like this:

“’Twas Christ the Word that spake it,
The same took bread and brake it,
And as the Word did make it,
That I believe and take it.”

In other words, if you believe Christ is truly present, if you appreciate the dignity of the sacrament of Communion, then you are welcome at the table.

This vision of unity, sadly, came at a price – many people resisted it, from both extremes of the spectrum. The Puritans and Pilgrims regarded anything remotely Catholic as being work of the devil; the Catholics despaired of restoring ties to Rome and the wider church, while also despairing of a more vigorous sacramental theology that they felt was lacking in the Church of England. There were still uprisings, there was still conflict, there were even plots to assassinate Elizabeth from both sides. In the end, all had to make sacrifices in order to live with the compromise that the Church of England became, which was in turn passed on to all other Anglican churches worldwide.

Elizabeth’s vision remains important even today. The Via Media, I think, offers the only hope of reconciliation of all Christians around the globe. It is more important than ever to try and find this middle path, to unite as many people as possible. The Anglican Communion is, of course, currently rocked by anger and division over teachings revolving around human sexuality, particularly homosexuality. It is also struggling with the bait placed in front of Anglo-Catholics by Rome, to lure them into a uniate Anglican church in submission to the Pope. The centrifugal forces at work are enormous. Particularly the strife over homosexuality is painful and difficult, with accusations of heresy and intolerance flying around. People claiming to be Christian seem to have nothing better to do that self-righteously hurl insults at each other. But the thing is, we all – regardless of our denominations – have a duty to try and bridge these differences, and to be united in Christ. Whether we like it or not, we need each other – Evangelical and Catholic, liberal and conservative, high church and low church. Each bit of the immense spectrum of Anglicanism carries a bit of the full picture of Christianity within, and each bit has something to contribute. Indeed Anglicanism mirrors the Church as a whole, covering the range from Catholicism to a diluted form of Calvinism.

So if we are to fulfill Christ’s final plea as He prayed in the garden of Gethsemane, “that they may all be one”, then we have to accept that we all, each and every one of us, have a place in the Body of Christ – and that means being willing to compromise, to sacrifice things we may hold dear in the name of greater unity. We cannot expect the Other to make the first step; we have to individually all make first steps, to build trust, to recognize the fullness of faith in all corners of the Church, whether Catholic or Protestant or Orthodox or indeed Old Catholic.

Recently I attended an Anglican conference in Düsseldorf. As it happens, I would place myself squarely in the liberal side of things regarding sexuality and women’s ordination; I would also place myself squarely in the high church Anglo-Catholic wing of Anglicanism. But at this conference, the range of Anglicans represented was huge. The church itself in Düsseldorf was a good example – as I entered, I noticed there was no altar, just a table; and on the table, nothing except a huge Bible. No tabernacle or aumbry, either. It doesn’t get much more low church and evangelical than that.

In particular there was a fellow there I had heard about, the rector of a particularly conservative evangelical parish here in Germany. Indeed he and his parish are so angry about the liberal drift in parts of Anglicanism that they no longer call themselves “Anglican”, and have resigned their official representation at Anglican conferences (while still being observers). I had visited their website a few times, and my curiosity was piqued, particularly by the profile of the rector, who is originally a white African from Malawi, of English extraction.

It so happens that he and I ended up riding next to each other in the car to the station, and then taking the same train (he had to pass through Hannover to get to his home parish). So I struck up a conversation, and we talked about church politics.

The thing is, we come from opposite ends of the spectrum. He favors things that I disapprove of, like lay presidency at the Eucharist; he disapproves of my stance on homosexuality and the catholicity of the Church. Conservative evangelical versus liberal Anglo-Catholic. But he is a good case in point for what I am talking about, in that we need each other. He is vehemently against homosexuality. But he is also not a wild-eyed lunatic. He, like everyone else, is a rational human being, searching for the truth as best as he can. I am certainly no better than he is – we are both sinners, we both have our flaws, and we both admit that freely. And in spite of our disagreements, we both showed a generosity of spirit towards one another that is sadly lacking in the whole debate storming the Church worldwide. Meanwhile his parish is flourishing, attracting more people to Jesus. Obviously we need more like him, just as we’re doing our best here to build up the Church in Hannover. We need each other to win as many people as possible for the Gospel, because in the Holy Church of God, we have – and I say this with great conviction – the last, best hope for humanity to save itself, with God’s help.

This means we all have to be ready to make sacrifices. We have to tolerate other opinions, even ones as wildly different as those between myself and my fellow train passenger, even if those opinions may seem to us intolerant or even heretical. We have to each make the first step in de-poisoning the debate, to raise the level of the rhetoric, to love those we agree with, but more importantly, to love our enemies and make them friends. We can and must reconcile with one another, even if it takes painful sacrifices.

This is particularly true as we celebrate Palm Sunday. Jesus went to Jerusalem riding a colt through a certain gate as a way of proclaiming Himself the Messiah, by deliberately echoing a messianic prophecy. He was in effect throwing down the gauntlet to the High Priests and King Herod, knowing full well what the result would be – his certain death. They chose a particularly horrific way of killing him, by lashing him with whips, by ramming a crown of thorns on his head, by mocking him, spitting on him, then driving nails through his hands and feet to let him hang there to die, in public and in the deepest humiliation. Even his fellow victims mocked him as he hung there. Jesus despaired of the Father leaving him: Eloi, Eloi, lema sabachtani – my God, my God, why have you forsaken me? I can’t imagine a greater sacrifice than what Jesus did, and He knew in advance that all this would happen – yet he didn’t turn back from His course. He experienced the full measure of human pain and suffering – being completely alone, lost in the world, abandoned to die. He made the ultimate sacrifice.

So if we are to fulfill His vision – that we may all be one – we must all be ready to sacrifice, to compromise, to see value in other opinions and love those whom we disagree with. The divisions in the Holy Church are entirely of our own doing, a sign of our own fallen nature – but in reality we are united in one baptism and one faith, whether we are Anglican, Old Catholic, Orthodox, Roman Catholic, Methodist, Lutheran, Baptist and many other denominations aside. The Body of Christ is one and holy, incapable of being divided – only we fail to see past our own prejudices and wishes, and perceive division, even inventing discord in order to justify our own church’s right to exist.

In other words, we must return to Queen Elizabeth’s holy vision, the Middle Way that accommodates everyone in the Body of Christ. One baptism, one faith, one Lord. Once we escape our own self-imposed limitations, once we tear down the walls of our own making, and open ourselves to the Christ present in the hearts of all of us, then God can work His wonders through us – and we can all say, “This is the LORD’s doing, and it is marvelous in our eyes”. Amen.

Believing in doubt: Sermon for the First Sunday of Lent

Deuteronomy 26:1-11; Psalm 91:1-2, 9-16; Romans 10:8b-13; Luke 4:1-13

Lent is normally a somber, reflective occasion, as we prepare for the joy of the Easter sacrifice and Resurrection. Not normally the time to be telling jokes. But I’m going to be a bit different and start off by telling one. It goes like this:

Jesus is subbing for Peter at the Pearly Gates.

A Roman Catholic dies. Jesus says, “I have one question to decide whether I should let you in: Who am I?” The Catholic says, “Well, the Pope says...” and Jesus says, “No, I wanted your answer. Sorry...”

A Protestant dies. Jesus says, “I have one question to decide whether I should let you in: Who am I?” The Protestant says, “Well, the Bible says...” and Jesus says, “No, I wanted your answer. Sorry...”

An Anglican dies. Jesus says, “I have one question to decide whether I should let you in: Who am I?” The Anglican says, “Well, you are Jesus, the Christ,” Jesus says “Very good!” And the Anglican continues, “...but on the other hand...”

The reason I tell this joke is because it highlights a central aspect of what it means to me to be a Christian: doubt. Gnawing, constant doubt, about everything. We Anglicans tend to question everything, we question authority and don’t take someone else’s word for it. We reject Biblical literalism, just as we reject slavishly following an overmighty Pope or other leader.

This brings with it an advantage, of course, of being liberated from these things. We aren’t burdened with slavishly following Biblical literalism or the latest utterances of Benedict XVI. But if we want to be honest with ourselves, it has a drawback: We are left spending our lives searching for answers, and our belief is constantly being tested and challenged, and thus evolves and changes over our lifetimes. Another old joke goes, ask three Anglicans what they think the Church is, and you’ll get at least five answers. Other Christians may accuse us of building our church on sand, because we as Anglicans or Old Catholics are so reluctant to accept outside authority beyond the barest necessities, and we keep asking questions.

Today’s Old Testament reading contrasts the experience of Israel with our own. Judging from the reading, the Israelites had no doubt that God was there, because He was constantly talking to their prophets and interacting with them directly. God today seems to be harder to spot. We today are plagued by this, constantly searching for evidence that God really loves us, or that God even exists. Bad things happen like the earthquake in Haiti, or the tsunami in the Indian Ocean in 2004, and our faith is sorely tested. We look for signs of God, and when God doesn’t quite turn out as we expect, we are frustrated and disappointed. Some of us give up entirely, rejecting the whole exercise as a waste of time.

But here, in this doubt, is the seed of our true foundation. It is in this doubt that the rock-solid foundation of our faith lies. Like the singer of the Psalm, we say to God, “You are my refuge and my stronghold, my God in whom I put my trust.” We trust in God and places our hopes in Him because our faith is constantly tested by the fire of doubt. We trust Saint Paul when he tells us, “if you confess with your lips that Jesus is Lord and believe in your heart that God raised him from the dead, you will be saved”, and further, that “no one who believes in him will be put to shame”.

The thing is, if one relies on outside authority, that person is be making it too easy for themselves. They are taking a shortcut. That person has to constantly line up daily events or personal experience and see what their authority has to say to them about it. In a sense doing this is not a test of ourselves, but a test of God, to see if God really lives up to what that authority tells us God said. When God fails that test, as He inevitably will, it somehow becomes God’s fault.

But we don’t serve any authority but God Himself, and we certainly have no authority to question or test God, though it is of course tempting to believe that we can. As Jesus told the devil in the Gospel, “worship the Lord your God, and serve only him”. And in particular, Jesus admonished the Devil by saying, “It is said, ‘Do not put the Lord your God to the test.’” To think that we mere human beings can dare to test God or limit God or make God do what we want Him to do in any way is impossible. It is sheer hubris; it is folly. It is temptation of the Devil himself, who promises us the same false rewards that he promised Jesus. The “reward” of allowing our arrogance to get the better of us and to place ourselves above God is to be enslaved by our worst instincts. The temptation of certainty is what leads people astray to fundamentalism in any form, whether it is Biblical fundamentalism, ultramontane Catholicism, militant atheism or any of the other isms out there. That temptation is as evil as they come, and leads directly to war, conflict and despair.

We must be humble enough to admit that our own worldly authority might get it wrong, or that we ourselves get it wrong. Just as we must not test God by laying claim to infallibility, whether it is of a Pope or of the Bible itself, we must also be very careful not to lay claim to infallibility for our individual selves. It is through the deepest humility and self-denial that we come to experience the real divine presence that is God. Only when we are ready to renounce all preconceptions and preconditions are we ready to experience God directly. We have to play by God’s rules, not our own. Thy will be done.

On a lighter note, Casey Stengel, baseball player and legendary manager of the New York Yankees and the New York Mets, put it in his unique way: “Never make predictions, especially about the future.” We can certainly take that to heart by rephrasing it a little, “Never make assumptions, especially about God.” We have to let God define us and not the other way around, and that is the most important thing about learning how to let our faith grow on its own, rather than succumbing to the temptation of forcing the issue or of taking shortcuts. Thy will be done.

Lent is a time of testing our faith. We prepare ourselves for the triumphant resurrection of Jesus Christ at Easter by spending these forty days reflecting on what we believe, and how we came to believe it. This is particularly true for our catechumens, Michelle and Jon, who are working their way towards baptism. Ideally, when we prepare for this, we fast. When we fast, we should do it not just to give up something because someone told us to. Once again that’s just following authority for the sake of following authority. Instead, we should fast because it is a way to strip down our selves to the barest essentials. To remind ourselves that we need nothing but God Himself. To reject the temptation of short-term rewards. To understand that we must be ready to give up anything and everything, just as Jesus gave everything He had when He stretched out His arms on the Cross. Above all, to understand, to see ourselves as part of the greater whole, and our place in it.

When we test our faith in this way, it is tempered, hardened, polished. It becomes something more solid than rock, harder than steel. When we are ready to test our faith to the utmost, to wear our self-doubt willingly, we come to dwell in the shelter of the Most High, and abide under the shadow of the Almighty. When we deny our own pride and hubris, and all pride and hubris around us, the door to God is opened in our hearts and the fire of the Spirit storms in. God can then work through us to save this world of ours. Each of us can become the hand of God working in our world, as an integral part of the body of Christ. It is when we seek rewards least that we gain the greatest reward of all.

When we confess our faults, our fallibility, we come to the point where Paul says in today’s Epistle: “For one believes with the heart and so is justified, and one confesses with the mouth and so is saved.” This is why Confession is part of each Anglican service: as a reminder to deny ourselves, to accept we are flawed, to accept that only together can we overcome those flaws. We confess our faith together that God is there for us. We come together as a Church to reinforce one another in our faith, to give one another strength on the journey, to leave no one behind. We come together as the Holy Church to make the world new, with God’s help. And that nagging bit of doubt and restlessness, the thirst for knowledge, the will to know God, is the seed in our hearts to help get us to the Kingdom of Heaven itself. And best of all, we know that at the end of Lent, we are ready to personally experience the triumph over death by Jesus Christ in the Easter Vigil, gaining strength from it year after year.

Remember the joke I told at the beginning? It’s true: All you have to do to get into the Kingdom of Heaven is to recognize Jesus for what He is, and do so out of your own heart. Lent is here, so that we can learn to see Jesus all around us, including in ourselves; at the end of Lent, like the disciples at Emmaus, we recognize Jesus in the breaking of the bread at Easter, when we come together as one to share – and then the door to the Kingdom of Heaven is wide open, so that we can come into the land that the LORD our God is giving us as an inheritance to possess. Amen.

The voice from the whirlwind: Sermon for the Thanksgiving for the Birth of a Child, Proper 24, Year C

Job 38:1-7,34-41, Psalm 104:1-9,25,37c, Hebrews 5:1-10, Mark 10:35-45

Marcus and Dana (Note: Names changed for their privacy), as a father myself, I’d like you welcome you to the select elite of mankind: parenthood. We’re here today to give thanks for the safe birth of your first child, Daniel, and I can’t tell you how happy I am for you. Now, as a welcome to that elite of mankind, I’d like to give you a little bit of a heads-up: Parenting, as you no doubt know by now, is not always fun and games. Children can be difficult, even maddening. A friend said of his son that »he’s going from the ›terrible twos‹ straight on into the I’m-going-to-freakin’-kill-him threes«.

One of the ways your child will also certainly drive you crazy is with a one-word question. My daughter has discovered this question lately. That question is, »WHY?«

The child will pester their parents, wanting to know this or that, until it in variably ends in a sequence of »why« questions with no end other than the parent gritting their teeth and saying »just because« or »because I said so, now go to bed«.

The thing is, as childish and innocent as that question is, it is still gnawing at us even as adults. We still don’t really know »why«. We grope around such questions, asking why we’re here, why this Universe even exists. Science, of course, tells us all about the how, but it falls silent on the why.

In today’s readings, Job finds himself in exactly the same spot. He asks God that question, »why«, and gets a magnificent booming voice from the whirlwind. Yet what I think is fascinating about this is that God does not give Job simple answers. Instead, God answers with a serious of questions. Each answer opens up a new question. Life, as Job learns, is a never-ending sequence of questions, and only God has the fullness of knowledge and wisdom. Only God has all sides of the truth. We mere mortals are confronted with our basic human limitations: We only see just so much of the puzzle. We try our best to connect the dots, but ultimately final answers will elude us. We are reduced to children asking their parents, »why?«

So the question is, how do we find God? How do we come into that direct personal experience of God? Job had the whirlwind, Moses had the burning bush, Elijah the chariot of fire. They had the luxury of at least directly experiencing God. But what about us?

Jesus, in the Gospel of Luke, gives us a clue. Jesus overhears people sending the children away, because they are (to the adults) being such a nuisance. But Jesus rebukes them, and says, »Let the little children come to me, and do not stop them; for it is to such as these that the kingdom of God belongs. Truly I tell you, whoever does not receive the kingdom of God as a little child will never enter it.«

As I grew into being a father, over time that line has resonated with me more and more. Because I came to recognize that children hold the secret. I see God in the eyes of my children. In particular I am reminded of a favorite story from the Sayings of the Desert Fathers, which I’d like to retell now:

One day some old men came to see Abba Anthony. In the midst of them was Abba Joseph. Wanting to test them, the old man suggested a text from the Scriptures, and, beginning with the youngest, he asked them what it meant. Each gave his opinion as he was able. But to each one the old man said, »You have not understood it.« Last of all he said to Abba Joseph, »How would you explain this saying?« And he replied, »I do not know.« Then Abba Anthony said, »Indeed, Abba Joseph has found the way, for he has said: ›I do not know.«

Abba Joseph, in other words, humbly accepts his humanity for what it is. He cannot and will not know everything. The thirst for knowledge is one that will never be quenched. Each question we ask of God, or of science, opens up new ones. We will keep asking »why« until the ends of our days.

But what Abba Joseph and Abba Anthony both also know is that they can put their trust in God that all will be well in the end. God is infinite knowledge, infinite love and infinite compassion. When we see terrible things happen to us – whether it is the death of a child, or a natural catastrophe that kills millions – our first reaction is naturally to blame God, to get angry with Him, to demand answers. But God answers us from the whirlwind: »Can you lift up your voice to the clouds, so that a flood of waters may cover you? Can you send forth lightnings, so that they may go and say to you, ›Here we are‹? Who has put wisdom in the inward parts, or given understanding to the mind? Who has the wisdom to number the clouds? Or who can tilt the waterskins of the heavens, when the dust runs into a mass and the clods cling together?« Who indeed but God Himself, and none other.

We must avoid the hubris of thinking we have all the answers, or even can have all the answers. We must accept that as terrible as things may seem, God really does love us, and it is all worth it in the end. To a child, sometimes parents may seem cruel, heartless, spiteful. They don’t understand why we have to ruin their fun by taking away the markers they used to decorate your antique lamp, or what’s so terrible about tearing out the pages of Mommy’s favorite book. Through those negative experiences, though, we all learn. As Paul says in the Epistle, »Although Jesus was a Son, he learned obedience through what he suffered«. Children figure out pretty quickly that their parents know more than they do, and accept what their parents have to teach them, because they know the love that is there.

We must learn to love God and one another as a child loves – with simplicity, trust, open eyes and open hearts. We must remind ourselves to come into the presence of God through the sacraments of the Church, so that we can reconnect with that real presence, with the grace of God. Rather than intellectually seek God, we need to feel God. And the means to do that is frequent prayer and experiencing the sacraments of the Holy Church.

Indeed we went to great lengths today to have the Eucharist as part of this service. Rev. Feldes agreed to fill in for our priest today, who is on sabbatical, because Rev. Feldes and the Anglican rector in Berlin sensed how important the Eucharist is to us. And it is doubly important because of what we celebrate today – thanksgiving for the birth of a child. The word Eucharist itself means »thanksgiving«, and what better way to give thanks for the birth of Daniel than by communing with God in the most blessed of sacraments. For that reason I’d like to thank Rev. Feldes for making the trip from Berlin so that we could do just that.

Thus, Marcus and Dana, when your child asks you »why« over and over and over again, accept it with love and learn to see the divine in yourselves, but especially to see the work of God in your child. As today’s Psalm ends, »O LORD, how manifold are your works! in wisdom you have made them all; the earth is full of your creatures.« The voice from the whirlwind assures us, all will be well, there is a plan, and the Kingdom of Heaven awaits us all: it is there for the taking. Amen.

God the builder: Sermon for Proper 18 (14th Sunday after Pentecost), Year B

Isaiah 35:4-7a, Psalm 146, James 2:1-10,14-17, Mark 7:24-37

The doctrine of »justification« is one that has divided Christians at least since the Reformation and the Roman Catholic Council of Trent. »Justification« is a theological term that basically defines at what point are we »just« in the eyes of God – that is, when are we fulfilling the Law as God foresaw, when are we being truly faithful in the fullest sense of the term, and when are we free from sin.

Martin Luther and the Protestant reformers, of course, changed the emphasis by insisting on the doctrine of sola fide, justification by faith alone. The principle of sola fide essentially says that without faith, no amount of good works will save you: Faith in God and Jesus Christ are absolutely necessary for being pardoned of our sinful nature. According to them, works are therefore irrelevant.

The thing is, neither of the two extremes – neither Catholic doctrine of faith and works, nor the Protestant doctrine of sola fide – really manages to tell the whole story as succinctly as today’s readings from the Epistle of St. James and from the Gospel of St. Mark.

In the Epistle, James says point-blank, »What good is it, my brothers and sisters, if you say you have faith but do not have works? Can faith save you? If a brother or sister is naked and lacks daily food, and one of you says to them, ›Go in peace; keep warm and eat your fill,‹ and yet you do not supply their bodily needs, what is the good of that? So faith by itself, if it has no works, is dead.«

In the Gospel, we see an example of Jesus living this to the letter. Jesus is of course the Son of God. He is free of sin, and by definition filled with grace – by definition as »justified« as it gets. Yet Jesus spends much of his time healing people and comforting them. Indeed that is the central aspect of His ministry as shown in the New Testament – in a time where there was no such thing as doctors or nurses or clinics or hospitals, where sickness and disease were rampant, Jesus went around making a difference. Jesus didn’t need good works, because Jesus Himself was free of sin – but it was because of His totality of grace that He performed those good works in the first place. The two ideas are absolutely inseparable.

Our good works are the necessary consequence of our faith. When we accept Christ as our Savior, we explicitly recognize our place in the Holy Church of God – that we are part of a communion of believers, but just as importantly members of the human race, itself a gift of God’s creation. God’s power and love permeate all aspects of Creation, and it is by that power that life itself exists and flourishes. It is also that power, that grace, that moves us to be there for our fellow man. A faith that is »strictly personal« is a faith that is totally hollow and without meaning. On the other hand, a faith that moves us to care for the needy and sick, the unemployed and the outcasts, indeed also for those having a crisis of faith themselves – that kind of faith is the sort that truly justifies our existence.

There is another aspect to this that is important, however, and that is the power of prayer. I think many people get confused about what prayer is for and what it’s all about, and what our place is in Creation. When our prayers don’t appear to be answered the way we imagined it, we blame God for not doing as we asked. When things don’t happen as we would like, we get angry with God. Some even turn away from faith entirely – I can’t tell you how many times I’ve heard the statement »I can’t believe in a God that…«

That attitude, however, demonstrates a fundamental misunderstanding of what prayer is, and what we are, and why we are here. God did not just create the world for us: God created the world with us and by us. God created us to with the ability to help ourselves. God created us as part of His Creation, as His tools as part of His great plan.

When some people pray, they do so in expectation of some supernatural result. Maybe it’s to ask God’s hand in making sure the right lottery numbers are picked. One imagines the hand of God reaching down and changing the numbers on the balls as they’re drawn out of the bin. But God clearly doesn’t work that way. In the Lord’s Prayer, we don’t say »my will be done«, but »Thy will be done«: we learn to surrender our will to the greater purpose, learning to see that even when things don’t go the way we want, it still all works out in the end. Prayer is the means by which we receive grace. From prayer comes the grace and the inner peace that we need to stop worrying and start doing.

God made us so that we can complete the great plan. Our own fallen nature, our own sinfulness, is the powerful motor that drives us on. We want to do better, we want to change, we want to transform: It’s all part of the human condition.

So when we pray, we do so not to ask God’s invisible hand to do something, but to gain grace and strength from experiencing God to do what we have to do. It is from our faith that we gain entry into that experience of God so that we are motivated to do good works in the first place. We acknowledge our sinfulness, and analyze our mistakes so that we can do better. We open up the gates of our hearts to let God in, and the power of the Holy Spirit fires us on to do more in God’s name. By experiencing God, by tapping into the love of God that permeates our Universe, we experience the totality of humanity. And when we see humanity’s suffering and troubles, we want to make it all better.

The amazing thing is that thanks to God’s grace, we are able to make it all better, even if it takes generations and thousands of years. Not only that, God’s grace is free for the taking – we only have to ask for it in prayer. As Jesus says in the Gospel of Matthew, »ask, and you shall receive«. To see the results, one only has to look and see the progress of the last five thousand years of human history. When we do work to change the world for the better, we call that »social justice« – we build a just society. Like James says, »If a brother or sister is naked and lacks daily food, and yet you do not supply their bodily needs, what is the good of that? So faith by itself, if it has no works, is dead.« It is through working for »justice«, by caring for the naked and hungry, that we find »justification«. If faith doesn’t motivate someone to do work for justice, it’s not really faith at all, but rather a kind of idolatry, a distraction from the true path. When we walk that path, we build that world of justice because of our faith. Meanwhile, we can hardly blame God for the state of the world, because it’s our job to change it in the first place.

In the end, what today’s lessons reveal is that each and every one of us plays a part in that great pageant of history, as part of God’s plan. God is like Bob the Builder: God asks us, »can we fix it?« and we reply in faith, »yes we can!«

The revelation is that we are the custodians of Creation. We are the tools of God. By God’s grace, experienced through prayer, we become the hand of God itself. And that is the faith that moves mountains. Amen.

Beam up Jesus, Scotty: Sermon for Easter Season/Ascension

The following was a sermon I wrote for an English service at our parish in May 2008. Needless to say, there was a lot of suppressed chortling and WTF looks, which is just the way I like it. :-)

Acts 1:6-14, John 17:1-11)

The Easter season has, for the untrained yet modern eye, a lot of odd things going on. On Good Friday we have a rabbi being falsely accused and executed for saying we should be nice to each other. Then he comes back from the dead. Then, as we heard at the last English service, he does a vanishing act after walking along with some of his disciples – he breaks some bread and »poof!«. And now today we have Jesus doing his very own forerunner of »Beam me up, Scotty«.

Now I’m not going to remotely suggest that Jesus Christ went up to some Starship Enterprise waiting on him. But that’s what the text of the first reading sounds like at first glance: Jesus is »taken up into Heaven«, as if Jesus is up there in the stars and galaxies swirling above us, doing warp eight. Maybe the two guys in white are the landing party. As for us, we even use the word »heavens« as if the sky – or outer space – is indeed where Jesus went when he left his disciples.

Jesus’ words in the Gospel make it sound like that as well: He’s returning to the Father, going to Heaven, leaving the world. Live long and prosper.

The name of this particular season doesn’t help: Ascension Day. Christ »ascends« into heaven. The German word is even worse, Himmelfahrt, as if Christ gets into a car or spaceship and – zoom! – off he goes.

That’s not really what is happening, so I’ll stop weirding you out with that. I’ll weird you out with something else: Merry Christmas!

You may not see any Christmas trees or greenery, and the weather sure doesn’t look like a White Christmas outside, but today we celebrate Christmas – or more exactly, the fulfillment of Christmas. You see, Christmas is when God became incarnate. He walked the Earth as one of us. That says a lot about God and a lot about us.

To paraphrase from a sermon I once read, let’s say we heard that there was a cat that had died and then came back from the dead by God’s power, and used that power to do great things to help other cats. We’d know two things: One, that cat was pretty special, and two, God thinks cats are worth saving, because after all, He sent a cat to help kitties all over the place.

Of course, Jesus wasn’t a cat or a dog or a fish or a cow, but a human being. God sent His son to be with us and to show us the Way. He cares about us: as the Bible says, »for God so loved the world that He gave his only-begotten Son«. Not only that, but because God became human, God knows what it’s like to be human. When we suffer, or go through rough times, it’s reassuring to know that God isn’t just putting us all through this, He went through it Himself, even death. God loves us very much and knows just how we feel.

So on Ascension, this Christmas incarnation stuff comes full circle: Jesus returns to His Father, and the cycle is complete. Not unlike the spinning of a galaxy coming full circle. Life is a series of cycles, of things coming to fruition. Ascension is the completion of such a cycle, just as our own lives are smaller cycles inside far greater ones.

Ascension is thus a reminder: First and foremost of God’s love and transcending power. But also of ourselves and our need to keep moving, to keep growing, to keep learning, as Time’s Arrow pulls us on and on along life’s path. What kind of a path, though?

The path of Ascension is not about is physical laws or literal senses of direction. Christ did not take a celestial elevator and certainly did not get beamed up. To think in such terms of »where is Heaven« is to fundamentally misunderstand the whole story of salvation. We can’t fly to Heaven any more than Jesus could.

There are, however, yet again hints of a journey in Jesus’ words, of travel. Over and over again, Jesus uses motion and travel to express what He is about. »I am the Way and the Truth and the Life«. Indeed the Christian Church itself in the early days was simply called »The Way«.

So Ascension is a story of progress, of growth, of achieving higher states of being. Not in a literal sense, as if taller people are closer to God than shorter ones. Rather, we reach a higher spiritual plane, of traveling higher and higher within ourselves to discover more about us. The more we explore and improve ourselves and shine light within the darkest recesses of our minds, the more we see and learn, the closer we get to God. Most importantly, we pass on the knowledge and insight that we find on to the next generation, and the cycle begins anew. Each of us has been given the power to ascend, to get ever closer to Truth.

Today’s archaic-sounding liturgy is also a reminder of that journey. Ancient people went before us, and we follow in their footsteps. As an old Anglican once said – Sir Isaac Newton – we stand on the shoulders of giants. As we recite the same prayers our forebears did, we remind ourselves of the Way of Christ. By looking backwards, we also force ourselves to look ever forwards. We learn.

Thus the Church is The Way. As we sit here together, sharing Communion with one another, teaching and learning from one another as well as from the wisdom handed down to us over the generations, we walk on Christ’s Way – a path that leads ever upwards, higher and higher, until we can reach the proverbial stars. Amen.

My first sermon: Baseball

This was one of the first sermons I wrote for the English services at our parish, all the way back in May 2007 for Trinity Sunday. It is, oddly enough, still my favorite. I hope you enjoy it.

Trinity Sunday

This weekend we celebrate Trinity Sunday. Trinity Sunday is the bane of sermon-writers everywhere, because, well, you have to talk about the Holy Trinity. Father, Son and Holy Spirit. A minefield even for experienced theologians. Oddly, the word »Trinity« doesn’t appear in the Bible, though the triune God does make cameo appearances. St. Patrick famously tried to use the shamrock – the cloverleaf you see on the cover of the bulletin – to describe the Trinity, which according to an article by some theologians I found, is actually a fatally flawed model. Wonderful. So what’s a desperate inexperienced sermon-writer to do?

This is the sort of thing where you desperately invite in the bishop for the weekend to give the sermon, then you find out he’s booked solid (because all the other parishes were much more clever than you and booked him years in advance) and you’re left thinking of a way of explaining the Trinity to your parish without causing yourself great embarrassment.

So you just change the subject.

So let’s talk about baseball.

I love baseball. Baseball is the true quintessential American sport, and like many Americans I grew up watching baseball. In the thirteen years I have lived in Germany, when I most feel homesick it is often because I can’t watch a baseball game.

Homesickness is a kind of loneliness, a spiritual feeling of being separated from other people. When you can’t share with them. Being lonely is a terrible feeling. Being unable to share your feelings is a a terrible feeling. Being unable to share them with your own child is a really terrible feeling.

One of the basic essential things about baseball is watching it with your kids. Unlike European football or soccer, baseball has a very wholesome childlike feeling to it, a tradition of fathers taking their sons and daughters to games. Now that I have two small children, the homesickness got worse, because I couldn’t take my kids to a ballgame.

So recently we got digital cable with some English channels. Thus we can now watch baseball on TV. Not quite the same thing as going to a real game, but close enough. And my son Edward clearly understood what it meant, because he was really excited by getting to watch baseball. So we shared it, and it was a great experience watching a game together. Father and son bonded, and my daughter was there too, the three of us bonding together.

We were together. The loneliness was gone. Three in one.

And that, to me, is the beginning of understanding the Trinity. God is three persons, but one being. God is never alone. God is by definition never lonely. God is infinite companionship, love and togertherness.

Thus when we are lonely, the triune God is always there for us when we need Him. The Trinity is just a way to represent His infinite love and companionship for us. But the Trinity also represents the community of God, and the community of Creation itself. God’s church is that community, the place that ends loneliness. The Trinity is thus community, community is church and we are here together, in church, sharing our time together. Nothing to be scared of.

So let’s play ball. Amen.