In her sermon last Sunday, Connie talked about how the first chapter of Mark’s Gospel, which we have been hearing for the last several weeks, is an extended introduction to the entire Gospel, and how Mark uses it to give an intense, fast-paced, overall impression of Jesus and of his ministry. This, Chapter One is saying, is what it was like, this is what Jesus was like.

The chapter closes with this story we just heard—Jesus cleansing the leper. It’s an important story, and it’s deliberately crafted with the other leper story we heard, the one with Naaman, very much in mind.

"A leper came to him, begging Jesus." Being a leper was something very special, and very terrible, in Israel. Scholars today are not really sure exactly what diseases were intended, or described, by the word ‘leper’. In fact, there is ongoing debate over whether what we now call leprosy, or Hanson’s disease, was even included in the broad category of skin and related ailments that are so carefully, almost lovingly, described in Leviticus.

But whatever it was, leprosy was seen as just about the worst thing that could happen to you. To be a leper was not only, (or even, perhaps, not mainly,) to have a potentially horrible disease. To be a leper was to be defiled; it was to be cut off from every part of human society—from all the things that give richness and depth and meaning to life. To be a leper was to be cast out and isolated. Lepers had to warn people that they were coming, and they had to stand at a distance, apart, so decent folks would have a chance to get out of the way, and to avoid looking at them or dealing with them.

Even worse, to be a leper, everyone knew, was to be shunned by God, to be rejected even by the creator, and cursed in a special, and devastating way.

To have leprosy was to not really to be sick; it was to be unclean.

In fact, the Bible never talks about lepers being healed—it talks about lepers who are made clean. That’s a big difference.

This difference between regular disease and leprosy is a little bit like the modern difference between guilt and shame. Guilt has to do with feeling bad about, and regretting, something we have done, some action of ours. Guilt can be an appropriate and useful thing; and it is something we know other people share, and know about. Shame, on the other hand, has to do with a sense that it is not our actions, but our very being, the very core of who we are, that is evil, and stained, and wrong. To be truly ashamed is to feel apart from human society; to be somehow beneath the common lot of humanity. Unlike guilt, shame is always destructive, and it always misses the point. In Jesus’ day, to be a leper was not to have an illness, it was to be an abomination.

And they thought it was catching. Not just the disease, but the uncleanness that was the real issue. That’s why normal people couldn’t even get close to lepers; they couldn’t walk along the road, or share a meal, or touch, or have a conversation, with one. To do these things would make you unclean. Whether you got the disease or not, you shared the uncleanness, the basic wrongness, of the leper—at least for a while.

This is who came to Jesus begging for help. This is why this story is different from the other healings, from the folks like Peter’s mother-in-law and the people in the crowds who had all sorts of other diseases.

This one is different. This leper, like Naaman in the first reading, stands at the prescribed distance and shouts to Jesus about being made clean.

What happens next is especially important—it is the image of Jesus that Mark wants you to grab and to hold on to. You see, Jesus could have fixed the leper the old way, he could have cleansed him the way Elisha did, safely and from a distance, to show that God was powerful. Or he could have done it the way Naaman wanted, with great waving of hands and elaborate incantations and dancing about—to show, I guess, that God not only had power, but that he also had some style.

Jesus could have done it any of those ways.

Instead, Jesus did something new. He reached out and touched the man. Now, that wasn’t easy. Jesus had to walk, he had to move several paces to where the leper was—because the leper could not get within touching distance himself, that was not allowed. Jesus had to move there, and he had reach—he had to reach through all those centuries of fear and shame and law—of repulsion and of hostility; and he had to reach through the self-righteousness, and the smugness that can come from being well, from not being like them. Jesus had to reach through all of that; he had to become ritually unclean himself, before he could reach that leper.

But that’s what he did. And when he did that, the old ways were gone forever, and Jesus was showing, not mainly that God was powerful or that God was flashy, but that God was here, right here, right where you are, right where the leper was; and that God would stop at nothing, absolutely nothing, to make even the most defiled clean, and new again.

Touching lepers. That’s the image, the impression, that Mark wants us to have of what Jesus was like, and of what Jesus did.

It’s a wonderful snapshot of Jesus’ ministry, of his life. He took the extra steps it took to get there; he reached out through whatever was in the way, and he took the uncleanness upon himself, so that we could be, not just healed, but restored, and have even the shame taken away.

That’s still how it works, the same way; but we figure into it now, the Church figures into it now. ||We figure into it now, first, because this is what has happened to us. We have been touched, we have been made clean. That’s what Jesus has done for us. Even the worst parts of us, the leprous parts, the secret, hidden and shameful parts, these have been touched by our Lord, and whatever had been wrong with us he has taken upon himself, and conquered. He did that, and here we are. That’s first.

The second way we figure into it now is that this picture Mark gives us of Jesus’ ministry is also a model to us for our lives and our ministry. Here is what it can be like for us to live as we are called to live. It can look like touching lepers, like taking those steps, and reaching through whatever is in the way—including either, or both, our revulsion and our self-righteousness—and touching the ones who are placed in our path, and who come to us needing the embrace of Christ.

Now, there is no telling what the details of this will look like for us. But taking seriously this picture of Jesus touching lepers can make sense of both what God has been, and is still being toward us, and of who God will have us be in relationship to one another, and to the world we are given to serve.

It was a big deal, back then, touching a leper. It still is. And it’s about us.

The Lessons for today: II Kings 5.1-15b; Psalm 42; I Corinthians 9.24-27; Mark 1.40-45
 

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 A couple of weeks ago, the Adult Class finished a study of the parables; and during that I learned again how helpful it can be to look at stories in the Gospels while keeping especially in mind two important questions: First, what is inside and what is outside, and, second, who is inside and who is out. These questions were always foremost in the minds of the Gospel writers, and they can make a real difference for us, too.

Take the story of the paralytic we just heard. In the past, I’ve always approached it from the point of view of the man’s friends, or of Jesus. But asking who and where are in and out has given me a whole new set of questions to ponder—and, I hope, you will decide to ponder them, too.

First of all, in this story, it is very clear that being in is being in the house, close to Jesus, able to hear what he has to say. And being inside is clearly a good thing—lots of people wanted to get there. Jesus was really packing them in. We can, I think, safely assume that most of the crowd, the people who were in and around the house, were ordinary folks who were interested in what Jesus had to say. Doubtless they were good, decent, religious people. We know for sure that some of them were what Mark call Scribes. These guys were very religious—professionally religious in fact. Mark makes it clear that, while they were always (again professionally) on the lookout for errors and for heresy, they were just as quick to compliment Jesus as to criticize him; and they seemed just as willing as the next guy to welcome and to take seriously anything they saw as good, solid, teaching. Not bad people, not by a long shot—if perhaps a bit narrow and fussy.

Overall, you probably couldn’t find a better collection of people in all Capernaum. Local boy makes good, and draws a great crowd. That’s who’s in.

Now, being out is obviously being outside of the house, away from Jesus and from all of the other fine people who were there. It is also obvious who is out. It is the paralytic and his friends. They were on the outside, wanting to get in. They not only wanted to get in, they needed to. After all, the man on the matt was in a bad way—and he needed something no one in the crowd could give him. He needed Jesus, and what Jesus alone had to offer. No one else there, as decent and as religious as they may have been, could be of the slightest use to him. But he was outside, and his way was blocked.

Blocked by whom? Notice how this is different from so many of the stories about Jesus and people on the outside. The man in need was not shut out by social customs or ancient prejudices or hatreds. He was not on the outside because he was unclean like the leper we heard about last week, or because he was a brazen sinner like the woman taken in adultery, or because he was a despised outsider like the Samaritans we run into from time to time. He wasn’t kept out by the nasty Romans, or the smug, self-righteous Priests and Pharisees that so often get cast in that role. None of that. So, why was he on the outside?

Yeah, because all the good, decent people who had got there first were in the way. He and his friends couldn’t get through them; and there is not the slightest indication that any of them were about to move aside to let him through—to let him in—no matter how bad he looked (or, maybe, because of how bad he looked).

As far as they knew, or were concerned, he could lay on his mat at the edges of the crowd until the cows froze over. They were there first, they were in, and that was that. Maybe if the paralytic had arrived a little earlier...but he hadn’t.

In the end it took four strong men, more determination than we are likely to have, and some flagrant vandalism in order for this outsider to get in, to get access to Jesus, and to find what only Jesus had to give.

Now, the thing I want us to ponder is this business of who it was who kept this fellow on the outside, and away from Jesus. Again, it was the disciples and Jesus’ friends and what generally amounted to the best of the lot in town. They did it. They set up the wall it took more determination than most folks could ever muster to break through. They almost certainly didn’t mean to keep him out—at least with no more malice than comes with simply trying to keep your place in line and not letting a stranger cut in front of you. But they did it just as effectively as if they had wanted to. How odd, and how sad.

All of this reminds me how it is really rather refreshing to talk to people who stay away from Church for theological reasons—who don’t come because they don’t believe in what we say, because they can’t use the Prayer Book with a straight face. I can understand that, and I can appreciate that, and I have some things to say about that. But I don’t hear that very often.

Most of the people I talk to who don’t go to Church say something a bit like what Mahatma Gandhi, one of the great souls of this or any age, said about Christianity.

Gandhi said that he was drawn to, moved by, and deeply impressed by Jesus, and that he would have been a Christian, except that he had met too many of them.

Now, that may not be the best of intellectual arguments against the faith, but it is a powerful emotional one. Personal discontinuity between belief and behavior is one of the greatest ways of blocking access to people interested in engaging seriously in that belief. A few centuries ago, Voltaire wrote ironically and sadly about the man who was from China, and had been converted to Christianity there and who was on his way to 18^th Century Europe. The convert was terribly excited about leaving the pagan China of his birth and going to France, to a Christian nation, where everyone would love one another, turn the other cheek, and live, in ways great and small, the real truth of the Gospel. One can only imagine ‘the rest of the story’.

It’s something to ponder. These days, how does the crowd around Jesus—how does our crowd around Jesus—keep other people from finding him, and from finding what he alone has to give? After all, very few folks have four friends willing to tear a hole in the roof. They only have us, the crowd around Jesus, to make it possible to get to him.

The Lessons for today: Isaiah 43.18-25; Psalm 32; II Corinthians 1.18-22; Mark 2.1-12
 

A list of Sunday Scripture readings, with links to the Biblical Text:

Epiphany

Lent
 

Holy Week Preaching, 2005


Archive of St. Mary's Sermons from August 15, 2004

 

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Fr. Jim Liggett
P.O. Box 2949; Big Spring, TX  79721
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This page last updated on November 18, 2006

As I read from the Prayer Book on Wednesday, one of the main reasons Lent came to be was as a special, intense, summary of the much longer catechumenate, or time of preparation for Baptism. From the earliest years of the Church’s life, Lent was a time when people looked toward making, or renewing, their Baptismal Covenant. Still today, there are several very real ways in which all of Lent leads up to us reaffirming our own Baptismal covenant. That’s why the Baptismal Font has been moved out during Lent, so we can literally bump into what the season is about.

You see, when the Bible talks about the fundamental relationships between people and God, it always uses the same word—covenant. A covenant is like a contract; it is a promise of certain things, of certain behavior. The Old Testament readings this Lent are pretty much a history of the covenants, the promises, God has made with Israel, and they all build to the events of Holy Week—where God establishes a new covenant, a final covenant, with us. Try to pay some special attention to the readings from the Old Testament this Lent, and, as you do this, remember that it is through our Baptism that we become part of God’s new covenant.

So we begin Lent with Noah, and with the first covenant the Bible talks about. We all know the story of the flood—it is a story about the power of sin. The story begins when, in the words of Genesis, "the wickedness of man was great in the earth, and the earth was filled with violence." The response of a just God to such a dreadful situation was that creation itself collapses. (Remember the imagery of the first chapter of Genesis where God separated the waters of chaos and held them back, and so made creation possible? At the flood, the gates of heavens open, these waters return, and virtually everything created was destroyed. Noah’s flood was not pictured as just a whole lot of rain. It was seen as the creation story in reverse.)

Now, one of the main things the flood story says is that the natural, expected consequence of human sin is destruction—a destruction so total that virtually nothing is left. This is the background for God’s first covenant.

Now, after the flood, just a few verses before today’s lesson begins, God looks at Noah and makes his first covenant with humanity: and God’s words, the content of the covenant itself, are these:

Notice that there are two parts to the covenant—it talks about both people and nature. ||As far as people are concerned, the flood didn’t change anything. People were just as evil after it as they were before. "The imagination of man’s heart is evil from his youth." So it was, so it will be. What the covenant changed was God; and the way God responds to the reality of human life beings.

If you think about it, it’s truly stunning: The promised response of God, the covenanted response of God, to a humanity that is fundamentally evil, is not justice, it is not wrath. Instead, it is mercy. God decided to find some way other than wiping us out to respond to the brokenness of humanity. That’s the first part of the covenant. And there is more. Not only is humanity spared, but we are given a world that is basically in order. Nature and creation are regular and dependable. Seasons, fertility, all of that, is a free gift from God. They will happen all by themselves.

This is a sort of Divine Policy Decision, and it is so strange, so unlike him, that God needs to sort of wrap a string around his finger, the rainbow, to remind himself of it.

Now, the best we can tell, every other people and religion in the Ancient Near East had a flood story very much like Israel’s. (This seems to be a part of human religious consciousness.) But none of them had anything like the story of the covenant. This insight was unique to Israel. This understanding of God set Israel apart from everyone else. It made them different, and it transformed the meaning and purpose of their religious life and their religious observance.

You see, there was one overriding, practical purpose for the religions of all of Israel’s neighbors. Religion was there to persuade or to bribe the gods so they would be in a good mood. Being in a good mood meant, first of all, that the gods wouldn’t get mad at you and destroy the world and everything in it and; second of all, it meant they would do their jobs and keep the seasons running on schedule and the fields, animals and people fertile. The purpose of most religious rituals was to insure that the sun would come up in the morning, Spring would follow Winter, harvest follow planting, and so on. All religious activity was directed toward keeping creation on course, and so preserving human life.

But Israel was different, and we are different. All of the stuff that is of the very essence of so many other religions is understood to be ours by gift, by covenant. We don’t have to be good, or be pious, or make sacrifices, in order for the human race to continue, or for the ground to be fertile, or for the seasons to follow each other. All of that is just given to us. The reason for this, oddly enough, is that " the inclination of the human heart is evil from his youth"

So the purpose and direction of religious observance had to be different for Israel—and it has to be different for us. Our relationship with God, our covenant history, does not begin with being afraid of what God might do to us. It begins with God’s gift of mercy. The story of the Flood, and the Covenant with Noah, is good news; it is very good news.

We see the same sort of thing in the Gospel. Mark wastes no words, and rushes almost breathlessly through his story. Jesus is baptized, proclaimed as God’s beloved son, and driven by the Holy Spirit into the wilderness to face temptation. But here, too, the gift comes first. Jesus is not told that if he does things just right out in the wilderness, if he overcomes temptation and passes all the tests, then he will be God’s beloved son. Jesus is not told that he is God’s son and if he is real good he can get to be beloved of the Father. No, he will be God’s beloved son no matter what he does.

Jesus is driven into the wilderness to work out the consequences, the implications, of God’s gift. Will he live out fully and honestly his identity, or will he settle for something a little less? How will he stand in relationship to a God who has already given him so great a gift? These are the issues of the wilderness for Jesus, just as they were Israel’s issues, just as they are ours.

For what lies behind our Lent, and any of our religious activity, is the gift of God’s love, the relationship of mercy he has established with us by covenant—beginning with Noah, and coming to fullness in Jesus Christ.

As we try to observe the discipline of Lent; and as we, from time to time, find ourselves driven into wilderness of temptation, doubt, fear, and dependence, as we wonder about our religion and our relationship to God, we need to realize that we are a people of God’s covenants. Like Israel, like Jesus in the wilderness, we are not in this to earn anything. We are in this to discover what it will look like for us to live under the rainbow, to be beloved children of God.

The Lessons for today: Genesis 9.8-17; Psalm 25; I Peter 3.18-22; Mark 1.9-13
 

A list of Sunday Scripture readings, with links to the Biblical Text:

Lent

Holy Week

Easter
 

Holy Week Preaching, 2005


Archive of St. Mary's Sermons from August 15, 2004

 

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Fr. Jim Liggett
P.O. Box 2949; Big Spring, TX  79721
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Stmarys@stmarysbst.org 

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This page last updated on November 18, 2006

Lent II, Year B, March 12, 2006           

It’s Lent, and I’m moved to preach like that today, so bear with me. We just heard a great deal about such Lenten themes as sacrifice, loss, and giving up our lives. All of which raise a big question, and an important one: What does God want from us? What does it mean for us to follow faithfully the God of Abraham, the God of Isaac, and the God of our Lord Jesus Christ?

The Lessons for today: Genesis 2.1-14; Psalm 16; Romans 8.31-39; Mark 8.31-38
 

A list of Sunday Scripture readings, with links to the Biblical Text:

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Holy Week

Easter
 

Holy Week Preaching, 2005


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Fr. Jim Liggett
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This page last updated on November 18, 2006

By Deacon Janice Byrd

The gospel today is sometimes interpreted to be an example of Jesus’ anger and hence his humanity; his actions of herding out the animals and overturning the tables are pointed to as examples of his ability to display anger. To focus on isolated attributes or emotions as proof of Jesus’ humanity is in effect to seek after signs to base one’s faith on surface evidence without perceiving the deeper reality. The underlying reality of the Fourth Gospel narrative is that "the word became flesh", Jesus’ humanity pervades everything he says and does in his ministry. The scandal of this part of the gospel is not Jesus’ anger as proof of his humanity, but the authority this human being claims for himself through his words and his actions.

The Lessons for today: Exodus 20.1-7; Psalm 19.7-14; Romans 7.13-25; John 2.13-22
 

A list of Sunday Scripture readings, with links to the Biblical Text:

Lent

Holy Week

Easter
 

Holy Week Preaching, 2005


Archive of St. Mary's Sermons from August 15, 2004

 

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Fr. Jim Liggett
P.O. Box 2949; Big Spring, TX  79721
(432) 267-8201 (phone)

Stmarys@stmarysbst.org 

The page background is courtesy  of  Windy's Page designs.

This page last updated on November 18, 2006

For about 1,000 years this Sunday, the fourth Sunday in Lent, has been a bit special. It even has some special names: It is called Laetare Sunday, Mothering Sunday, and, more commonly, Refreshment Sunday. This last is for a couple of reasons. The first is that, in the Middle Ages, Lenten disciplines (which were really strict) were relaxed a bit—by the middle of Lent, folks needed a break. The second is because this Gospel, John’s account of the feeding of the multitudes, was always read on Lent IV.

So today I want to take this story just as we receive it from John, along with the first reading we heard, and say something about them, something that has a lot to do with Lent, and where we are in Lent.

The place to begin is with the grim account in II Chronicles, which tells the story of the fall of Jerusalem to the neo-Babylonians (that’s who the Chaldeans were), in 587 B.C. It begins as a story of hopelessness and failure.

God had done everything for Israel. God created the nation, delivered the people from slavery, gave them the land, the temple, the law; and so much more. What God asked in return was that his special nation respond by loving obedience—by being a faithful witness to God who had done so much for them.

But they failed; they blew it. It was so much easier to be like everybody else than it was to be who they were called to be. It was so much easier to be like everybody else than it was to trust in the protection and care of God. It was just easier to be like everyone else.

Israel’s failure was not really a failure to keep the rules—that’s secondary. It was at its heart a failure of mission. Israel was called to be the place where the world could look and see what life with God was really like; and so, by seeing that, the world would be drawn to God. However, instead of offering the world a vision, Israel offered a mirror.

What happened next Israel understood as judgment. The kingdom was conquered, the land was deserted, the temple was destroyed, and the people were taken into exile. One thousand years of Israel’s covenant with God were finished—all that remained was ashes, rubble, and a few slaves in a distant land. No one could blame God—it was the people’s fault. They just didn’t have what it took. The story was over. Israel couldn’t help herself, and God did not seem to be in much of a mood to be helpful, either. ||Hold on to that picture—it’s the way into the Gospel and Refreshment Sunday.

After all, John’s account of the feeding of the multitude, while a whole lot less intense than the story of Israel’s collapse, also starts out as a story about failure. Jesus has been teaching, and has attracted a good-sized following—a crowd.

Now, in spite of having the good sense to be interested in Jesus, it is otherwise a pretty ordinary crowd, almost a mob. Like a whole bunch of crowds before and since, this one had much more enthusiasm than good sense. So, when Jesus finished up where he was and moved down the road to the next county, the crowd just up and followed right along, with no apparent thought for the necessities or the consequences. Not a Boy Scout among them, no one was even close to prepared.

They just sort of wandered along until their stomachs started growling and it slowly dawned on them that it was dinner time and it would sure be nice if they had made a plan or packed a lunch or something. ||So, Jesus points this situation out to the disciples (who probably should have seen it coming and made some kind of arrangements) and they are completely overwhelmed.

It’s clear that the disciples were ready to announce that everyone had to go home, get their own stuff, and maybe come back another day. (After all, hungry crowds have always had a long history of getting downright nasty.) Like the story of Israel, this little story was over. Somebody, the crowd or the disciples or both, had blown it, and that was the end of that.

But the end is not what happened. It’s not what happened to Israel; it’s not what happened to that hungry crowd. Instead, something very different happened, something totally unexpected, indeed something impossible.

First of all, Israel came home, the exile ended. But be sure to notice Israel didn’t leave Babylon the way they had hoped and expected they would—with miracles and victories and God leading the way with angels and pillars of fire—like happened in the Exodus.

Instead, the least likely of people, the pagan King of Persia, became the instrument that God used to preserve his covenant and to save his people. No one could have imagined it. Some great Jewish leader, or God himself, was supposed to do stuff like this—not an unclean foreigner who had never heard of the Law and who didn’t know Moses from a hole in the ground. But there you are.

Second of all, the crowd got fed. Not by a wealthy benefactor who was moved to generosity (either by what Jesus said or by the crowd’s need), and then rushed to the rescue; not by Jesus pulling off a flashy miracle like turning stones into bread. (I think Jesus had already been there.) And not by manna falling from the sky like in the old stories. Instead, as John tells it, there is this "boy"—the Greek is a diminutive form that can refer to a slave, or a young child of either sex. This is a person of no value, no status, no learning, no resources, no prospects and no reason to be noticed. This is who shows up with what is necessary for the best thing possible to happen. This was the last person in the world anyone would expect to come to the rescue of the disciples and the crowd. It wasn’t supposed to work like that. But there you are.

Both of these stories are types of what Paul means when he says, again and again, "by grace you have been saved...and this is not your own doing." We cannot rely on ourselves, we cannot rely on our expectations and preconceptions, we cannot rely on our own best efforts, we cannot rely on what has happened before or what we would like to happen now. (We can’t even rely on the lottery).

If Lent has taught us anything by now, it has taught us that this whole business of relationship with God—whether we are talking about salvation or spiritual growth or the life of prayer and discipline—this is not about us, and it is not from us—it is all gift, surprising, unpredictable, frustrating, undeserved and unexpected gift. It doesn’t matter how bad things look, it doesn’t matter how messed up we are or we have been. Instead, what matters is that God is with us, and there is always hope, and this hope usually comes from very a unexpected direction. Pagan Kings, useless children, a criminal’s painful death on a cross. There’s no telling.

This Refreshment Sunday we pause in the midst of Lent to do two things. First, we remember that everything comes from God, and that he absolutely will not desert us—so we need to keep our patience intact, our hope alive, and our eyes open for the unexpected.

Second, we live out a little taste of that hope, just like we do every Sunday. Because every Sunday it is our turn to sit down on the mountain-side; and we join that crowd in the Gospel. Don’t ever forget that the bread we share here comes directly from one of those twelve baskets of left-overs, and there is always enough. No matter what.

The Lessons for today: II Chronicles 36.14-23; Psalm 122; Ephesians 2.4-10; John 6.4-15
 

A list of Sunday Scripture readings, with links to the Biblical Text:

Lent

Holy Week

Easter
 

Holy Week Preaching, 2005


Archive of St. Mary's Sermons from August 15, 2004

 

Back to St. Mary's Homepage
 

Fr. Jim Liggett
P.O. Box 2949; Big Spring, TX  79721
(432) 267-8201 (phone)

Stmarys@stmarysbst.org 

The page background is courtesy  of  Windy's Page designs.

This page last updated on November 18, 2006

 By Deacon John Marshall

It is now the 5th week in Lent and we are starting, possibly, to feel the strain of our Lenten discipline to which we have strapped ourselves-I remember in my younger days when I was trying to get in shape for taking off to the hills and doing some hiking I would take a backpack and put three or four one gallon water jugs in it and then take off around the neighborhood and try to get in shape. I have gotten over that phase by the way. Taking on a Lenten discipline can seem a little bit like that sometimes, putting on a back pack full of one gallon water jugs. Sometimes we would just like to forget it but we keep feeling the weight of that decision pressing on us, like that heavy backpack following us around.

The Lessons for today: Jeremiah 31,31-34; Psalm 51; Hebrews 5,1-10;  John 12.20-33   
 

A list of Sunday Scripture readings, with links to the Biblical Text:

Lent

Holy Week

Easter
 

Holy Week Preaching, 2006


Archive of St. Mary's Sermons from August 15, 2004

 

Back to St. Mary's Homepage
 

Fr. Jim Liggett
P.O. Box 2949; Big Spring, TX  79721
(432) 267-8201 (phone)

Stmarys@stmarysbst.org 

The page background is courtesy  of  Windy's Page designs.

This page last updated on November 18, 2006

This morning I want to talk in a roundabout sort of way, about the Peace, that part of the service where we greet one another in the name of the Lord. It’s been a while; and I’ve had a couple of questions. To get at this, I want to give three pictures, or images, of this ritual. The place to begin, and the first picture, is with the Gospel we always hear on the Sunday after Easter Day. It is the story, from John’s gospel, of Jesus’ appearing to his disciples after the resurrection.

As the Gospel begins, it is Easter; the day of the resurrection. The disciples have heard from Peter and another disciple that the tomb is empty. So they gather. The doors are locked—the disciples are afraid. Perhaps they are afraid that they will now be persecuted as Jesus was. Maybe they are afraid that they will be accused of stealing his body. But maybe they were afraid for still another reason.

Consider this: The last time most of these folks saw Jesus was when he was arrested. They fled. They hid, they deserted him, they denied they knew him. They did whatever they could to save their own skins, and they left Jesus on his own. Each and every one of them had treated Jesus poorly. They had hoped that he would be a messiah who would raise armies and establish Justice. They thought he had failed and died. Then they heard he might have returned.

Now, under those circumstances, who would you be more afraid of, a few Roman soldiers and a High Priest, or an angry messiah who had come back from the dead, maybe this time to establish justice, maybe beginning with you? What if he had come back? What if he remembered what you had done when he needed you?

The doors were locked where the disciples were. Think about those doors, locked from the inside; think about the guilt, the fear, the uncertainty, the shame and the hurt that those doors kept inside. Then Jesus came and stood among them.

There was no place to hide. There he was, and he knew how the disciples had treated him. There was silence. Then Jesus spoke; what he said was the traditional rabbinic greeting, a formula, a stock phrase; words they had heard from him hundreds, if not thousands of times.

But the words they heard would never again mean the same thing. Their meaning would be forever shaped by this instant. The abandoned Lord stood among his cowardly and failed followers and said, "Peace be with you." Not "Where were you?" Not "Gotcha"; not even "You hurt me"; but "Peace be with you." Now, the kingdom of God was fully alive and present at this moment. This is what God’s victory is like. This is where we begin. We begin with a love so strong that it overwhelms even the best reasons to hate, the best reasons to separate, the best reasons to say them and us. That’s what the kingdom of God is like.

Now, as you may have noticed, what we call the real world is not like this. It is not like this at all. In the world we live in, we are divided, we are afraid, we compare, we look at differences, we pay attention to race and to money and to age and to the way people dress and look. We hold grudges, we get even, (or we try to, or we want to); and we just plain don’t like some folks. Even some folks in Church. The kingdom of God has not yet arrived in its fullness. The world we live in is not very much like the Kingdom of God; at least not very often.

But sometimes it is. Sometimes we grasp a tiny bit of that first Easter, sometimes we grasp a tiny bit of the kingdom. One of the things that the Eucharist is about is this, every Sunday, we reach out, and bring to this place, bits of the kingdom. We do this in a lot of ways. For one, we do this as we come forward for communion. We don’t come because we’re hungry. It doesn’t fill us up, but we are fed. We are fed here like we are fed in the kingdom—with the very stuff of God.

For another, we do this when we say the Creed. On any given Sunday, any one of us, individually, may well have our doubts about one part of the Creed or another. There are weeks when the whole thing is just too much of a stretch. But we still stand up and say, "We believe"—just like we will in the Kingdom of God, when everything is perfectly clear. When we do this, we are not being dishonest, we are living in hope. We take a bit of the food of the kingdom, and a bit of the faith of the Kingdom, and we bring them here, and, for a while at least, they are ours.

This is also what we do at the Peace. We reach into the past, into Jesus’ coming into that upper room. And we reach into the future, into that day the kingdom has come in its fullness. And we bring, from the past and from the future, a small token of the kingdom, and we say, "the peace of the Lord be with you."

Remember, this is a theological action, not a social event; and sharing the peace with those around you is exactly the same sort of thing as is coming forward for the bread and the wine. We don’t share the peace because we like one another and it’s nice to say "hi". While it is nice when we do like one another, that’s no more the point than the point of communion is the wine’s vintage or the wafer’s tasty crunchiness (and thank heavens for that.)

We share the peace because the Lord Jesus is risen from the dead and brings Peace to those who follow Him; and because he commands us to do the same. We share the peace because, in the kingdom of God, all of our differences, and all that separates us, will yield to the power of the love of God.

Now, sharing the peace during Communion is not a new idea. It’s been in the Eucharist from the earliest days; and it was even in the very first Anglican Prayer Book.

But then it pretty much faded away, until one national Church in our Communion brought back this ancient practice, and so began its restoration for all of us. That was the Church of South India. Can you guess why restoring the peace was so important there?

It was because of India’s deeply entrenched caste system. You see, people in India who were of different castes did not have dealings with one another and they certainly did not touch one another. Ever. Now, the Gospel of Jesus Christ has something to say about the caste system; and the Gospel is supposed to replace that system with something different. But doing that is very difficult in a place like India.

The church of India realized pretty quickly that restoring the Peace was dreadfully important. So they did it; and for thousands of Indian Christians, the very first time they actually spoke to, touched, and greeted their brothers and sisters in Christ who were of a lower caste was when the peace became a part of the liturgy.

For a Brahmin to turn to an untouchable, and touch that person (it is all very formal, the actions are carefully mapped out) and say "The peace of the Lord be with you", this was a radical, and a transforming, action. It was bringing a bit of the kingdom into the present. While it was understandably controversial, it was also necessary, and it makes a difference.

These are two pictures of the Peace. The first is the Risen Lord coming to is frightened and failed disciples, and bringing them, not what they deserved, but instead a bit of the Kingdom of God. The second is India, where the Church discovered that the best way to confront social and personal barriers that were as ancient and entrenched as they were unchristian, was to restore this moment of the Kingdom. There is a third picture. We are that third picture.

Because we do the same thing, for the same reasons. We do as the risen Lord did on Easter morning. We live out a miracle—the new creation of God, where all of the very real barriers that stand between and us and God, and that stand between us, where these barriers are removed by the loving sacrifice of Jesus.

That’s what the Peace is really about. That’s why it is a part of our worship. It is a symbolic and a deeply religious action. It is an action that speaks of what God has done for us, and is doing for us, and will do for us. It is a time when we reach both into the past and into the future—back to that first Easter, and forward into the Kingdom of God. We bring back a small flower from that journey into the kingdom— and we share that flower with one another.

It all started on Easter Sunday when the doors were locked and the disciples were afraid, and Jesus came, and stood among them and said "Peace be with you."

Easter III, Year B, April 30, 2006

Does it ever bother you when at least one of the bad guys in an international tragedy is a bunch of Christians? It bothers me. The genocide in Bosnia, the long and grotesque Civil War in Lebanon, the ability of Christians of two different flavors in Northern Ireland to blow one another up in a variety of creative and interesting ways for several centuries, many of the long-running tribal and civil wars in both Africa and Latin America, not to mention things closer to home like the Oklahoma City bombing, all remind us that you can’t tell the good guys from the bad guys just by checking out their religious preferences.

The Lessons for today: Acts 4.5-12; Psalm 98; I John 1.1--2.2;  Luke 24.36b-48   
 

A list of Sunday Scripture readings, with links to the Biblical Text:
 

Eastertide

Sundays after Pentecost

Holy Week Preaching, 2006


Archive of St. Mary's Sermons from August 15, 2004

 

Back to St. Mary's Homepage
 

Fr. Jim Liggett
P.O. Box 2949; Big Spring, TX  79721
(432) 267-8201 (phone)

Stmarys@stmarysbst.org 

The page background is courtesy  of  Windy's Page designs.

This page last updated on November 18, 2006

The Fourth Sunday of Easter is always Good Shepherd Sunday and there are always sheep everywhere you look. This year they are especially thick—we have two of the most familiar and cherished portions of scripture—the 23^rd Psalm and that place in John’s Gospel where Jesus says "I am the good shepherd."

Historically, this image of Jesus as the good shepherd and his followers as sheep has been, for whatever reasons, terribly appealing. The amount of stained glass, painting, music, and poetry that it has inspired is truly staggering; and the number of sermons, articles, hymns, and meditations devoted to it is doubtless vast beyond measure. So, it is with great trepidation that any preacher enters this particular field, and tackles these particular critters. You need to watch where you step.

Still, in all the words I have read and heard on the subject of the good shepherd and his sheep, there is one thing about it that I have never heard anyone else talk about, and that I want to dwell on a bit this morning. That has to do with the simple question of ‘why in the world do shepherds have sheep in the first place?’ Now, I don’t know a lot about sheep; but I suspect that shepherds keep sheep for pretty much the same reasons that ranchers keep cows, farmers keep wheat, and the Colonel keeps chickens.

Being a shepherd and taking care of sheep, and being a sheep and having a shepherd, are, sooner or later, going to have something to do with wool and with mutton. There’s just no avoiding it. And this little reality never shows up in the stained glass windows, or in the cutesy paraphrases of the 23^rd Psalm. But keep that in mind: wool, and mutton.

Actually, I find this rather encouraging. After all, one of the problems with this shepherd and sheep business—as popular as it is—is that sheep tend to be passive, stupid, unimaginative, docile and dull. So, if we are the sheep of our Lord’s pasture, does that then mean we are supposed to be like sheep: hanging around, not doing much, looking cute, and being taken care of because there is absolutely no way we could survive for fifteen minutes on our own? Is the whole point of the story that we are not worth very much; and that we are not very capable? I don’t think so.

Remember, shepherds don’t generally keep sheep as pets; I gather they aren’t all that much fun to have around. Instead, shepherds keep sheep for a purpose, there are reasons for the whole enterprise, and expectations for all concerned. The sheep are useful, they are important, indeed they are necessary. If the sheep don’t produce, the shepherd is flat out of business. Which brings us back to wool and mutton. This is the piece that is about us, it is about our part of what is going on with this familiar and comfortable talk about the good shepherd. The Lord expects things of us, and if we don’t come through, well, there are no contingency plans.

We have to be careful here, and keep things straight. The point is not that there is fine print on Jesus’ promise to be the good shepherd; or that he is only a good shepherd for the most useful of the sheep. Jesus isn’t going to leave us to the wolves or turn us into dog food, (or whatever it is you do with worthless sheep), if we don’t produce. The Lord cares for us and has blessed us. He has laid down his life for us. That sacrifice, that love, that continued care, these are simply gifts. They are given without condition and without exception. We don’t try to do stuff in the hope that God will be nicer to us.

None the less, there are expectations—there is the business of wool and mutton. The care that the Lord offers us is supposed to lead to something, something real and substantial.

We are to produce, to give back, from what we can do, from what our situation in life is, from our various skills, abilities, resources, and gifts. And, as with sheep, what we produce has to do with who we are.

We don’t grow wool, that is not of our nature. But it is of our nature to worship and to serve; to reach out and to share; to study and to pray; to increase in holiness and to tell the truth; to seek for justice and to be willing to sacrifice. It is of our nature to chose to grow, in a disciplined and steady way, into the fullness of the stature of the person of Christ; and to do this in community, and with integrity. This is expected of us. This is not about Church-work, although that can be part of it. This is about the work of the Church, which is much larger and much more interesting.

And that costs, it can cost a lot—which is where the wool and the mutton come in.

At the same time, remember that this also means that each and every one of the sheep has purpose, and value and worth; and that each is important. Each and every one of us can contribute, and is called to contribute, in one way or another, to the mission of the Church. You can’t be too young or too old or too new or too sick or too ordinary or too uneducated, or too anything to avoid the reality of wool and all that.

We are needed, and without us, without any single one of us, the mission and work of the Lord and his church are impoverished. We matter; and things are expected of us. We aren’t pets, kept for the owners amusement. We are valuable assets.

One of the truths of the biblical story that our culture is eager to forget, is that there is no such thing as being chosen for privilege. We are not chosen, picked out, protected by our good shepherd, for the sake of our own comfort, convenience, personal needs or ease of life. Instead, this care and protection is always given that we might be better equipped for service. It always means that something special, something more, is expected.

To be sure, Jesus is the good shepherd, he pays the price, and protects us and cares for us. That is the way it is; but there is more to it. than that. We are valuable, and important; and we have an essential role to play in all of this. There is the business of wool, and of mutton.

The Lessons for today: Acts 4.23-37; Psalm 23; I John 31.1--2.2;  Luke 24.36b-48   
 

A list of Sunday Scripture readings, with links to the Biblical Text:
 

Eastertide

Sundays after Pentecost

Holy Week Preaching, 2006


Archive of St. Mary's Sermons from August 15, 2004

 

Back to St. Mary's Homepage
 

Fr. Jim Liggett
P.O. Box 2949; Big Spring, TX  79721
(432) 267-8201 (phone)

Stmarys@stmarysbst.org 

The page background is courtesy  of  Windy's Page designs.

This page last updated on November 18, 2006

"We know that we have passed from death to life, because we love one another." This week and next week, we hear about love. The lessons are from both John’s Gospel and the first letter of John; and they focus sharply on the command to love, and the importance of love for the Christian and the Christian community. Today I want to talk about this fascinating verse from the Epistle.

"We know that we have passed from death to life, because we love one another." (The RSV says "because we love the Brethren", making things a bit clearer). Think about that; it’s an amazing statement. John is saying that if we want to know where we stand with God, there is really only one place we need to look; and it is not where we usually think it is. The place to look to find out how we stand with God is not what religious experiences we have had; it is not how we feel about things, (not even how we feel deep inside); it is not what we have suffered; it is not what we have learned; it is not what we think or what we have seen. Instead, the place to look is whether we love one another.

This is a wonderful expression of an odd truth of the Christian life, one that the Church has always known: The way we check up on our spiritual life, the way we find out how well or poorly we are doing, is not by looking at our prayers, or at our spiritual and religious experiences. Instead, it is by looking at our morality. Our spirituality is ‘working’, whatever that means, if we are sinning less. If we are not sinning less, then we have a problem with our spirituality.

Often, this seems a dirty trick. It doesn’t seem to be fair that the heart of our spirituality should be so intimately connected to the way we respond to a bunch of people we accidentally end up living with or going to Church with. Still, this is what John is talking about.

Think about it, if loving one another means anything at all, if it refers to any real people at all, then it must be talking about, at the very least and at the very first, our families—our families at home and our parish family. These words no doubt mean a lot more than this, but they cannot mean any less than this and mean anything at all. After all, it is almost always easier to love everybody, to love humanity, than it is to love anybody in particular, and especially those who are closest to us.

This is a central insight of the Christian faith. There are some institutions, and some people in them, that God puts into our lives primarily so that we will have to learn how to love them, and so discover what love really is, whether we want to or not. These "schools of love" include, at the very least, the family and the church, especially the local church. Notice just one of the things these two have in common: They both bring us into very important, and very deep, relationships with people we otherwise, quite likely, would have absolutely nothing to do with. And the main reason they do this is not to insure that we will always enjoy ourselves; but, instead, to help us grow, to help us become more than we would otherwise be.

This can be a refreshing perspective, and can put a different look on things. After all, we so often expect the places and the people of our lives to be there to keep us comfortable, and to meet whatever needs we think we have right now. So whenever that doesn’t happen, we feel justified in leaving.

But the primary people in our lives are not given to us to make us constantly satisfied. Instead, God has given us each other mainly to drag us, sometimes kicking and screaming, deeper into the life of love and service that he knows is what we truly need the most. God has given us one another in order that we may become better than we are now.

If we take a look at our families, and at our parish, we will almost always find all sorts of variety and not a few surprises. In part, (and in both) we will find exactly the people we would choose if we were choosing. In part, (and in both) we will find people we most certainly would not choose if we were choosing. What’s more, if we look at the people we thought we were choosing, like our spouses, we discover that the person we are living with is, perhaps to understate the matter a bit, not exactly the same person we imagined he or she would be when the choosing happened.

The fact is, the people who constitute at least these two vital parts of our lives are gifts from God to help us pass from death into life. Some of the business of living all of this out is supposed to be delightful; but some of it is supposed to be really hard. Living in these schools of love can, and should, draw from us the very best we have to offer. (Also, since it is so important, and since it does involve such a level of depth, all of this can also draw the very worst from us as well. The stakes are very high.)

In opposition to this is the current cultural fantasy that says that if a relationship is meant to be, it will be easy, and simple, and natural—and if it isn’t, well, then leave where you are and keep looking until you find one that is.

That’s absurd. There are always hard times when people try to live together in a relationship of love. It’s supposed to be that way. After all, God isn’t finished with any of us yet.

In some sense, God has just thrown us all together, willy-nilly, and said that it is here, with these folks, these relatives, these friends, these people who just show up, it is with these that we are to learn to love.

But there is another piece of that as well. You see, I also suspect that one of the main things these ‘schools of love’ also do is that they also give us some real practice for living in the kingdom of God. Remember, God has created us to live eternally with him and also with a vast and surprising assortment of folks that he has called together and we have not chosen—so we might as well start getting used to it now.

In any event, I offer you this way of looking at many of the people in our lives. Perhaps they are gifts to us from God, but not as we usually count gifts. Perhaps they are here, not to please us or to do what we want them to do; but for another reason. Perhaps they are simply brethren, and are placed before us to help us grow, and to give us some practice for life in the Kingdom of God.

For we know we have passed from death to life, because we love on another.

The Lessons for today: Acts 8.26-40; Psalm 66.1-11; I  John 3.14-24;  John 14.15-21   
 

A list of Sunday Scripture readings, with links to the Biblical Text:
 

Eastertide

Sundays after Pentecost

Holy Week Preaching, 2006


Archive of St. Mary's Sermons from August 15, 2004

 

Back to St. Mary's Homepage
 

Fr. Jim Liggett
P.O. Box 2949; Big Spring, TX  79721
(432) 267-8201 (phone)

Stmarys@stmarysbst.org 

The page background is courtesy  of  Windy's Page designs.

This page last updated on November 18, 2006

Today is Pentecost. It’s the day we celebrate God’s gift of the Holy Spirit and, with that gift, the beginning of the life and ministry of the Church. It is our birthday. It is a day especially about us, about who we are as the Church.

With that in mind, I want to pay some special attention to one part, a small part really, of the reading from the Book of Acts. This reading (one of toughest to get through, good job, Billye) is Luke’s version of the Day of Pentecost. Luke takes great care to tell the story theologically. That is, every detail of it has meaning and significance beyond the historical. Every part is rooted in the whole story of the people of God—past, present, and future. The business of hearing the Word in several languages is no exception.

As you know, the theological foundation of this is the story in Genesis of the Tower of Babel. That old story tells about how, way back in the "good old days" (before the base closed), everything was great, and people had just one language and only a few words. So everyone could understand one another.

But then humanity pridefully tried to act like God (they built the tower and all of that); and God punished their pride by giving them different languages and scattering them all over the world. The story of Babel wonderfully describes the human condition: that’s how we are; we are isolated and separated from each other and we can’t talk to each other as we should. Languages symbolize this.

Pentecost, the coming of the spirit, is sort of a reversal of Babel. Pentecost is a moment in which those old wounds, and their descriptions of who is in and who is out, are healed; and the ancient divisions that separate and isolate us begin to mend.

The people in the crowd at Pentecost represent the whole world, and that difficult-to-pronounce list of places is really a catalogue of all the major nations located around the Mediterranean Sea at the time the Book of Acts was written. The point is that the damage done to the whole world at the Tower of Babel is overcome by God. That’s what the work of the Holy Spirit is all about.

But notice that Babel isn’t exactly reversed. That is, things are not restored to exactly the way they were in the "good old days". Do you see what was different?

To be sure, each of the nations in the story from Acts had its own language. But it is very likely that every person in that crowd spoke a good bit of Greek, and that most, if not all, could handle some Hebrew or Aramaic; and all but a very few of them were able (at least) to ask directions and order in a restaurant in Latin.

But the people in that crowd—the people of the world—did not hear of the mighty works of God in some common language that they all knew. And they didn’t hear of the mighty works of God in some new, universal, language that everyone was suddenly and miraculously able to understand. In fact, they did not all hear the same words or the same language. Instead, each heard "in his own native language". Each heard in the most familiar words, the words most loaded with meaning; the words they knew—words that were the fruit of Babel.

So two things happened at once. First, everybody heard the same Gospel. The base content, the core, was the same. However, and at the same time, everybody also heard something a little different. Different people heard different nuances and different details. There was unity, but there was also difference. It was the same, and it wasn’t.

After all, languages aren’t identical; and to hear something in one language is not exactly the same thing as to hear it in another. This old saying is always true: ‘he who translates, lies.’

Now, for one reason or another, it is very important to God that we hear the Gospel (both literally and figuratively) in our own native language, through the distinctive filters of who we are. This is part of a sort of tightrope God walks with us. On the one hand, God wants us to be together, to be of one heart in His body. But, at the same time, God does not want us all to be exactly the same. God enjoys our variety, our differences, all of the particularity and difficulties that are symbolized by our having so very many native languages.

The Spirit does not coerce sameness, but the spirit strives to hold together in a holy unity the variety that God cherishes. That’s hard.

Remember the folks in the early church in Jerusalem, the ones who were there and who heard it first-hand. Remember how, in a matter of months, they were at each others throats over things like cultural snobbishness and racism? Obviously, their very real differences managed to survive the experience of Pentecost. Staying together was very hard.

And in the reading from Corinthians, Paul has to remind the people in that church that all of the weird and different and conflicting things that the folks in Corinth are up to, all of these are from the same Spirit; all of these belong together. Doubtless the various groups within that church were hoping to hear that only their thing, or only their favorite thing, was truly from the Spirit.

But Paul insists that, while people were different, and while what they did and what they thought and how they lived out their faith was different—they were still all about the same thing, and they were called to this holy unity, this tightrope of a single gospel and many native languages.

We’re still there. We see this in all sorts of ways, and it is helpful to remember that we still hear the same Gospel, but each in our native language—and there is an important symbolic sense to this that even native English speakers, or native West Texas speakers, need to be aware of.

I suspect that this is part of the business with so many different denominations. We hear the same Gospel differently because we are different; and so we live it out differently. Yet we are also given a holy unity, a unity that is more important than our differences. So there is a call both to respect and honor the differences among the different churches, and always to work toward a unity with integrity.

All of this has a special poignancy with General Convention beginning next week. The Anglican Communion, the Episcopal Church, and even St. Mary’s, are all trying to walk that tightrope between unity and differences—we all live with some variety, with some ambiguity, with some differences, and with some native languages that seem to have very few words in common. We know about that. It has been ever thus. It is sometimes hard and it is sometimes glorious. It seems just to be the way we are. Yet here, too, there is God’s constant and continuing call to this holy unity; to a shared life in the one faith in the midst of differences.

And the word of God today is that we are given God’s own self, the Holy Spirit, to be both the means to that unity and the true source of it. That is our promise and that is our hope. So we can, perhaps, relax a bit and enjoy the great gifts of one another—both our different languages and our common faith. For the Spirit is with and among us, and we are being led, together, deeper and deeper into presence and the truth of God.

Native languages and all.

The Lessons for today: Acts 2.1-11; Psalm 104.25-37; I  Corinthians 12.4-13;  John 20.19-23   
 

A list of Sunday Scripture readings, with links to the Biblical Text:
 

Eastertide

Sundays after Pentecost

Holy Week Preaching, 2006


Archive of St. Mary's Sermons from August 15, 2004

 

Back to St. Mary's Homepage
 

Fr. Jim Liggett
P.O. Box 2949; Big Spring, TX  79721
(432) 267-8201 (phone)

Stmarys@stmarysbst.org 

The page background is courtesy  of  Windy's Page designs.

This page last updated on November 18, 2006

It’s Trinity Sunday, and that makes it one of the most peculiar Sundays in the Church’s year. On one hand, Trinity Sunday makes sense. Today we pretty much complete our annual cycle of celebrating the great events of our Redemption: from Advent through Pentecost we remember the birth, life, death, resurrection and ascension of the Lord, and the coming of the Holy Spirit. That part of our liturgical year is complete, and we go to green next Sunday. So there is a need to summarize all of that, to say something direct, strong and basic about our faith. We do this by speaking as fully of God as we are able—by proclaiming God as Trinity. The Trinity is the uniquely Christian theological insight. Nobody but us Christians believes it. It ties things together nicely. That’s the sensible part.

On the other hand, we are left in a rather puzzling position. Trinity Sunday is unique among the Church’s feasts in that it’s not about a person or an event. It’s about a doctrine—an official statement that the Church has made about the content of our faith. Put most simply, that doctrine states that, if the one God is to be understood and spoken of correctly and fully, God must be seen as three distinct Persons—God the Father, God the Son, and God the Holy Spirit—yet at the same time as one God, existing in perfect unity at the most basic level. One God, three persons, that’s the doctrine: a bit fuzzy on first reading, perhaps.

Now, how do we celebrate a doctrine? ||Having a party doesn’t seem to work real well—the decorations would be hard to figure out, (triangles and 3-leaf clovers really don’t do it) and, to the best of my knowledge, Hallmark doesn’t make any Trinity Cards or party favors. So that’s out. Another, and more common way, is to study the thing. After all, we tend to see doctrines as abstract theories formulated by academic types in the splendid isolation of universities and monasteries.

So, we could all turn to the Historical Documents section of the Prayer Book and examine both the Athanasian Creed and Articles I through V of the Articles of Religion (which are the ones that deal with the Trinity), and we could ponder the division of the Apostles’ and Nicene Creed into three paragraphs—one for each person of the Trinity, then we could note that not only our creeds, but also all of our prayers, blessings, and Sacraments are formulated around our Trinitarian understanding of God.

Finally, next Sunday, we could have a test—maybe a bunch of multiple-choice questions about persons and substance, being begotten from the Father and proceeding from the Father and the Son, and things like that—with a closing essay question about just exactly how, how, if Jesus was fully God, how did the universe kept running when Jesus was asleep. We could do that; and in fact the church has all too often done that sort of thing on this day. But, it would be pretty silly, and it would miss the point.

That’s because to speak of the Blessed Trinity is to speak of God—and what is of primary importance about God is not description, but relationship; not abstract theory, but personal encounter. And the doctrine of the Trinity is about this. It is not at its heart a fuzzy theological theory on display in a doctrine museum somewhere. Instead, it is a gift to us from our past—a legacy to lead us ever deeper into the mystery which is our life in God.

You see, the Trinity was not invented by theologians, (they just gave it formal words). In fact, the doctrine of the Trinity was not invented at all—it was discovered; and it was discovered by Christian people, just like us, who loved God and tried to live faithfully—and speak honestly and clearly—about what it is like to explore the inexhaustible, wonderful, eternal heart of God. The Trinity was discovered as the faithful through the ages made, and reflected upon, their journeys into God.

Behind it all are the people of Israel. They were the first human beings on the planet to recognize and to worship the one God—and they knew God as the one who creates and sustains the world, and who guides the life and history of humanity. Before Israel, quite literally, no one else had grasped this. Israel discovered, as we heard in the first reading, that God was to be approached with awe and with wonder. And, gradually, the people of Israel learned more about God; they learned that God cares, and loves, and reaches out to the world he created.

Through the centuries, Israel also gradually learned that we human beings are special, that we have a unique relationship to the Creator; that we are made in God’s image; that God longs for justice and has a soft spot for the poor and the outcast, and that we are, each one of us, incomplete without God. Israel taught us that we cannot call God only Creator; we must also call Him Father; the one who loves the best. In doing this, Israel taught us that when we face the vastness and the power of the Universe, when we look toward the heart of creation—when we do that we will discover that there is love, and compassion, and that we are not alone. This was the first step; this is where it begins.

But this was not enough. The very first generations of Christian people held tightly to Israel’s faith in God; but they discovered something more, something new.

They discovered that they, and we, cannot speak fully of the human encounter of God without speaking of this man Jesus of Nazareth. It was simply not enough to seek, and even to know, God as Creator and as Father. There was also this man who lived among them, and who loved them, and in whose life, death, and resurrection they found the key to their own lives. They realized that, in Jesus, they had actually and really met this same God they knew as Father; and they knew that, from now on, to know God fully would have to involve knowing Jesus. They didn’t learn this by abstract thinking; they learned it from their experiences, and from trying to share those experiences.

Remember: The Church doesn’t teach us that God is in Jesus Christ so that we can be smart. It teaches us that God is in Jesus Christ so we can be saved—brought by God into new life and wholeness. Those first Christians—and all who have followed them—want us to know both that God has a human face, and that we can know God in the life of a fellow traveler in this strange business of being human. So, we can look beside us, in the very middle of the real life we live, and there we will discover that there is God, and there is love, and that we are not alone.

But Even this was not all. For these early Christians, their experience of God did not end at the Ascension. Very soon, those who had come to recognize the Father, and who had found new life in the Son, also discovered something more.

They discovered within themselves and among themselves a presence, a presence that filled them with strength, that brought them together in community and sent them out in mission. They discovered a presence that was real, and powerful, and that always pointed them toward Jesus, and to the one Jesus called Father.

These early Christians knew who God was, and they knew what it was like to be in the presence of God, and they quickly learned of the Holy Spirit that, here, too—within them as individuals, and among them as a body—here, too, was God. And they want us to know that we can look within ourselves as individuals, and that we can reach out to one another in search of community, and when we do that, we will discover that there is love, and that we are not alone.

God the Father, God the Son, and God the Holy Spirit—one God. Not a confusing bit of ancient philosophy; but a road map into relationship. That’s really what the Trinity is all about. It’s not something we understand by studying it in an abstract way, it is something we need to use—a marked trail to lead us deeper into the reality of God. It is how those who have gone before us are telling us what it is like to live with God, showing us where to look as we look for God, and promising us that wherever we look—be it the vastness of creation, the face of our neighbor, or the depths of our souls—there we will find that one who loves us; there we will find God—and we will not be alone. Here is good news, here is the promise of love, and of life.

The Lessons for today: Exodus 3.1-6; Psalm 93; Romans 8.12-17;  John 3.1-16   
 

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This page last updated on November 18, 2006

Pentecost II, Proper 7, Report from General Convention, June 25, 2006       

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