Sermon audio is available here: Babel Undone

If you were here last week, you will recall that we left things at a cliffhanger. How, we asked, is it possible for Jesus to be present with us to feed us? How is it possible that every Sunday we are called upward into God’s presence and forward into God’s future to participate in the life of Christ communicated to us through the sacraments? How is it possible that, having eaten at the Lord’s table, we are then sent to take that life into the world? This past week, I felt a little like the narrator in the old Batman TV show. Come back next week. Same bat time, same bat channel. Well here we are, next week has come, and you’ve come back.

You’ll recall that the answer to all these questions was embedded in part of Jesus’ departure speech in last week’s Gospel: “See, I am sending you what my Father promised.” Christ has ascended, and the first act after his coronation, the earthly echo of his exaltation, is to send the Holy Spirit upon the Church. Christ’s Ascent is verified by the Spirit’s descent.

The sending of the Spirit on the day of Pentecost is our Acts lesson this morning. Try to imagine being there. In the Upper Room. With the 120. Having been told by the risen Lord to wait, they had been. Worshipping in great joy. Worshipping in anticipation. And then, Sunday, at nine o’clock in the morning, heaven and earth, eternity and time, intersect. The taking up of the risen One is now complemented by the descent of his Spirit. True to his word, he has sent the Promise of the Father. The Spirit of God who will, the prophets of Israel said, would renew the face of all creation at the end time. We have quite a good depiction of the event in our Pentecost window. With the disciples praising God, arms upraised, the tongues of fire dancing above their heards. What that picture cannot capture, however, is just how noisy the scene is. Immediately, the Spirit inspires them to proclaim the Gospel (you will be my witnesses) in the languages of all those Jews who had come to Jerusalem for the festival (already, the implication is that the Gospel is going to explode beyond the borders of Palestine). What are we to see here? Three things.

First, the sending of the Spirit is the undoing of Babel. That is the story that is our Old Testament lesson today. The story of a human race united in culture and language and aim—to make a name for themselves by building a tower. By ascending—note that—on their own terms to the level of the divine. Humanity, it seems, has an inbuilt desire to become divine. We encounter this desire innocently expressed in the Garden, when the tempter says to the woman, eat the fruit and you shall be like one of the Gods. We find it less innocently expressed in our OT lesson, the story of Babel, where on the plains of Shinar, humankind decides to make a name. To build a tower into heaven.  To be joined with the divine.

Now, it is tempting here to get tangled in debates about what actually happened. Was this some sort of Ziggurat, the ancient near eastern structures similar to the Egyptian pyramids whose ruins we still see today? Probably. Was the entire human race really once so geographically limited, and to this place? Well, things get more thorny there. Fortunately, that’s not the point of the story. The point of the story is, even after the Flood, human beings are still hardwired both to seek after God and to insist on doing it their own way. Let us make for ourselves. Let us cross the barrier between creator and creation. Let us make him pay us heed. And God does. As humankind plans and plots to ascend, God descends. He confuses their languages and he scatters them.

At Pentecost, after the ascension of the one human to God’s right hand, God descends again. This time not to confuse our language, to separate and counfound and frustrate our utopian dreams, but to draw all languages into the saving scope of the Gospel.  To begin the exaltation of all humanity that was begun in the ascension of Jesus Christ. To create the space in which all human beings might ascend to their rightful place in a new creation. And because the Spirit descends to undo Babel, there is no language in which the Gospel cannot be proclaimed. On the contrary, it seems that, for the Gospel to be faithfully proclaimed, it must forever leave the language of its founder behind so that it can be told and re-told in many tongues. And that task—the task of translation and proclamation in the language of the people—continues up to today.

At Pentecost, God descends again. Not to scatter humankind across the globe, but to draw them together, Jew and Gentile, into one people. The drive to become divine that seems hardwired into us is planted there by God. But it will be realized not on our time and in our own power, but by the God who seeks us out in the sending of the Son, who finds us in the sending of the Spirit, who sends us in that Spirit. His Gospel—the sending of the Son to redeem the world—is the means that will undo Babel  And now, empowered by the Spirit, we have been sent to announce this Good News to all. The sending of the Spirit is the undoing of Babel.

Second, the sending of the Spirit makes the many one.  Which is to say, the sending of the Spirit is the fulfillment of human hope and destiny. The desire to become one of the gods—the desire embedded in us as expressed in both the Fall and Babel narratives is not wrong. It is part of the fabric of our make up. It is implanted in us in by our creator. It is part of what it means to be made in his image. Corporately, this desire is found at the heart of every human utopia—whether ancient as the story of Babel, or medieval—Christendom or the Caliphate, or modern—the stories of fascism and communism in the twentieth century, the stories of unbridled capitalism or radical Islam in the twenty-first. And yet, in the working out of each utopia, horrendous evil results. Why?

Because even as much as we might want to deny it, the gift of a renewed creation is just that—a gift. It is not something that will ever be accomplished by human endeavor but can only be received as God’s crowning of God’s own work in creating and redeeming what he has made. Think about John Lennon’s “Imagine.” The construction of a perfect world with a united and peaceful human race is not easy if you try. It is, short of the coming of Christ, impossible.

It is only the Spirit who can and does make the many one by uniting them to Christ, who reigns even now and whose kingdom will never end.

Finally, the sending of the Spirit makes the one, many. The overcoming of Babel is not the reduction of the world’s many languages to one especially holy tongue, but the proclamation of the Gospel in every language. One people of God is, at the end,  made up of many peoples, many nations, many tongues. This, Pentecost proclaims, has been God’s plan from the beginning. This is what was accomplished in the death and resurrection of Jesus. This is what is being proclaimed now even as we are sent in the power of the Spirit into the world to proclaim, to love and to serve.

And now, we gather again in the power of the Holy Spirit to be drawn further into Christ, to hear again the Good News, to feed again in our hearts with faith and thanksgiving, in order that we might be sent again as announcers of God’s kingdom and agents of its coming.

Audio is available here: Ascension 2013

Today we celebrate the Christian feast that, St. Augustine tells us, fulfills the rest. Without it, Advent and Christmas, Lent and Easter, Pentecost and the almost innumerable Sundays that follow, make no sense. It is the feast of the Ascension. What does Augustine mean? He means that the Feast of the Ascension marks the climax of the Gospel. It underscores the truth of the Incarnation that we celebrate at Christmas. It completes and discloses the meaning the Resurrection that we celebrate at Easter. It points us toward and gives the rationale for the Pentecostal coming of the Spirit and the sending of the Church into the world. And it does all that work because the Feast of the Ascension is, at the end of the day, the church’s declaration that Jesus is Lord.

Three little words. Jesus is Lord. For the early Church, those words or the conviction that they encapsulate could end a promising career as a soldier or government official, could send someone to prison, could even send someone to the arena to die. For if Jesus was Lord, then the accompanying, if unstated conviction, was Caesar is not. And the powers Caesar embodied could not hear that their reign was not theirs, but was given to them, that whatever loyalty they commanded, they could not command final fealty. For Jesus had, in his Ascension, removed Caesar from his throne, or better, exposed Caesar to be what he was—at his best a mere functionary under the reign of God and at his worst, a beastly usurper whose blood-lust for the saints of God would ultimately be his downfall.

This is why the writers of the later New Testament and the earliest Christian documents outside the New Testament take great pains to insist that they are not revolutionaries. That they are loyal citizens. That they pray to God for the Emperor’s wellbeing even if, on pain of death, they will never pray to the Emperor to secure their own. Even by Augustine’s day, a century after Rome had bowed the knee to Christ, he could still insist that while Christians had a foot in two kingdoms—what he called the City of Man and the City of God—their final citizenship was in the second  city only. And that as a result, they should regard every exercise of coercive power with just a little bit or perhaps a lot of critical distance. It was of Christian Emperors that Augustine said that it was only the number and size of their ships that made them different from pirates.

For the early Church, and for many Christians even after the Empire became Christian itself, there was no rhetorical strategy to distance the claims Jesus is Lord and Caesar is Lord from each other. Both Jesus and the Emperor at some level claimed Lordship, authority, rule, to the same space. And the martyrs were those who wagered their lives on the hope that the true King was King Jesus. That the true King was he who ascended to the Father’s right hand. That the true King could bring them through death into resurrection. That one day, the open secret on which they based their lives, would be made plain to all. And that King Jesus would reign without interference. For the early Church, Jesus is Lord and Caesar is Lord were claims to the same public space. And it was the Ascension of Jesus that grounded the public nature of that claim. The Ascension was not about Jesus’s soul going to heaven, but about the exaltation of a human being to reign as God’s vice regent over all the world, and all of its Caesars, both great and small.

Now, we don’t believe that, of course. We believe something quite different. We—notice that I am including myself in this—we believe something more like this: “Jesus is Lord, but that is just my private opinion.” Now what kind of a community, asks theologian Stanley Hauerwas, do we have to be to produce a speech act like that? That’s a loaded question. A pithy answer, with more than a kernel of truth, is one that has grown tired of the public invocation of Jesus’ name and lordship to justify the most horrendous of evils that one human being can inflict on another. And the solution—we should invent a space called “the private” to which we can banish Jesus. Another answer, again one with more than a kernel of truth, is that we are a community is, in this kind of language, actively trying to restrict the Lordship of Jesus because we have become too comfortable in Caesar’s world and would rather live under his dominion. Jesus has set before us God and Mammon, that is money, and we have in our idolatrous ingenuity, found a way to serve money while keeping the Jesus vocabulary to leave us feeling soothed in our sinfulness.

We have become a community, whether for good and noble reasons or for others, or—as is more likely the case—for reasons that mingle both, that does not know just what to do with the Lordship of Jesus over this world. We have decided it is safer to leave Jesus’ Lordhip in our private and to live accordingly, which is to say, to ignore it. We have cut ourselves off from our fathers and mothers in the faith whose conviction about the public Lordship of Jesus caused them both to refuse Caesar’s sword and to reject Mammon’s rule, who identified with their Lord even to death in the hope that they too would be highly exalted even as their Lord was highly exalted in his ascension into heaven.

Well, if you are inclined to think that this move, this re-desciption of Jesus Lordship, this transposition of that Lordship from a public claim which one must either accept or reject to a private opinion which one may safely ignore, represents a loss to the Church, a fundamental misunderstanding and rejection of the mission we received from the Risen Lord, I think you are right. And the solution, it seems to me, is to deliberately recover the ascension language that is found throughout the Bible—Old and New Testaments—in order to use it. We have to say before we can see. We have to have language before we know just what it is we are looking at. We have to return to what Karl Barth called the strange new world within the Bible, in order to let its vocabulary  open our eyes, so that we can see God, the world, and ourselves as God intends them to be seen.

There is a sense of course in which this is exactly what we do every Sunday. If I might quote Stanley Hauerwas again, what we believe and do as Christians is often so crazy, we have to get together on Sundays, if only to convince ourselves that we aren’t nuts. But with Augustine, we must add that this is especially true of the Ascension. For the Ascension rightly understood obliterates the distinction between public and private, and helps us again to see ourselves as a community whose citizenship lies elsewhere and which acts accordingly.

So what must be said about the Ascension? Negatively, we must say this: The Ascension means that the kingdoms of this world—kingdoms that the prophet Daniel likens to animals in their form and intent, kingdoms that were, in fact, the frustration of God’s intention for humanity—have been decisively overthrown and it was time to live in that truth. Positively, we must say this: The Ascension is the day that Christ in his humanity, fulfills not just his destiny, but all of human destiny as God the Father’s vice regent. He reigns in his humanity. And if and as we have been united to him, we reign too.

Now, let’s unpack this a little more. First of all, we need to be clear about where Jesus did not go. He did not to a secure undisclosed location somewhere between Jupiter and Saturn. This is not a tale of pre-atomic age space travel. Nor was his ascension a flowery way of saying that he left his body and his humanity behind so that he could go back to what he was before: God. The incarnation is not an interruption in the being of God the Son.

Now, perhaps a little way of positive speech. Where did he go? He went to that space where creation is fit for the full presence of God. Can we go there now? That’s a good question, and one that I’ll get to in a moment. But before I do, I really want to stress that in his going, he did not leave his humanity or us behind. He took his humanity with him. Where he is now, he is in—as the theologians put it—the unity of his person, fully God, fully human. He is the God who descends to our level, to take up our humanity. He is the man who ascends to God’s level, so that we might go with him.

That we might go with him. Think about that. That we might go with him! Now back to that question I just put off. Can we go there now? The answer is, We do! Every Sunday, we go there with him.

Here’s how Thomas Cranmer put it

Being like eagles in this life, we should fly up into heaven in our hearts, where that Lamb is resident at the right hand of his Father, which taketh away the sins of the world; by whose stripes we are made whole; by whose passion we are filled at his table; and whose blood we receiving out of his holy side, do live forever. (Thomas Cranmer)

I can tell you exactly when that moment happens—we go to where he is every Sunday when we are bidden to lift up our hearts. The sursum corda, as it is called, is actually a command more than it is a polite request. It would be an entirely appropriate translation of the Latin were I to say this morning, “Hearts UP!”

When we come to the Lord’s table, we come into the heavenlies, where Christ himself is seated. We come to the table where he feeds us with his very life.

There, in that very instant, we are given a glimpse of God’s future, given a glimpse of our humanity made fit for the fullness of God’s presence, given a foretaste—literally!—of the heavenly banquet that is being prepared for us even now.

Imagine how our attitude toward Sunday service might change if we really believed that. “Sorry, I can’t make that tee time, that restaurant, that long awaited date with my pillow and duvet. King Jesus has invited me to his house for breakfast.” Can you imagine? That’s not a fair thing to say just as we’re getting ready for our summer slump is it?

And yet, that’s what happens every time we gather at the Lord’s table. We are called upward and forward by him. Called to a place where creatures can and do commune with God, a place where creation is made fit for his presence.  In that place, we are placed before Jesus’ table, that place where he reigns as the Lamb, and he feeds us with his very life.

And then, we are sent. You are witnesses to these things. These things—not just a past teacher who gave us an ethic, but a present and living Lord who reigns, and who is transforming this world even as we speak. As he who reigns not as the Pantocrator commanding the armies of heaven, but as the Lamb who was slain for the redeeming of the world.

We are—like the first followers of Jesus—sent back into the world not mourning a martyr, but celebrating a living King, who has made us—us!—the vanguard of his reign. To rule not with violence, but with patience and joy even in the midst of suffering. Sent to tell of his Kingdom’s coming and to live in its presence even as we wait for the rest of creation to be transformed.

Which brings us to our last stop.

How is all this possible? It is possible because of the promise. The promise the risen Lord alludes to in our Gospel lesson. “See I am sending you what my Father promised; so stay here in the city until you have been clothed with power from on high.”

What on earth does that mean? Come back next week!

Right now, I have to get ready for a banquet. And so do you.

Audio is available here: Attending to the Spirit

Our lesson from the book of Acts begins as our last one did—with a vision. Last week, it was a vision of a sheet lowered from heaven with the command to rise, kill and eat. And with it came the interpretation—that Peter was to go to the house of Cornelius and proclaim the Gospel.  The Gospel was for the Gentiles, too. This, we saw, was a turning point in the book. The Gospel had in fact strained the bonds of ethnicity with Phillip’s preaching to the Samaritans, but now, with the preaching of Peter, those bonds were decisively broken. The Good News about the Jew Jesus was Good News for Jew and Gentile, two peoples made one by the blood of the cross.

This week we have another vision, and also at a decisive time. You wouldn’t know it from our lectionary text this week. Rather, it sounds rather mundane—well, mundane for Acts, anyway. Paul had a vision, then we went to Philippi. Par for the course when the topic is the evangelization of the world in the first century.

However, if we back up just three verses, a very interesting and more complicated picture emerges. [Read v 6-8 here] It seems Paul and his companions had hit a road block. They wanted to go east, out of Asia Minor and into Asia, but the Holy Spirit forbade them. So they turned North, to the city of Mysia and the region of Bithynia. Again, however, Paul and his party are directed by God not to go there. Now, I will confess here that I have no idea what this means. Did someone hear a voice? See a vision? Simply know? It could be any of these. It could be none of them. The point of these verses is not the nature of the intervention, but that it took place. The missionary party had a plan. And the Holy Spirit intervened to change it.

So, they head south and west. To the city of Troas. And there, they waited. Then comes our reading for today. Paul has a vision—much more straightforward than Peter’s of last week. And the missionary party sets out in obedience to the vision for the region of Macedonia. The Gospel goes west, to the city of Philippi, named after the father of Alexander the Great and a major Roman center in the region.

But again, a roadblock. There is no synagogue. There is not even a small Jewish community. The missionary party is there for some days and nothing happens. Why, I expect some wondered, did the Holy Spirit send us here? What is the point? Did we really get the message right? With no synagogue base from which to proclaim to the Gentiles, Paul andhis team go to a river where they had heard there might be a place for Jewish worship. And there, they meet Lydia. The Gospel comes to a Gentile worshipper of the Jewish God, a wealthy businesswoman, who then welcomes the missionary party into her home.

There are several matters to note in this passage. The first is its decisive nature. This passage, perhaps more than any other in the New Testament, tells us why Christianity took the shape it did in subsequent centuries. The Gospel was for Gentiles, yes. But the Holy Spirit was careful in which missionary party went where. The Holy Spirit did not leave it up to Paul to plan it all. Paul’s party was sent by God not to the East into Asia, nor to the North. But West. Macedonia, Greece, and eventually Rome. Why is Christian thought influenced more by Plato and Aristotle than Vedanta or Zarathustra? This story is why. Why is Christianity a Western religion and not an Eastern one? This story is why. The Holy Spirit actively directed Paul and his companions West, toward the heart of the Empire rather than North or East, and beyond its borders. I find that interesting.

Before I tell you why, though, I want to push this just a little further. Paul and his companions go to Phillipi—the leading city of the region. They go having interpreted Paul’s vision. And what awaited them? Well, first, no synagogue. There was, as far as they could find, after many days, no synagogue in the city and no Jews with whom to dispute. The mission was to the Gentiles, but it was always also to the Jews first. And here, there were no Jews. So, after some days, they go outside, to a place where they had heard there was a place of prayer. No Jews there either. But there was a Gentile. A woman. A seller of purple. By any kind of sociological analysis, this was not a successful mission trip. One convert. Paul didn’t know that this one mission trip, with its lonely convert, had fundamentally altered not only the history of the new faith, but indeed, the history of, well, history. But it did. Paul and his companions simply obeyed what they had interpreted the vision to mean. I find that interesting too.

So, the move west into Europe is, from our vantage point, a decisive turn in the history of Christianity and even the world. Paul didn’t know that. The Holy Spirit did. Paul and his companions obeyed, trusted, went and by any natural means of evaluation, it was a huge mistake.

The second thing to notice is a very interesting change in pronouns. When the paragraph opens in verse 6, the missionary party is spoken of as they. They went, they attempted, they travelled to Troas. Then, after Paul had seen his vision, “we immediately tried to cross over.” The author of Acts has now inserted himself into this story. What might that mean? It might mean that Troas was where Paul and his party met Luke, the author of both the Gospel and Acts, and the narrator actually became a participant in the story. It might be some kind of literary convention.  Scholars debate about that. I don’t much care about that. That’s not why the change in pronouns is interesting.

Rather, it’s interesting because there is a suggestion of deliberation in the text. He (that is Paul) had a vision. And we, being convinced that God had called us, tried to cross over. He changes to we. Paul, it seems, submitted his vision to his companions for discernment. Paul had a vision. But the party had to be convinced before they left. There is an intimation of  reflection, interpretation. Unlike Peter’s vision, there was no accompanying interpretation and commandment. Rather, it looks likePaul submitted his vision to the group. And only once they were all convinced (clearly, it didn’t take long), but still, only after we were convinced did “we” set sail.

As I reflected on this passage this week, three statements and three accompanying questions emerged that seem particularly apt for us. Here’s the first set. The mission is the Holy Spirit’s mission. Are we prepared to follow? I’m sure, Paul must have felt when he got to Phillipi only to find that there weren’t enough Jewish families to establish a synagogue. It is the fatigue that Paul must have felt when he went outside the city to a place of prayer and found not a small cluster of Jews, but one Gentile woman. Really? The Holy Spirit brought us here for this?

But we can look back on the move west in a way Paul could not, in a way the writer of Acts could not, and see just how decisive a move it was. We can look back and see that it was, in fact, the Holy Spirit’s doing. It was his mission. He was still shaping it. He did not send the disciples off to be witnesses on their own power and following their own direction. He sent them empowered by His presence and following his plan.

The mission in which we are engaged, the mission of the church of God in downtown Sudbury is no less the Holy Spirit’s mission than Paul’s in the book of Acts. We are, like him, called to attend to the Spirit’s leading. To stop when the Spirit says no. To listen when the Spirit says wait. To go when the Spirit says go. And to go not committed to numerical success, but to go committed to the mission because it is the Spirit’s mission, and only he knows the end from the beginning. The mission is the Holy Spirit’s mission. Are we prepared to follow?

Here’s the second set. The mission requires vision. Who are our visionaries? The Holy Spirit is calling us to participate in his mission. He has called us here to this place, to this neighborhood, to do something no one else here can do. What is it? Paul had a vision of man calling to him for help. Who are our visionaries? What is the Spirit calling us to do through them? Will we be willing to listen to the vision given to him or her as Paul’s companions were willing to listen to him?

And finally, the third. The vision requires discernment. What is the Spirit saying through them to us? We are not a church led by a visionary. We are a church, I hope and pray, led by the Holy Spirit. And if the Spirit gives a vision, it is for the visionary to submit that vision to the church for discernment.  The he must become, in the process of discernment, we. So that the mission of the Spirit is communicated through the vision to the whole body. The vision requires discernment. What is the Spirit saying to all of us?

Are we prepared to follow the Holy Spirit’s guidance? Who are our visionaries through whom the Holy Spirit is speaking? Will the community discern with them what the Spirit is saying to all of us? Some of you look a little nervous. Don’t be. The point of asking these questions is not to push us into mystical enthusiasm but to give us the vocabulary to speak about 2 upcoming events. For if we can speak about them rightly, then we can see them rightly, too.

The first is Synod. This gathering is not simply a business meeting (though we could be forgiven, what with memos, circulars, agendas, and motions being sent round, for thinking that). It is the place where we, the community that is the Diocese of Algoma, will discern on issues large and small, where the Holy Spirit is leading us. The whole process is how we will move, as Paul and his companions did, in the book of Acts, from he to we. Will you pray for your delegates, for me, that we will be attuned to the voice of the Spirit? Will you help us discern? Will you follow?

The second is the assessment process. I get the frustration that some of you are feeling and have expressed to me. We have done this all before. What will be different this time? That’s a fair question and I am glad that you have felt free to express it. The process will begin in September, but it is time to start thinking and praying about it. It is very deliberately a discernment process designed to help us say and see who we are and what the focus of our mission is. What does being a community of disciples in the downtown look like? What needs doing differently? What needs doing better? What needs preservation? What needs to be set aside? All these questions will be explored. But, my friends, the whole process will be a waste if, in the asking, we are not listening to the Spirit for the answers.

I will be honest with you. I have an answer to these questions taking shape in my imagination. Is it a vision like Paul’s, no. God does not address me in that way. Still, I need to submit these thoughts to the direction of the Spirit. It may be that, like Paul, I think it is a really good idea to go East. And I will have to hear the Spirit say no. It may be that like Paul, you think it is a really good idea to go North. You’ll have to hear the Spirit say no too. My challenge to you, through the summer, is to imagine yourself in Troas with Paul and Luke and the rest of the missionary party. You are waiting. You are not sure what the next move is. And most of all, you are praying such that when the Spirit speaks, you will hear, and you will act. Who knows? That act may—just like Paul’s move to Philippi—end up changing the whole world.

Audio is available here: A Gift for All

Throughout Easter, our Old Testament readings are replaced by readings from the book of Acts, the “sequel” to the Gospel of Luke. In the Gospel, we are given the story of Jesus that comes to its climax with the Ascension. In Acts, we are given the next chapter—the passing of the mission of Jesus to his followers who are commissioned as witnesses to the events of the Gospel, empowered by the Holy Spirit at Pentecost, and “sent” on mission by the first persecution.

To open the book, Jesus says to the disciples, “You will be my witnesses in Jerusalem, Judea and Samaria, and the to the uttermost parts of the world.” And that threefold expansion of mission organizes the whole book. The Holy Spirit falls and Peter preaches his Pentecostal sermon in Acts 2. The disciples are witnesses in Jerusalem. This evangelizing in turn provokes the first persecution of the church—which we read about a few weeks back—a persecution led house to house by a young Pharisee named Saul. And many of the 3000 who were baptized after the preaching of Peter were scattered as a result.

Was it the end of the church? No! Rather, in fulfillment of the Lord’s commission and in obedience to his command they remain Christ’s witnesses even as they go. And Phillip brings the Gospel to Samaria. Many Samaritans believe and, after the arrival of Peter and John, are baptized too.

What an amazing story! Three points are worth noting right now. Evangelism—telling people the good news about Jesus—leads both to progress and persecution. We don’t have one without the other. When the Gospel is breaking new cultural ground, it provokes response: neutrality is not found in the book of Acts. People believe and are baptized or they do not and actively work to oppose the spread of the faith.

Second, persecution has, in the plan of God, a purpose. In the book of Acts, persecution leads not to the extinction of the church but to even more expansion. As persecution forces believers—especially Peter and later, Paul—but others too—from one city to the next, they take the Gospel with them. And the cycle continues.

Third, the Gospel breaks ethnic and cultural boundaries. It is for Jews. The Jews who believed in Jesus did not thereby “become” Christians. They did not change religions. They became Jews who believed that God had given his Messiah in Jesus and that it was time to repent and believe in the One whom God had sent.

The Gospel is also for the Samaritans. Philip evangelizes  a group of people who were ethnically mixed. They weren’t Jews but neither were they Gentiles. They held Abraham as their father, but they did not worship in Jerusalem. With Phillip’s preaching, the good news of the Gospel is straining at the boundary of ethnicity. The message that God has acted definitively to renew the whole world is a message that can’t be limited to Israel, even as it uniquely comes from Israel. The Samaritans too are to be drawn into the announcement of God’s saving work.

At this point in the story, a bit of an interlude ensues. An interlude from which our readings have come for the last two weeks. We read first about the conversion of Saul and then about the travels and preaching of Peter. But attentive readers should know something is going on. The Gospel has come to Jerusalem. It has spilled out of Jerusalem and into Samaria. What’s left? The rest of the world is what’s left. And we should be thinking, “hmm, the conversion of Saul and the travels of Peter are setting us up for the next big movement in the story of Acts.”

And it is that next big movement that is our reading today. The coming of the Gospel to the Gentiles. The uttermost parts of the world is, it seems, not simply a matter of geography: Jews all over the Empire are going to hear about Jesus. It is also a matter of race. The Gospel that has come to Israel is to come through Israel to all people. The plan of God is a plan to bless the whole world. Jews, Samaritans, and Gentiles too.

When we enter the story today, the mission to the Gentiles has begun. Peter has, in response to a vision from God, gone to the house of Cornelius, preached the good news of Jesus to them, and, before he can get his sermon finished, he has seen the Holy Spirit fall on them just has the Holy Spirit had fallen on the disciples on Pentecost Sunday. And the Gentiles were baptized. The third movement of the story is now underway.

Luke then tells us that the word quickly spreads from Caesarea to Jerusalem that Gentiles had believed in the Good News! The Gentiles had accepted the Word of God. The Holy Spirit had fallen on them. You’d think that the disciples would be overjoyed at this announcement. You’d think that Peter would be welcomed back to Jerusalem with rejoicing that the commission and command were obeyed and that obedience had been so powerfully rewarded.

You’d think they would ask, “Peter, what on earth is God up to?” Instead, however, the Jerusalem disciples open their interrogation with this: “Why were YOU eating with GENTILES?” They turned on Peter. Peter, you are not being a good Jew. Why, Peter, are you not being a good Jew?

Peter, however,  does not defend himself. Instead, he recounts the story that I just summarized for you. Luke both tells the story of the conversion of Cornelius in Acts chapter 10 and then has Peter retell it in Acts chapter 11. Is But Luke being redundant? No! This is earth-shattering news for people with almost none of the equipment necessary to hear it. It needs to be repeated for it to sink in. The Gospel does indeed come to Jewish people. But it is not their exclusive property. The Gospel comes also to the “almost-Jews” the Samaritans. But also, the Gospel comes to the Gentiles! How on earth can the Gospel come to Gentiles? And not just any Gentiles. But to an officer in the occupying army and his family.

To blunt the force of their question about him—why are you not eing a good Jew, Peter—Peter turns their attention to God by retelling the story. Peter says, in effect, to his accusers “I know this is hard to believe! But here’s what happened.” And he tells his story. He doesn’t argue the Scriptures with them. He doesn’t cite his status as an apostle to justify his actions. He instead re-tells what has happened.

And in the retelling, the clincher is the gift of the Holy Spirit. If God has given the Holy Spirit to the Gentiles in just the same way that God has given the Holy Spirit to us, there’s no way I’m going to hinder God!

I love how Luke ends this retelling. When they heard this they were silenced. Then they praised God. You can almost see it, can’t you? The news is so momentous, the story so gripping that the first response is silence. And then, an eruption of praise. “Then God has given even to the Gentiles the repentance that leads to life.”

Now as the rest of book of Acts (and especially Acts 15) and several of Paul’s letters make clear, this is not the last of the story of the Gentiles and the Gospel. In fact a case can be made that the entire New Testament after Acts boils down to one question: how do Jewish and Gentile followers of Jesus get along?  It took a long time for many Jewish followers of Jesus to settle into the fact that the Gospel was not only for the Gentiles too, but also that those Gentiles did not have to become Jews in order to follow the Jewish Messiah, Jesus.

But there would be no going back. In obedience to God, Peter had broken bread with Cornelius. Peter had preached to Cornelius. Peter had baptized Cornelius and his family. On that day, the Lord Jesus had, as Paul would later put it, broken down the wall that divided Jew from Gentile and made both peoples one through the blood of the Cross.

Now what does this have to do with us?

Just this: it is a reminder to the Church that the Gospel is God’s gift to all people. Now, let’s unpack that sentence.

This story is first, a reminder to the Church. Yes, to us. It is not for us to say, “Those foolish Jewish believers. They were not yet free from their cultural snobbery. They were not yet delivered from their ethnic elitism. Thank God we aren’t like that anymore.” Because we are. We are like that all the time.

We are reminded, secondly, that the Gospel is God’s. It is not our property. It is not our message. It is not about us. It comes to us clothed in our culture to be sure, but it cannot be constrained to our culture because it is God’s.

It is, thirdly a gift. It is not something to sell or barter. We have received it freely, freely, we are called to give it away. And finally it is a gift for all people. There is no person who is excluded from the Gospel’s scope, no one who is excluded from the invitation to come to the waters of baptism. The Gospel is God’s gift to all people.

This truth is personally embodied in Lamin Sanneh. Lamin Sanneh is a Gambian, a Christian convert from Islam, and a professor of World Christianity at Yale University. In his recent, award-winning autobiography, From the Margins, he speaks frankly about how difficult it was to be accepted by Christian communities after he had converted. I cannot here recount the challenges he faced first as a Muslim convert to Christianity in Affrica, and then as an African Christian first in the US and then in Britain. But by the time I finished the book, I was left wondering how on earth the poor man remained in the faith after being treated so badly by Christians who simply didn’t have a category for him to fit into.

But the message of Peter’s story is that, that’s the way it is with the Gospel—if and as it is proclaimed, it will draw people into friendship with Jesus who don’t fit our categories of who belongs and who doesn’t. And that’s a good thing! That’s the good news! Peter’s story is a reminder to the Church that the Gospel is God’s gift to all people. It’s not ours; it’s not a commodity we can buy or sell; and we don’t get to decide in advance who will repent and believe.

And if that doesn’t stun us into silence and then provoke us into praise, nothing will.

Audio is available here: Faith, Anti-Faith and Sheep

Two weeks ago, we met the famous doubter, the disciple Thomas. We heard is “Unless I see, unless I touch,” and our hearts were drawn to him. We also heard his “My Lord and my God,” as his own doubts melted when confronted by the reality of the risen Christ, whose wounds displayed meant that the barrier of death had been broken. Life had won.

Thomas’s doubt, we saw, was the doubt of wounded love. Not the skeptical doubt that denies the identity of Jesus. Not the cynical doubt that refuses to bend the knee regardless of the evidence. It is the faithful doubt—think about that—the faithful doubt that, when confronted the harshness of reality, cannot but express to God bafflement at God’s ways and means. The Lord Jesus, we saw two weeks ago, has all the time in the world for such faithful doubters. And he has all the time in the world for those of us who, with Thomas, bring our questions to the altar week in and week out.

Thomas’s doubt is not only faithful, it is also uncomplicated. It is the doubt that we all experience when we confront the resurrection. It stands alongside the faithful question, “How can this be since I am a virgin?” the question uttered by the Mary when she heard the news from the angel Gabriel that she would be the Mother of the Lord. In our Gospel lesson today, however, we meet different doubters with different doubts.

The doubt we meet among the Jewish leaders today in John’s Gospel is not the straightforward inability to believe that comes with the momentous and miraculous nature of the Gospel of Jesus. It is not the open-minded doubt of the skeptic willing to believe if given evidence. Rather, the doubt we meet today is the cynical, willful and deceitful doubt that refuses to believe what is plain before its eyes. This is the doubt that feigns ignorance; the doubt that deceptively asks for evidence all the while knowing that no evidence will ever be enough. It is the doubt to the Anglican priest in C.S. Lewis’ Great Divorce, who, in the end, chooses hell over heaven because heaven will limit his theological options. The price of heaven for that priest was three words: “I was wrong.” And it was a price he was unwilling to pay.

This is the doubt we meet today in our Gospel lesson. It is not the doubt that naturally accompanies faith, whether weak or strong. It is not the doubt that expresses itself even in faith’s absence. It is the doubt that refuses to believe no matter what. It is the doubt that is, if there is such a word, anti-faith.

So it is that the Gospel today presents us with another of John’s polarities. His is a Gospel of Above and Below. Of Descent and Ascent. Of Light and Darkness. Of Inside and Outside. And today, of faith and anti-faith.

This is clear from the opening description of the setting: It is the time of the festival  of the Dedication. That is, the festival we know today as Hannukkah. The festival of lights that commemorates the rededication of the Temple following the Maccabean revolt. Light is about to confront darkness. Jesus is walking in the Temple complex, by Solomon’s porch, the place where tradition held, the kings would come to pass judgment. The King has come and judgment is about to be passed.

“So the Jewish leadership gathered around Jesus  and said to him, ‘How long will you keep us in suspense? If you are the Messiah, tell us plainly.’” 90% of the time, questions are statements in disguise. So says that fount of wisdom, Dr. Phil McGraw. This is one of those times. This is not a question of identity. They are not curious about this man from Nazareth who claims to be the bread of life. It is a statement of unbelief. I refuse to believe that which your works make plain.

Parents, do your children ever ask questions to which they know the answer? When you were younger did you ever ask that kind of question? That is what is going on here. It is a testing of the boundaries. They know perfectly well what Jesus’ works mean. They are quite clear about Jesus own self-understanding. And the enemies are looking for a loophole, a foothold, a gap of some sort in the works and the words to get them off the hook of having to believe.

And that explains Jesus’ answer, ‘I have told you, and you do not believe. The works that I do in my Father’s name testify to me; but you do not believe.” The evidence is in front of you, says Jesus. You have seen the signs. You know what the signs mean. You know perfectly well who I am. The problem is not that you cannot believe. The problem is not a lack of evidence, which, when supplemented, will result in faith. The problem is that you do not believe what has already been offered. The problem is no amount of evidence, no matter how direct, will be sufficient for you. The blindness to Jesus’ identity is, as far as Jesus is concerned, deliberate. It is willful. The problem is not that his questioners cannot believe what is unclear. The problem is His questioners refuse to believe what is obvious.

And now we come to the hard part of the Gospel, we come to the division this refusal to believe creates. “You do not believe because you do not belong to my sheep.”

Above and below. Descent and Ascent. Light and darkness. Eternal life or perishing.  Faith and anti-faith. And the point at which the roads diverge is not a theory. The fork is not produced by some abstract theological proposition to which we must assent. The pivot is not an ideology. The crux of the matter is the Cross. The point is a person. The point at which we are bound or loosed is Jesus. His disclosure of the Father’s glory is the pivot on which John’s story turns. He is the one, who simply by being present in our midst, will either save or condemn. Simply by being here, he forces a decision. Light and Darkness. Above and Below. Life and Death. Ascent and Descent. Faith and anti-faith.

In the Gospel of John, the decision comes to groups and it comes to individuals. In the Gospel of John, the hardness of heart that is played out here on Solomon’s porch is not simply the hardness of heart of those individuals who confronted Jesus on that day. It is the hardness of heart of Israel. It is the hardness of heart that, in Abraham refused to trust God, but descended into Egypt.  It is the hardness of heart that in Israel, refused to trust God and longed to return to Egypt when the road with Moses became difficult. It is the hardness of heart in Israel and Judah and their kings when they refused to trust in the God who had made covenant with them, choosing instead contracts with the nations and covenants with idols. It is the hardness of heart that drove St. Paul to distraction in his great letter to the Church in Rome, in which he declared he would be damned if it would turn the hearts of his people toward their Messiah.

This has for centuries, of course, led to abominable treatment of Jewish people by Christians because we misunderstand out own Scriptures. For Israel’s hardness of heart is not unique to Israel. It is, in the mystery of God’s election, the hardness of heart that is true of all nations, all cultures. It is the world’s hardness of heart. And if the story of Israel is, as the Fathers following Paul have always insisted, our story, the Church’s story too, then Israel’s hardness of heart is also and especially the Church’s hardness of heart when confronted by the Lord. It is our own hardness of heart.

There is therefore no point at which the Gospel for this morning gives us the license to point our finger at that culture far away, that religion over there, those people down the street, to condemn them for refusing to believe in the One who was right in front of them. It is an indictment of human unbelief wherever it is found. And it is found wherever and especially the Gospel is preached, wherever and especially where Christ is present in the sacrament. For the darkness is nowhere darker than in those places where it is confronted by the light. So the unbelief is the unbelief of Israel, it is the unbelief of the world, it is the unbelief of the world. It is my unbelief. And yours.

But the Gospel, thank God, does not end there. It does not end in the confrontation between Light and Darkness, faith and anti-faith. The King has passed his judgment—you do not belong to my sheep. But he has passed a second one, too: “My sheep hear my voice. I know them, and they follow me. I give them eternal life, and they will never perish. No one will snatch them out of my hand. What my Father has given me is greater than all else, and no one can snatch it out of the Father’s hand. The Father and I are one.”

Over against those who refuse to believe are those who do. And he who is the light of the world, by his presence, exposes them too. The sheep are those who hear his voice. They are attentive. The sheep are those who follow the good shepherd. They are mobile. They are willing to embrace a nomadic life, an unsettled life, resting only in the promise of the Good shepherd to protect them.

Clearly this is not the life of settled certainty that so many of us—that I!—want my Christain life to be. I want it to be settled. I want it to be peaceful. I want it to be uneventful.

But Jesus doesn’t promise his sheep that kind of life. He promises instead a life of constant attention, not because the content of the Gospel may change. He is after all, the Truth. Rather, he promises a life of constant attention because the Truth that is embodied in him continually calls us into a fuller and deeper understanding of that truth. There will never be a point at which we have arrived. There will never be a point at which we have it all figured out. It may even be that in the new creation, when God is all and in all, in the day of resurrection which we say we hope for every Sunday, we still be moving further up and further in. We will still be paying close attention even as we have been finally freed from the distractions caused by sin. My sheep know my voice, he says. They listen to me.

Not only do the sheep listen, but they follow. To attend to the voice of Jesus is to persist with him on the long and sometimes hard road of discipleship. Both the largely inner road of a deepening faith and the largely public road of living out of those faith commitments wherever our roads may take us. And following Jesus will at some point get us—each of us—into trouble. Not because the Gospel  grants us permission to be mean or rude (though it seems with the advent of facebook, far too many Christians think that is exactly what it does), but because faith is continually confronted by anti faith, light by darkness. Indeed, the light exposes the darkness. The light, simply by its very nature, provokes conflict.

And that means what you are about to do when you come to the table is risky. Very risky indeed. For what you are about to do is to lay your soul bare to him who is the light of the world. Will he find you to be one of his sheep or not? And if he finds you to be one of his sheep, what will he call you to do? How will he call you to change as you continue to grow in your discipleship? Coming to this altar rail is perhaps one of the most dangerous things you can do because you will leave it different than you were when you came. You will be confirmed, whether as a sheep or as not one. You will be called to a deeper life with him who, by his Spirit, gives his life to you.

But with the risk comes the promise—the life of discipleship is hard. The life of discipleship means doing things that appear to make no sense to good sensible people. “Sell what you have, give the proceeds to the poor and come and follow me.” It means believing things that many people think are absurd. “On the third day he rose again according to the Scriptures. He ascended into heaven. I believe he will come again to judge the living and the dead.” It means risking social stigma, rejection or worse. But it also means you are heirs of the promise that no one can snatch you from his hand. Light and darkness. Above and below. Life and Death. Faith and Anti-faith. And now it is time to decide.

Audio is available here: Impossible, Useful, or True?

“When I was your age, I always did it for half-an-hour a day. Why, sometimes I’ve believed as many as six impossible things before breakfast.”

So says the White Queen to Alice.

I confess to finding myself turning more and more to Alice as, with each year passes, the Good News of the Gospel seems to become just a little more absurd.  And I’m not talking about doctrine, here. That a human body, crucified, dead and buried was not simply reanimated, but transformed and made fit for life with God, such that the Risen Lord could appear and disappear, could, indeed, ascend into heaven, has strained the credulity of Christianity’s critics from its earliest days. The preaching of the Cross, says Paul, is a stumbling block to Jews and foolishness to Greeks.

No, Christian doctrine has always been difficult.

What I mean is the Christian ethic. The ethic announced every Maundy Thursday: A new commandment I give you, that you should love one another. An ethic symbolically expressed every Maundy Thursday with a basin, a towel, and some water. This love is not a warm fuzzy, but a love that stoops to serve. A love, that Chrsitians ostensibly believe, really does not simply serve friend and enemy a like, but a love that is woven through the fabric of all creation, a love, as Dante says, that moves the stars.

That ethic, as much as the doctrine to which it gives voice (no, you don’t get to divorce Creed from practice), is, every day, just a little harder to see, just a little harder to hear, just a little harder to believe.

What is in its place? Although Christendom’s ghost still haunts our culture and our imagination, in place is an ethic that worships power. In such an ethic, political leadership is the ability to thwart the aims of your opponents and then continually humiliating them in defeat, reducing them both professionally and personally to laughing stocks. This approach to politicial leadership—explored and endorsed by Warren Kinsella in his book, Kicking Ass in Canadian Politics—knows no party bounds. All decry it; all practice it.

Although Christendom still haunts our imaginations, it is an ethic that says torture of our enemies is justifiable. Or, if we hate torture because it is up-close-and-messy, we’ll contract it out to others whose hypocrisy level is decidedly lower. Or, worse, we’ll ask our leader to sign a piece of paper that permit a solider in Virginia to pilot a drone in Pakistan that will launch a missile that will kill not only one man, but all the people in his house, it will not discriminate on age, sex, or criminal activity, because he might—MIGHT—be planning a terrorist attack against us. The current President, and I know many admire him in Canada, came to the White House promising to turn a critical eye on such practices. He has done. And he has expanded them beyond the most feverish dreams of the most hawkish Republican.  

The worship of power in politics is not a party problem. It is our problem. We are, all of us, implicated.

Of course, picking on politicians is a safe move—even if I pick on politicians we might happen to like. But Christian observance is no different. The Duke University theologian and ethicist, Stanley Hauerwas, who is, by the way, a communicant at the Church of the Holy Family, an episcopal parish in North Carolina, is fond of saying that mainline Christians, having given up on the doctrines of the faith being true, still want to harness what is useful for their social agenda. Just so we’re clear, he’s speaking from the inside. Much the same could be said for more conservative Christians who might not have not given up on the truth of Christian faith, but for whom that truth doesn’t often impinge upon an increasingly peculiar social and political vision. We—now you know which “inside” applies to me—may continue to assent to the Creed, but the reality of our confession stops at the church door, Sunday at noon.

Christians too have found their witness compromised by drinking from the same poisoned chalice as the wider culture.

Power is the object of devotion. Religion is useful in the service of power.  We are all neo-pagans now. We are back in pagan Rome. And we, with each day, find it that much harder to believe that the world could be any other way. We find it that much harder to think and act as though it’s not violence all the way down to very quanta of our universe.

At our best, we are like Edie Stall in the movie, A History of Violence, who prays and serves meatloaf and tries to maintain the illusion of peace in the family. At our worst, we are like her husband, Tom, who knows that if that illusion of peace is to be maintained, he has to be willing to be just that much more ruthless than his enemies. We’re not bad people. We don’t want to eliminate our friends. We’re just like Michael Corleone in the Godfather II, who gives us a glimpse into his own leadership style when he says to his consigliere, Tom Hayden, “I don’t feel I have to wipe everybody out, Tom. Just my enemies.”

Edie Stall—horrified at her husband’s capacity for killing, but prayerfully acquiescing to its necessity. Tom Stall—a peaceful man ready to do what he has to do to protect his family. Michael Corleone—the mobster who can’t get clean because his enemies keep coming. They are cinematic personifications of what the Bible calls the principalities and powers. Those spiritual forces whose power lies in their ability to frighten us to death. Who call us to embrace them because, they say, they will destroy us if we don’t.  Who insist that they are not evil. They are just part and parcel of the deepest structures of the world. They are the way the world really is.

And here comes Jesus, with a pitcher, a basin, and a towel. Here comes Jesus saying love each other. Here comes Jesus, showing with a towel, a basin, and a pitcher that our embrace of violence, our love of power, is to embrace literally, nothing. Here comes Jesus, refusing the trappings of power, looking—well really, weak.

And it will only get worse. Tonight—On this very night is how we will pray in just a few moments—he will be handed over to his enemies. On this very night he will remain silent before his accusers. On this very night he will begin his final task.

And what does John say? John says this hour is the hour for which Christ came. John insists that tonight and tomorrow, in the midst of the most horrific violence inflicted on a human being, it is that human being who is in control. John says that when he utters his last words tomorrow afternoon, it is not a defeated, “It’s over,” but a triumphant “It is accomplished.”

John says, here, on the cross, Jesus displays the true power that exposes the false power of the principalities. Here, John says, in the power of self-emptying love, Jesus defeats his enmies, his father’s enemies, our enemies. Here, on the cross, we see the love that is written on the fabric of the universe. The love that is, to borrow from Narnia, the deeper magic that was written before the dawn of time. The love that moves the stars.

The love that comes to us tonight in a basin, a pitcher and a towel.  A love that bids us follow. A love that presents a vision of human being that is not just useful, but true.

Audio is available here: The Uselessness of Love

Every story in the Gospel of John is weighty with significance far beyond the mere telling of the tale. This one is no different. Jesus, we read just one chapter above, went into a kind of hiding after the raising of Lazarus because the act was so provocative that religious and political leaders began to plot his murder. But, here we are, in the very next chapter, and Jesus is not only in the same town where he performed the miracle, but in the house of the same family, at table with the same man—Lazarus—who was also marked for death—and his sisters Mary and Martha.

The point, it seems, is that Jesus is not running from death, but to it. The plotters are not in control. Jesus is. Jesus is not hiding from their machinations, but going toward them. Jesus is orchestrating the events. When he utters his last cry from his cross in John, it is “It is finished,” not in the sense of relief “It’s over,” but in the sense of triumph: “It is accomplished.”

Jesus’ mission is, with each step, each gesture, each word, coming to its climax. His long awaited hour is now about to unfold. And it will unfold with him in control through it all. The plotters will plot and the haters hate and the lovers love, but it is Jesus who is in charge. And so we find him, on the outskirts of Jerusalem, eating and drinking. Knowing that even though he is a man marked for death, nothing will happen before the time.

And we read that Mary, the sister of the man who was raised, took a pound of costly perfume made of nard. The Greek word here is “litra” and totals about 11 ounces. She breaks the jar, pours the perfume on Jesus’ feet and wipes them dry with her hair. Judas, the betrayer, pounces on this act of extravagant devotion, insisting that the perfume should have been sold and the money given to the poor. John then gives us an insight into Judas—he was concerned only with lining his own pockets. And finally, we have Jesus’ rebuke. Leave her alone, he says.  Leave her alone so that she might keep it for the day of my burial. Leave her alone because the poor you will always have with you. Leave her alone because you will not always have me with you.

Weighty words. They clearly communicate that Mary’s act is a threshold event. Something decisive has happened. But what?

At one level, it is an act no doubt of thanksgiving. Jesus stood at the grave of her brother Lazarus and he wept. In response to Martha’s charge, “If you had been here, my brother would not have died,” Jesus replies: “I am the resurrection and the life. Whoever believes in me shall live even though he die.” And he ordered for the tomb to be open. In a wonderful realism, we have then another rebuke from Martha: “Lord it has been four days. By now, he stinks!” There is more to the timing than decomposition, however. It is an ancient Jewish custom that the soul resides within the body for four days and thereafter returns to God. Now, the deadline has passed. No mere wonderworker is going to call Lazarus out of the tomb, back from the grave. But this wonder worker does just that.

“Lazarus! Come out!” And he came out.

And now, a few days later, here is the sister of Lazarus anointing the feet of Jesus with expensive perfume and drying them  with her hair. This is a celebration banquet. This is a banquet of thanksgiving. This is Martha and Lazarus and Mary—Mary most of all—saying thank you to Jesus in the most elaborate way they could. My Irish ancestors would have looked at it and said, “My that was a mighty party.” And it was. And Mary’s act was the best, the most lavish, the most extravagant way she could thank the one who had returned her brother to her.

But there’s more to it than that. Mary’s act signals that Jesus’ mission is about to come to its climax. Her pouring of perfume is an act of anointing and commissioning. Oh Mary probably doesn’t know that. But remember, Mary is not in charge. Jesus is. The plotters are in Jerusalem plotting. The hater—Judas—is two seats down, hating. And Mary, the lover, is loving with all that is within her. But through it all, Jesus is in control. And for Jesus, this act is an anointing for mission.

It resembles very closely Jesus own anointing of his disciples for mission—when he washes their feet  and bids them follow his example of service. Jesus himself must be anointed for his mission. And he is, here. Now, he can go to his appointed hour, and go in the love of His Father and in the power of the Holy Spirit.

The anointing is the anointing of Jesus the Prophet, who will with his final word declare that God has done with human sin and brokenness. That God has, through his One and Only, disclosed himself full of grace and truth. That God has defeated all the enemies of humankind. And so the word to be uttered on that Friday we call Good can only be “It is accomplished.” For Jesus has been anointed to declare God’s word. And he will.

The anointing is the anointing of Jesus the Priest, who “by his one oblation of himself once offered, a full, perfect, and sufficient sacrifice, oblation and satisfaction for the sins of the whole world.” Here is he who is both priest and victim, laying down his life for his friends that we might be the friends, and not only the friends, but the adopted children of his father. And so, John says, when all was accomplished Jesus bowed his head and gave up his spirit. For Jesus has been anointed to be God’s one final high priest and sacrifice.

The anointing is the anointing finally of Jesus the King. The hour to which Jesus walks completely in control, is none other than the hour of his glory, for John. The hour when he will enter into the glory that was his, and always has been his, since before the world began. The hour when he would be exalted—lifted up—from the earth. The hour when he would be nailed hand and foot to the cross. There. On the cross, there is the One who was with—who was God in the beginning.

There. On the cross, there is the One who is the Father’s one and only. The one whose very being is the glory of the Father.

There. On that cross is where we get a glimpse of just what that glory is. It is a glory that shines for all who have eyes to see. It is a stumbling block to some and foolishness to others, but to those who are being saved, it is the wisdom and power of God, St. Paul will later say.

That is a glory that does not triumph over its enemies through naked force. That is a glory that does not lord it over its subjects by sheer radiance. That is a glory that is most fully shining in the complete giving of itself to the powers that would destroy it and us, in order to show that they have now power in themselves. That they are illusions. That even as they do their worst, they are already defeated.

There. On the Cross. There is the glory of the King. The King who says when I am lifted up from the earth, I will draw all people to me.

Jesus, the Prophet. Jesus, the Priest. Jesus, the King. Jesus has been anointed. There will be no going back. Six days until the Passover begins. Six days until the one final lamb will be sacrificed to take away the sins of the world.

And now, it’s time for us to come to his table. To recall his sacrifice once offered. To receive his life into ourselves by His Spirit. To be united to him that we might be his body, sent out on mission into his world. And that mission is simply to point to him, that he might draw all people to himself. The invitation to join him, and join us in mission, is extended to all. Be united to Christ through the waters of baptism. Be united to Christ through the bread and the wine.

The invitation that Jesus extends is bold. It leaves little room for nuance. Here, John gives us Mary and Judas. There is no third. No middle way. As much as it might pain us Anglicans, there is no via media when Jesus confronts us with himself, confronts us with his glory, and asks what will you do?

We can, like Judas, seethe. We can admit to being willing to use Jesus so long as Jesus agrees with, supports, advances the goal we have already set for ourselves. That goal might be noble—serving the poor—or it might not—lining our own pockets.

Either way, we will take Jesus provided Jesus will do as we ask. We will take Jesus provided he will get on board with the ideology, the goal, the purpose we have already accepted as true without him. We don’t care if Jesus is true. We’ll take him so long as he is useful. And, like Judas, we will, when we find Jesus is no longer useful, betray him.

Or we can, like Mary, love. Love extravagantly. Love lavishly. Love, dare we say it, shamelessly.

We can like Mary love not because we have it all figured out, but because there is no other response fitting to the gift of life that Jesus has given us.

We can like Mary pour out our very best with tears, because with her we realize that in Christ we have met that which is true, that which is good, that which is beautiful. And there is no other response worthy.

Such love is messy. Such love is useless. Such love does not fit tidily into strategic plans or programmes for congregational development. And that’s ok.

It’s ok because such love freely abandons itself to the one who is, finally, in charge. The plotters are plotting. The haters are hating. And Mary is loving. Mary is loving because she has glimpsed the glory of God’s One and Only. Mary is loving because, at last, she has a clue about who is behind it all. She has seen his tears and heard his voice and received her brother.

She knows who is in control even if she doesn’t know how. And she loves.

Jesus extends to us today a bold invitation—to see, to hear, to taste, and to respond.  Will we find Jesus useful or beautiful? Will we try to shoehorn him into our plans or allow him to overturn them all? Will we seethe or will we love?

Audio is available here: The Lost Sons

One of the challenges to really hearing the Gospel is that, sometimes, we have heard it too much. We no longer hear it with freshness. Our brains are no longer capable of receiving its message as the most surprising and unbelievably Good News of all. I think this is especially the case when we read the parable of the Lost Son, which is our Gospel for today. We read it sentimentally, nostalgically, resting in the soft-focus portrayal of the loving father rising and watching day in and day out for his lost son to come home, the Hallmark slow-motion run together at the parable’s climax as father and son embrace. The joyful party. The father’s final words, “we had to celebrate and rejoice, because this brother of yours was dead and has come to life; he was lost and has been found,” can’t help but moisten every parents’ eye.

Who, having experienced family strife, does not long for this sort of reconciliation? Of course we do. And this longing, says Jesus, is a window into the desire of God to be reconciled to all his wayward children.

I do not want for a moment to mock this reading of the story. Not least because I think it’s true. But is there more to it than that? Does this story still have the capacity to shock, to surprise, to confront, to provoke the repentance and reflection that Lent is all about? Let’s see.

Luke sets this story provocatively. “Now all the tax collectors and sinners were coming near to listen to him.” That’s a tip off. Jesus is surrounded by the undesirables. Roman collaborators—Jewish people who worked for the occupying government, taking taxes from their fellow Jews and making their own living by adding to the tax. Zaccheus was one of these. The man who was stunted—both in stature and in spiritual formation—but who was attracted to Jesus, and who, when he found out that grace had found him, repented and made restitution.

Tax collectors, says Luke, and sinners. The undesirables. Those who are not like us. The ones on whom, obviously, God’s favour does not rest. To get inside the attitude of Jesus’ opponents here, you need to say the word with a little sniff while tilting your head.

And Jesus’ crime? He eats with these people. Table fellowship is a big deal for Jesus’ opponents. It is not the same as when I take one of our guests for a cup of coffee. It is to imply a relationship of some siginificance. A relationship of deep trust, intimacy, almost family. You know who you are by the company you keep. And Jesus was not simply keeping bad company, but he was keeping bad company in the most intimate of settings outside the marriage bed. He was keeping bad company at the table.

No wonder the Pharisees and the Scribes were grumbling.

In response to their complaints, Jesus tells three stories. The shepherd who goes in search of the lost sheep, the woman who scours her house for the lost coin, and the father who longs for the return of his lost son. The three come together—a point I’ll get to at the end. For now, just notice it. Our Gospel lesson is the third story. Let’s look at that one more closely.

A father has two sons. The younger comes to him and says, “Father, give me the share of the property that will belong to me.” This is not simply a brash and impatient and perhaps spoiled young man looking for a hand out. This is what he’s saying to his father: “If you won’t hurry up and die, give me my inheritance now. I wish you were dead because I’m done waiting.” Parents, can you imagine being on the receiving end of those words? We immediately want to sit in Oprah’s chair or Dr Phil’s and psychologize this young man. What trauma has he suffered to speak in such a way? But Luke has no time for our psychological speculations. There is nothing positive to this young man’s character. He does not honor his father. (The implication from the fifth commandment is that, as a result, his days will not be long on the earth).

And the father, in response to his son’s request, does not merely give the younger son his inheritance. He divides his estate between both sons. The older son receives his own share too. The father becomes, in effect, a guest on his sons’ farm. He divests himself of everything for both his sons. That’s not a detail we notice often, but there it is. The younger son and his older brother both cash in because of the former’s request.

After a few days, apparently, co-owning the family farm has lost its luster for the younger son and so he gathers up what’s his and moves far away, where he spends everything. And, desolate and hungry, this good Jewish boy hires himself out to a Gentile farmer to feed that farmer’s pigs, his only wage, it seems, the freedom to eat the pigs own food.

“But he came to himself.” There’s the pivot on which the whole story turns. He came to himself. To use the language of our AA groups that meet here on Tuesdays and Fridays, he hit rock bottom. He had a moment of intense clarity. And he repented. Repentance here, as throughout the Gospel, is not an emotional response but a volitional one. Regret, Remorse, Guilt emotions as natural as they are unpleasant—all of those come after repentance, not before. Repentance is simply a change of direction. He went into a far country. He came to himself. He resolves to return to his father. Do you see the parabola here?

When Jesus comes preaching, “Repent for the Kingdom of God has come,” he uses a word that means, literally, change your mind and metaphorically means turn around. And in this story we have both. He came to himself—his mind is changed. He returns to his father’s house—the direction is reversed.

And he returns to his father, and the father, while he was still far away, saw him coming. And he ran to meet him and welcomed him not as a slave but as a son. He put the ring—the sign of familial authority—on his finger (how could he do that if he already divided his inheritance among both his sons?). He called for a celebration. The lost is found.

Now, I’m an older brother. And if like me, you are an older sibling, you get the feelings of the older brother here. He didn’t provoke this fight. He didn’t squander up to half of the family fortune. He was the good son. He took his inheritance and honored his father with it. And he never got a party. How does he hear the words “Son, you are always with me and all that is mine is yours. But we had to celebrate and rejoice because this brother of yours was dead and has come to life; he was lost and has been found!”

It’s easy to work out who’s who in this parable, isn’t it? The tax collectors and sinners are the younger brother; the scribes and Pharisees are the older brother; and God is the father.  Fair enough. I’m not going to dispute that. But there are a couple of things you might want to notice.

First, neither in this story, nor in the previous ones, does Jesus dispute the scribes and the Pharisees moral assessment of the situation. These people, those with whom Jesus insists on having table-fellowship, are tax collectors and sinners. These people are, in the language of the first two parables, lost. They are in the wilderness. They are not safe in the fold. They need to be found. They need to be saved. The whole power of the story of the lost son rests on the accuracy of the Pharisees’ assessment.

Jesus, in having table fellowship with these people, does not say to his critics your assessment is wrong. They are every bit as good as you are. In insisting on table fellowship with these people, he is saying, your assessment is right. And that is exactly why I came. I am the shepherd in the wilderness and the woman in the house. I will not rest until every lost sheep is in the fold, every coin is recovered. And when they are, I will rejoice.

The second thing that sticks out as surprising to me is that the older son is lost, too. “This son of yours,” is how he begins his remarks to his father. He never left home,  but he’s estranged. The family bond is broken. And no, the father doesn’t throw him a party. But he does say, “You are always with me. All that is mine is yours,” The father doesn’t begrudgingly take it back from either son.

You know, there are some of us—and I know it’s true for me—who have grown comfortable with the good news. Like the older brother, we’ve been inside all along. We never left. I don’t have a conversion story, whether a rock star one like St. Augustine or Nicky Cruz or a plain one like J.I. Packer. I count that as a powerful testimony of the quiet Christian witness of my parents. I grew into the faith as naturally as I grew into my next pair of running shoes. Now, I can point to experiences of divine closeness in my life, don’t get me wrong. But I cannot point to one of them to say, that one was my conversion. Many of you are like that, too.

And our common temptation is to look and sniff and the joy and wonder of a new convert—who has moved from death to life, from being lost to being found. Do you hear the distance in the older brother’s words to his father: “This son of yours,” he says. Not “this brother of mine,” but “this son of yours.” The younger brother severed his relations with his family by moving away. It looks like the older brother severed his, too, but he never left home. How hard it is sometimes to see the grace of the one Father at work in the lives of our younger sisters, our younger brothers! And yet Jesus in this story insists that even if only one brother left, both are lost. Both need to be found. And when they are, it is a time of joy, whether it is the stupendous joy of a party or the quiet joy of receiving what was there all along.

That, it seems to me, is part of the offence of the Gospel. It tells us that we’re all sinners. It tells us that we’re lost. And we don’t like hearing that. If offends against our sensibilities. We are not sinners. How dare you say that? But the father says, rejoice, the son who was dead is come to life. The son who was lost has been found. The father says, I never left you. All that I have is yours.

And if we can’t hear the bad news about being lost, then it seems to me, we cannot hear the good news about being found, or how. The good news that is expressed in our Epistle: “For our sake, he made him to be sin who knew no sin, so that in him we might become the righteousness of God.”

The Epistle brings me to the third thing that sticks out to me: the love of God surpasses the love of the father in the parable. The father loves his son. But he does not search for him. He looks every day for his sons’ return, but he stays secure on the family farm.

Our Father is not that passive a father, that passive a lover of his wayward children. No. He sent his son, that Great Shepherd of the Sheep, into the wilderness to find the lost ones. That Son—our older brother—has gone into the far country to find us. To bring us home. To say to the holy angels with each baptism, here, I’ve found another one!

And the party to which he will bring us, we get to glimpse every Sunday when we come to present ourselves at this altar rail, to receive the gift of Christ’s own life poured into our hearts as we eat and drink together. This is no mere religious ritual. This is the foretaste of the end-time party where all God’s wilful children—both those who wandered and those who stayed at home—will be made welcome. There is no time for younger brothers to worry about whether we’ll really be accepted and even less for older ones to grumble about whose coming to dinner.

Here is the sign and seal that sin—our alienation from God—has been overcome. That Christ himself is the bridge that reconciles us to his Father, and ours. That Christ himself is the older brother who leaves the family farm to find us and bring us home. For God made him who knew no sin to become sin that we might become the righteousness of God.