Month: March 2018

The Great Vigil of Easter

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I’m a big fan of irony. I love it when she decides to come out and play. Tonight, perhaps, she is having some fun with us. On one hand, we are having an elaborate celebration full of bells, candles, lights, fantastic music, baptisms, Alleluia’s, chanting, processionals, and recessionals while on the other hand we get this simple, simple story from Mark’s Gospel. So what’s all the fuss about?

The two Mary’s and Salome (very practical women with the practical responsibility to anoint the dead body of Jesus) finds the stone to the entrance of the tomb rolled away. In it is a young man in a white robe giving very practical advice and observation. Upon seeing the tomb empty of Jesus’ body, and not initially taking the advice to go and tell Jesus’ disciples to meet up in Galilee because the women were seized with terror and amazement, makes tonight seem like we may be over doing it. Did you read the same text I read? Why all the pomp and circumstance?

And yet….the tomb is empty. Jesus is not there. He has been raised. He said he would meet up with his disciples in Galilee and that is what he is doing.

And yet…Peter and the other disciples were scattered like sheep. They denied, betrayed, and abandoned him.

And yet…Jesus still loves. Jesus still desires reconciliation, forgiveness, and peace. And should this be a surprise to us after all the readings and remembering’s we encountered during the Lenten Season? It’s the same old story AND the greatest story ever told all at the same time:

God loves us in spite of ourselves. God loves us because he is our God and we are his people. God loves us even when we are wandering aimlessly in the wilderness:  when we deny him, when we abandon him, when we hurt him. In those dark moments in our lives and when the stone tombs of our own hearts remain closed, it is he who opens it up. It is he who seeks us out. It is he who is utterly dedicated to us.

Tonight, the message is very simple and yet the message is profound. Tonight, God is being God in an old/new way. God is not where we think he should be (looking for love in all the wrong places), but where God needs always to be: Searching us out. Meeting up at our old stomping grounds. Making all things new. That’s the business of God. That’s who and what he does.

So I’m glad that tonight is one of celebration, and I’m also happy that the message we are celebrating is a simple one. As we look to more Alleluias tomorrow on Easter Sunday as well as over these next 50 days, live into the simple message of God’s love for us. Seek out the practical things that are of God’s and live boldly (with a little terror and amazement) that the tomb is empty, Jesus will gather instead of scatter, and He is risen. He is risen indeed!

**Preached at the Great Vigil of Easter at St. Julian’s Episcopal Church, 2018**

Good Friday

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Before all the processionals, and recessionals. Before all the robes, vestments, and liturgies. Before all the music, art, and architecture. Before all the ceremony, the pomp and circumstance. Before all the religions (splintering of religions), theologies, and ideologies in His name. Before all of this and more, there was the cross.

Jesus famously said, “Don’t call me good. There is nothing good but God alone” and yet today we call this Friday of all Fridays – Good. Why? Because it is God alone who centers himself into the very navel of the universe where life and death are joined. It is God alone who did a good thing even though the people who loved him the most abandoned him in the end. Nobody but God himself could have gone to the cross, and that is why nothing is purely good but God alone. The Psalmist once quipped, “For God alone my soul in silence waits” and yet today, tonight, and tomorrow, we wait no more because all was finished, all was accomplished, all was poured out on the cross.

Tonight there are no robes. The vestments and decorations have been put away. Tonight there is no Holy Eucharist. Like sheep, we are scattered. Tonight we don’t get to think of ourselves as taking up our own crosses because tonight we remember only the cross of Christ – Christ crucified. Christ dead. Christ buried.

**This reflection was preached at St. Julian’s Episcopal Church on Good Friday – 2018.**

Maundy Thursday

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A philosopher and a theologian sat down for drinks one evening. After staring into the dark liquid conforming to the shape of the highball, and listening to the ice clink against its glass while raising the rim to his lips, the philosopher asked this question, “Why is there something rather than nothing?”

The theologian mimicked the movements of his philosopher friend. Then after some time, and staring out the window into the night’s form answered the philosopher’s question with one of his own, “How does God love?”

The philosopher was taken aback once the second question sank in, for he realized that both questions pointed to the same answer, and although the answer was never plainly put forth that evening both parties spent the rest of the night discussing stories, tales, and heroic feats where the underlining theme pointed always to love.

“Take. Eat. “This is my body that is for you. Do this in remembrance of me.”

“Take. Drink. This cup is the new covenant in my blood. Do this, as often as you drink it, in remembrance of me.”

“Just as I have loved you, you also should love one another.”

Tonight is a special night. Tonight, we get to be both philosopher and theologian; and yet, we also get to transcend those labels. We get to remember, remain, and reflect, but we also are invited to participate in something rather than nothing. We get to share in God’s love. This is no easy task, for by remembering and sharing we also are commanded to love one another as Christ loves us. The theologian would then ask, “Then how (indeed) does God love?” Answer: With his substance, and with his very life.

It is in God where we live, move, and have our being. As Christians, we don’t find our way to God so much as we realize that we have been in God and God has been in us from the very beginning. Once this realization takes place, everything around us seems to change. Life is experienced as a gift, and all that we have, and all that we are, and all that we ever will be is experienced (or at least can be) experienced as grace. Grace, we find out, is received. Once received, we want to offer it back up to the one who gifted us with it. God obliges this instinct found within us, takes our offerings and multiplies them, transcending the original gift into one of abundance. And should these acts and attributes of God really surprise us? As catholic Christians perhaps not. After all, this is all played out each week during Holy Communion. We offer up the gifts we have been given symbolically through the bread and the wine. They are then brought to the altar, prayed over, and offered back to God. God takes these ordinary elements of bread and wine and transcends their realities into the very Body and Blood of Christ. This night is special because this is the night we remember how and why God instituted the sacrament of his Body and Blood.

This night is also special because Christ has taught us that he is not only present when we gather in this place, and do these liturgies in remembrance of him, but he is also made manifest when we perform the same acts of mercy that he has performed. Jesus said, “So if I, your Lord and Teacher, have washed your feet, you also ought to wash one another’s feet. For I have set you an example, that you also should do as I have done to you.”

Tonight, we not only wash one another’s feet in imitation of Christ, but we also do it to remind us to love our neighbors as ourselves when we take our feet and get up and get out of this place. Where have your feet been this week? Whose house have you visited? What sights did you see? Did your feet take you to places you wanted to be as well as places where God needed you to be? This is the attitude, I believe, Jesus was getting at when he was teaching his disciples. “Remember,” he could have stated, “all the places I have been, and all the people I have seen, healed, taught, dined, conversed, argued, loved, prayed, forgave. These are the same places and faces that you must now go. Do not worry, for I will be with you. Have no fear. Take up courage with your cross, and may your feet follow me – always.”

Finally, tonight is a special night because we remember God’s sacrifice. Theologian Matthew Levering once stated, “In a world gone wrong, there is no communion without sacrifice.” This Lent, we learned that God’s promise to us and to his people is that, “I will be your God and you will be my people.” We also learned that covenants and promises always require sacrifice. After Abraham learned that he would be the Father of many Nations, he made an animal sacrifice in remembrance of this. After Moses gives the law of God to the people, he does the same thing as Abraham. He sacrifices an animal and sprinkles its blood onto the people. God promised King David that his line of descendants will last forever. David’s son, Solomon later built the Temple – a place where sacrifices were made daily. On Palm Sunday, we read and recited Christ’s Passion, and how he like an animal was sacrificed for the sins of the world. Up until this point, all sacrifices to God (at least liturgically) were observed by the people. Bishop Robert Barron has stated that, “After Jesus (and with the institution of the Lord’s Supper) Christians don’t just watch the sacrifice happening, but we eat it and drink it. In other words, we take the sacrifice of Christ within our very bodies; thus experiencing the communion that God desires.” And doesn’t this fit in with our instincts as human beings? Do we not hurt either physically, mentally, or spiritually (sometimes all 3) when sacrifices are made in the short term for some greater glory in the long? In order to do this; however, our egos must be stripped away and left discarded having faith that we will be robed in new garments sometime in the future.

Tonight, we are philosophers and we are theologians, poets and prophets, sacrifices and the sacrificed stripped naked and laid bare before the mercies of God. Tomorrow may we be lovers and forgivers, explorers of truth and beauty, and neighbors who seek out one another just as Christ seeks and has always sought us out…for only in him do we will live, move, and have our being.

*Sermon preached at St. Julian’s Episcopal Church, Maundy Thursday, 2018.