Jul 05 | “Side by Side,” (Sermon, July 3rd 2016)

After this the Lord appointed seventy others and sent them on ahead of him in pairs to every town and place where he himself intended to go. He said to them, ‘The harvest is plentiful, but the labourers are few; therefore ask the Lord of the harvest to send out labourers into his harvest. Go on your way. See, I am sending you out like lambs into the midst of wolves. Carry no purse, no bag, no sandals; and greet no one on the road. Whatever house you enter, first say, “Peace to this house!” And if anyone is there who shares in peace, your peace will rest on that person; but if not, it will return to you. Remain in the same house, eating and drinking whatever they provide, for the labourer deserves to be paid. Do not move about from house to house. Whenever you enter a town and its people welcome you, eat what is set before you; cure the sick who are there, and say to them, “The kingdom of God has come near to you.” But whenever you enter a town and they do not welcome you, go out into its streets and say, “Even the dust of your town that clings to our feet, we wipe off in protest against you. Yet know this: the kingdom of God has come near.”

‘Whoever listens to you listens to me, and whoever rejects you rejects me, and whoever rejects me rejects the one who sent me.’

The seventy returned with joy, saying, ‘Lord, in your name even the demons submit to us!’ He said to them, ‘I watched Satan fall from heaven like a flash of lightning. See, I have given you authority to tread on snakes and scorpions, and over all the power of the enemy; and nothing will hurt you. Nevertheless, do not rejoice at this, that the spirits submit to you, but rejoice that your names are written in heaven.’

Luke 10:1-11, 16-20

“Oh, we ain’t got a barrel of money

Maybe we’re ragged and funny,

But we’ll travel along, singing a song,

Side by side.”

When I was a little girl my Dad made me a tape of himself singing that song, along with many others. Listening to it is one of my earliest memories.

Today’s reading made me think of it.

Seventy people (or seventy-two, depending on the translation) – none of whom are named, and most of whom are not the twelve disciples, clearly – are sent out as sheep amidst the wolves. Sent out together, with nothing but the clothes on their backs, into territory which may be totally unfamiliar with them.

“We don’t know what’s coming tomorrow,

Maybe it’s trouble and sorrow,

But we’ll travel the road, sharing our load,

Side by side.”

It sounds kind of fun when we sing it like that, doesn’t it? I’m sure sometimes it was! Maybe they watched sunrises together and drank crisp clean water from a well. Maybe sometimes they got a really good meal from a happy family. Maybe sometimes they came upon a village celebration – a seasonal festival or a wedding – and were welcomed and caught up in the excitement. Maybe in the heat of the afternoon they sat under a tree and had men and women and children come to them to learn, talk, and listen together about this amazing thing that was taking place among them. Maybe sometimes they restored broken families through healing. Maybe sometimes they raised the dead.

“Through all kinds of weather

What if the sky should fall,

Just as long as we’re together,

It doesn’t matter at all!”

But maybe sometimes, it did matter. Maybe the sky did fall. Maybe sometimes they were rejected, as Jesus warns them. Maybe sometimes they got into huge fights about silly things – “Your foot’s on my side of the blanket!” “That last scrap of bread was mine!” “I wanted to heal that kid!” – and not so silly things: “You never listen!” “You always get so angry, it’s not helping!” “Why don’t you ever take anything seriously?”

Worst of all, maybe sometimes they got along great…but the people they were sent to were frightened, despairing, or unkind. “We don’t want to hear it.” “There’s no way you can fix this.” “We’re starving and you want us to feed you?” “Thanks, but there’s nothing you can do. It’s hopeless.”

Maybe sometimes they just lay together on the side of the road, unwanted, freezing cold, afraid, and alone.

Jesus says, “The harvest is plentiful, but the labourers are few.”

How true this can feel.

How woefully true.

It can make us feel so small, so quiet, so worn out.

We might feel like we’re being shushed when we try to share our good news. Outside the world moves on without us. There are days when it smugly says, “We’re evolving. There is no need for religion.” Sometimes the world is not smug at all, but hostile. “Look at this, another episode of religious violence. You know the problem with this world is religion.” Some folks have a reason to be hostile, because they’ve been horribly abused or have witnessed horrible abuse at the hands of the church. And some folks are simply afraid of what they don’t understand, and are unsure where to direct their fear and anger. They could still be right. There shouldn’t be people in the world who colonize religion to spread hate and violence. But it’s not the only thing that has been or will be colonized by the hateful or the fearful, and sometimes it seems like a lot of people don’t remember that.

The harvest is plentiful, but the labourers are few.

So many of us work so hard to spread love, and to be different from those who are fearful of or hateful toward the unknown. We work so hard, and a lot of that work goes unseen and uncelebrated. We work so hard, and sometimes we are stretched so thin. Sometimes there are so few.

The harvest is plentiful, but the labourers are few.

How true.

And yet how wonderful.

How wonderful that those of us who remain are the ones that God called and continues to call, the ones who remain out of love, fidelity, trust, and hope. The ones who remain, maybe without even knowing why sometimes. The ones who may seem foolish to the world, but never to God.

How wonderful, for example, that all of these labourers came to the ordination of seven people on June 28^th, and cheered with us, celebrated us, blessed us, and affirmed us – not just because they liked us, but because in the face of all that is changing in the world, people are still called to serve the church as members of the clergy, and the church – that means you – is so joyful and thrilled to help them to answer that call.

But it’s even more amazing than that.

How wonderful that, at that service’s Eucharist, my atheist husband and three of my friends, all of them spiritual seekers but not religious, sought me out for a blessing. How beautiful that these non-church people were even wiser than Naaman in today’s Hebrew Bible reading, not only accepting a freely offered gift but trusting in their hearts that it was a gift, knowing that they wanted a concrete, fleshly symbol of God’s love from a friend whom they trusted – and let’s be clear: a friend who is still a human being, who isn’t even always the best friend, who isn’t always good at making time to be with them, whom they still sought out and, paradoxically, claimed me as their own even as they sought to be claimed by God, if only for a moment.

They claimed me by saying, without words: “I don’t know what this is all about, but something’s happening in this room, and I want to be a part of it, even if it’s just today.”

They came to me for a blessing.

They came to me not because I have suddenly become more holy, but because they believed in my belief. A blessing is not a magic moment of electrical transference between the sacred and the profane. A blessing is a claim. A blessing is something that confers perpetual relationship. It changes people and things. It sets them apart for holy work.

It’s something that ordained people do, but we by no means have a monopoly on the proclamation of God’s blessing for the world.

The seventy were not ordained, but sent. They didn’t take any of this stuff [vestments] with them. Only themselves, and their proclamation: “The kingdom has come near.” And they were not to withhold that proclamation from anyone, not even those who rejected it.

That proclamation is given to you at your baptism: gift-wrapped to you in the water, and it sticks to you in there whether you want it to or not – whether you even open it or not.

That proclamation is given to you every time you come to church.

Every time you hear it, you join the seventy.

For better or for worse, for richer or for poorer, in sickness and in health, forever.

Yeah, sorry – even death doesn’t part you from this covenant. Now none of you can say I tried to fool you with fine print.

Don’t let it scare you. Rejoice and be glad, because we don’t do any of this work alone. Carry one another’s burdens on the road. Get ready to laugh, cry, eat, drink, sing, share, love, walk slowly with care and in peace.

I’ll be with you. I’m so glad I’ll be with you.

“When they’ve all had their quarrels and parted,

We’ll be the same as we started,

So we’ll travel along, singing a song,

Side by side!”

Jun 26 | Not Permitted

Photo by Adele Wonnick

I decided to share this as a matter of interest, knowing full well that it may open up a can of worms for some folks.
My wonderful stepmother forwarded me an email conversation with a friend(?) of hers regarding my ordination, asking me for my opinion on it. I share it here, and my response below. Let me say that I am quite impressed with her theological prowess, as I always got the sense that she tuned out when I started talking theology.

Just thought I would share this with you both!
Clare was ordained a Priest on Sat. at the Christ Church Cathedral!
Who would of ever guessed!
xoxo Cheri

There are always surprises in our life.
This is all NEW to me.
The Bible does not permit women (females) to be Priests……….???????
Lets go back and study more
[X]……. I am so ignorant.!!!!!!

Hi [X]
Re; not permit. Does it really? or is it someones interpretation?
When you really think of it, is a woman’s understanding, thought and love less than a mans? Does the bible teach that a woman is of less value, not worthy or have less brains and not of the same quality. Are we not to be considered different but of equal value? I think some things are to be taken in a metaphorically sense from the bible because there are things they did in those days that would not be right today.
Just a little of my thoughts out loud.
;-) Cheri

I just wish that it is my interpretation,but it is not You and I can discuss this for a long time.
Not my opinion–God’s
He is not changing over the many thousands of years.
We are.
[X]

I’ll ask Clare about this subject. I would like to know too, as I will be getting similar responses and would like to give the proper reply.
Cheri

Here was my response (sent only to her).

Ohhh dear. Haha.
There are lots of different Christian churches and many of them have
different beliefs on ordaining women to the priesthood. The Anglican
Church of Canada has been ordaining women since the ’70s, and we did find
biblical justification for it, although many Christians would likely not
accept the interpretation. As you say, there are many interpretations –
anyone who says that the Bible is “clear and simple” about any issue is
deluding themselves. (But don’t tell that to your friend, heh).

So folks who say that the Bible does not permit women as priests usually
refer to some passages in the letters of Paul which say that women should
not speak in church or that women should not have headship over men. It
should be noted that Jesus himself does not say anything about this
issue, and although people often argue that he only had male disciples
that too is debatable. In fact, the first people to learn that he rose
from the dead, according to the Gospel accounts, were women, and the
Gospels also have lots of stories about women following Jesus and helping
him, and even more stories of women, particularly rich ones, helping out
the infant church after he died. Jesus spoke to women and treated them as
equals in many accounts – there are a couple of stories of him having
deep theological conversations with women (check out Chapter 4 of the
Gospel of John!)

The apostle Paul also had women helping him, both building churches and
teaching: he had a friend called Phoebe who was a deacon and probably
preached to congregations. There are even people who think that another
friend of his, Priscilla, might have written the Letter to the Hebrews.

The biblical passages that talk about women not speaking in church or
having headship are somewhat problematic, in that some of them are
actually from letters that are attributed to Paul but scholars claim may
not actually have been written by him – and even if they were, these are
Paul’s words, not Jesus’. Paul never even MET the living flesh and blood
Jesus. Those letters containing the problematic passages were written
quite late, in a context where the Church was hoping to ingratiate itself
to the Roman Empire, which at the time had a much more paternalistic
attitude toward women. There are also translation issues, and of course
beliefs about people, especially women, changing over time.

The fact is that women have been in different positions of leadership in
the Church for years already, no matter what people think about it. From
the rich patronesses of the early church to Medieval monasteries with
female abbots to female hymn writers whose theology informed and
continues to inform generations of believers to nuns in the Catholic
Worker Movement, women have been doing leadership already – it’s just
that it was happening under the radar and with no recognition. (Sound
familiar?) The Anglican Church of Canada just finally decided that it was
ridiculous to bar women from full sacramental leadership because they
were women.

All of those in my church who worked to let women be ordained took wisdom
from the Holy Scriptures, the traditions of the church, and the use of
reason, as is Anglican custom.

There are many faithful Anglicans (and other types of Christians) who
really don’t believe that women should be priests and the whole thing
really tore up the Anglican Church back in the day. A lot of people left
and became Catholic!

What matters is that women have been able to be priests in the Anglican
Church of Canada since the ’70s, and since we practice apostolic
succession when we ordain people, we are linked to the Church all the way
back to the apostles/disciples, from the beginning. That means that there
is an unbroken line from my bishop to the apostle Peter. And of course,
Anglicans (and I) also believe in the Communion of Saints, which means
that I believe that there were not only living people ordaining me, but
also saints of the church who had died were doing so as well.

If you don’t want to cut and paste this whole long email, I guess you
could just tell him that in the Anglican Church of Canada we have been
ordaining women for about forty years, and that is the church into which
I have been ordained, so yes, it’s allowed. Whether or not he thinks the
church is a legitimate church is his own concern. I’m the one with the
legal paperwork. ;)

Love you!
-Clare

Welcome to my life now.
Wouldn’t change it for anything.

Jun 12 | “We haunted ones,” (Sermon, June 5th 2016)

11 Soon afterwards he went to a town called Nain, and his disciples and a large crowd went with him. ¹²As he approached the gate of the town, a man who had died was being carried out. He was his mother’s only son, and she was a widow; and with her was a large crowd from the town. ¹³When the Lord saw her, he had compassion for her and said to her, ‘Do not weep.’ ¹⁴Then he came forward and touched the bier, and the bearers stood still. And he said, ‘Young man, I say to you, rise!’ ¹⁵The dead man sat up and began to speak, and Jesus gave him to his mother. ¹⁶Fear seized all of them; and they glorified God, saying, ‘A great prophet has risen among us!’ and ‘God has looked favourably on his people!’ ¹⁷This word about him spread throughout Judea and all the surrounding country.

– Luke 7:11-17

Several years ago I a completed a basic unit of Clinical Pastoral Education. Clinical Pastoral Education is a program of study which takes place in a clinical setting like a hospital and requires the student to both offer spiritual and emotional care to patients and, in a sense, receive the same themselves from their supervisor and fellow students.

I did my unit, which lasted for three months, at St. Paul’s Hospital in downtown Vancouver. On my ward, which was General Surgery, I saw a lot of what I’ll call humanity in the raw.

On my very first day, I received a care request from a nurse, and went up to see someone who had just woken up after a major amputation. This person had had a rough life. They had come in alone and were expecting no visitors.

The nurse said to me, “He’s really upset. I just thought he could use someone to talk to.”

She led me into the room.

On the bed was the patient, every muscle in tight, hard knots, pressed back into the pillow, just howling at the top of his lungs with despair.

I looked over at the nurse, and she turned and left, shutting the door behind her.

“I guess we’re doing this,” I thought.

When someone experiences a major amputation, they are taught to expect phantom pain, the weird sensation of the continued presence and pain of the amputated body part, as the brain tries to re-calibrate itself to accept its new reality without it. Human beings actually have more than five senses, and I’m not even referring to ESP. The fact that I can close your eyes and still have an idea of where my hand is in relation to my body is a sense, and I wouldn’t really lose that sense if I lost this hand.

If the brain has this sense, how much more does the heart in times of grief and loss. The phantom pain that comes with the brain reaching out into emptiness to find that lost limb, I think, is quite easily compared to the phantom pain from the heart reaching out into emptiness to find the beloved that has been lost.

My patient knew this. The first words out of his mouth were a lament, not for his lost limb, but for the family he never knew.

Every loss comes with a ghost, whether we believe that literally or figuratively. And the more ghosts there are, the harder it is to feel whole.

Today’s story made me think of this. This widow of Nain is a haunted woman. It’s bad enough to be a widow today, but back then it could be a death sentence, especially if the widow had no children.

How cruel indeed for this woman, who had a son who has now also been lost. She is crying not only for him, but for herself. And since he would have been her only source of support, she could look forward to more ghosts: the loss of her home, her agency, her health, even her life.

Despite her despair, this woman follows the rites prescribed to her, as we all manage to do in times like this. Her child is carried out on a simple palette, wrapped in cloth, likely with the face exposed. Accompanying such a procession was believed to be a mitzvah, a good deed that observant Jews could not shirk, so the whole town has come out to accompany her. They are on their way out of town, for bodies could not be buried within the boundaries, as they were ritually impure.

And from the opposite end of the town comes Jesus with the crowd, who are still amazed at the healing of the centurion’s slave that we heard about last week.

What a compelling image: two processions coming together at the gate – life, and death.

Jesus pauses as he sees the woman. He is moved with compassion – a sense of suffering with her.

In a deeply prophetic moment Jesus reaches out and touches the bier on which the dead man lies, rendering himself ritually impure. The parade of life and the parade of death have truly met. But at his touch, the parade of death stops. There is a waiting, a held breath, and then, the triumph of life.

We do not hear what the son says. The story is not about him, but about his mother. Like last week this healing story is more about the caregiver than the person healed, and yet this story is a beautiful counterpoint to last week’s, because while last week Jesus focused on the faith of the centurion, this story has nothing to do with faith. Jesus sees the woman weeping and has compassion. He reaches out to touch death, and the veil is thrown back.

The man rises and begins to speak. He is given to his mother. All is restored.

Maybe.

There are several pieces of this story that are still challenging. The most obvious challenge is that there are still ghosts left over.

The woman is still a widow.

So is the woman who fed Elijah with her never-ending meal and oil.

The last time I saw my patient before he left the hospital, he had a prosthetic leg and was walking up and down the hall with it. He’d made a fantastic recovery. He smiled at me.

But his eyes were still sad.

God makes people whole, but that man’s leg will never grow back.

There are still ghosts in this room, among all of us.

So what can this story possibly tell us, we haunted ones?

Perhaps the key lies in comparing the stories of these two widows. Neither of them have managed to fully escape the ghosts or hardships of their lives. But both of them find themselves experiencing intimate encounters with the divine at a period of deepest night, and through those encounters they are not really saved, but empowered by God.

The woman who met Elijah is expected to offer the same hospitality that any other woman would offer. She is the one God chooses to be lifted up, even though she is outside the community, waiting to die alone, and so Elijah seeks her out rather than avoiding her. Later, Elijah wrestles with God on her behalf, and her son is restored. All of this occurs in private, outside the walls of the community, to highlight the significance of this woman’s personal journey.

The widow of Nain, surrounded by those who would mourn with her but may then desert her, is comforted, then given back a portion of what she has lost. It is not just that the man gets up and starts talking. Jesus gives him back to his mother. Her son is her bread and oil as well as her beloved child. All of this occurs in public, just before they manage to cross outside the boundaries, to show the community that this woman is not to be abandoned, that she is blessed.

What can this story tell us, we haunted ones?

When you feel beset by your ghosts, keep on the lookout for God, in public and private. The Spirit has a habit of showing up where she’s least expected. You may yet feel her hovering over you, sowing seeds of power within you.

But let us also, as the incarnate Body of Christ, walk in Christ’s ways. Who do you know that needs to encounter God in private and in public?

Who occupies the space of a widow today in your life? Who are people who are cut off from help, whose agency is threatened? Who are people who are avoided, whose grief is carried by others for a little while but then dropped, consciously or unconsciously?

In prayer, ask God to show them to you. Then, meet them, just outside the city walls.

Be at the head of the parade of life.

Try as hard as you can to avoid platitudes. Jesus didn’t bother with them. Only, “Don’t cry. I am with you.”

Then, touch them. Be willing to become ritually unclean, whatever that means to you. Surrender to God the need to be busy and productive; remember the old pastoral care adage goes, “Don’t just do something – sit there.”

Wait just outside the city walls, and you will see resurrection.

You will be resurrection.

May 24 | “Transcending Transcendence,” (Trinity Sunday Sermon, May 22nd 2016)

Note: This was a sermon I preached at the 8am service on Trinity Sunday. I used two of the assigned readings, which you can find here and here.

One of my favourite online resources for sermon help is a Lutheran website called “Working Preacher,” and my favourite contributor is David Lose, current president of the Lutheran Theological Seminary in Philadelphia.

When I checked out what he had to say on Trinity Sunday, David wrote not to preach on the Trinity. His advice was to preach on hope instead, because it would be more accessible, since the Trinity was a doctrine, and preachers today preach to post-doctrinal people.

I don’t know if I’d go that far. And if he’s right and we are, should we be?

Now don’t be alarmed. We Christians have argued for generations about how a God can be Three-in-One, and I’m not about to twist us into knots for an hour for the sake of proving David Lose wrong. But I do want to talk about the Trinity, specifically because of something else that Lose says later in the same essay, which is that we need to talk more about hope because, living in a secular world, we suffer from a loss of transcendence. Well what better way to regain transcendence than by reflecting on the one God who transcends divinity, omnipotence, and one-ness?

The world in which we live is strikingly materialistic. I’m not speaking of materialistic in the usual sense of being overly concerned with material objects; I mean in the philosophical sense. The pendulum of Western civilization has swung from the dualistic privileging of spirit over physicality back to a more Aristotelian “What you see is what you get” worldview. We still retain echoes of that dualism – think of every diet, fitness, and beauty commercial you’ve ever seen which promised the latest elixir to help you control, maybe transcend your fragile aging flesh – but I have also perceived a struggle for the immaterial, the spiritual, in our age: a dismissal of the subjective in favour of being objective; a denigration of alternative cosmologies (many of which are, tellingly, non-Western) that proclaim unseen but very real dimensions in which spiritual and emotional energy has weight and can interact with the physical; and an almost primal focus on living in the here-and-now over and above the future which may or may not exist if we don’t get our act together.

I think this pendulum swing is necessary – even Spirit-guided – and I think we are beginning to swing back. Balance, however, is the key that we always seem to be searching for. And this is how God, transcending the image of the absent clockmaker so popular for the last five hundred or so years, becomes prophetic in our time.

Lady Wisdom (Tiziano Vecellio)

Think of the image of Wisdom in our first reading. This is no airy, abstract, academic portrayal. This is a woman who stands on the street corner shouting for people to come to dinner. Everyone in the world knows what that looks like! If you read the whole chapter, you will see that she does not privilege any one people or philosophy, other than careful speech and good relationships. That last one is key. She loves company, and sings rhapsodically of her intimate relationship with the Creator, which is characterized by playful skill-sharing instead of competition. She is not to be grasped and hoarded as a treasure, because she is anything but passive. Not for her cages or pedestals, which are both dehumanizing as they deny agency on the one hand and vulnerability on the other. No, this is biblical proto-feminism at its finest. She’s an agent. Like the woman in the Song of Songs she is active in her pursuit of lovers, not because she needs them in order to be whole or loved but because she is by nature invitatory. She has an identity and life completely independent of any who would seek her out, and yet she chooses to do so because why would she not share her joy and strength with all? She is the anti-Hollywood hero: rejecting proud solitude, dominant posturing, and bootstrap thinking for open arms and an open table.

No wonder biblical commentators believe that the Gospel of John portrays Jesus as a cipher for Wisdom. God transcends solitary magnificence, transcends transcendence, even, for stuffy upper rooms, crisp roasted lamb, and barrels of cheap wine.

And that’s what Trinity Sunday is all about. The hypostatic union, the nature of natures, metaphors, similes, heresies – let’s leave all that aside and focus on this mind-blowing truth: that even as we poor, frightened, fragile creatures born from dust have sought to transcend our fleshiness through any means necessary, up to and including the eating of the one forbidden fruit in the whole garden, God is transcending perfection, transcending divinity, through the creation of something utterly unlike Godself; through freely offered invitation; through entering into time and flesh in Jesus; through the continued breathing of wisdom, truth, and love upon the earth; through the constant and evolving interaction with the cosmos. God in God’s infinite wisdom and recklessness sought to transcend omnipotence, and when that invitation was rejected, God, loving the world as recklessly as a child and as fearsomely as a parent, dug in deeper. God transcended transcendence to become immanent, and in resurrection gives us the power to transcend immanence and evanescence and become transcendent.

How can we possibly respond to such a momentous gift?

Well, in the spirit of that wild, untamed, and boundary-destroying love, in the spirit of the one who scatters our foolish boundaries like toy blocks and laughs with joy at the birth of stars, in the spirit of the one who is somehow three, I commend to all of you the following slightly edited piece of wisdom from Angel Silvermain Strange, a witch and friend of mine from my days in the Vancouver Goth scene:

“Love people unabashedly, without imposing expectations on their behavior, without the necessity of being loved in return, without the requirement of labels, with the joy of giving in your heart. Do it like a child would. Get raw. Be kind. Be unembarrassed. Forgive. Tell them you love them. Dig the **** in.”

May 12 | “Ring them Bells,” (Sermon, May 11th, 2016)

Holy Father, protect them in your name that you have given me, so that they may be one, as we are one. ¹²While I was with them, I protected them in your name that you have given me. I guarded them, and not one of them was lost except the one destined to be lost, so that the scripture might be fulfilled. ¹³But now I am coming to you, and I speak these things in the world so that they may have my joy made complete in themselves. ¹⁴I have given them your word, and the world has hated them because they do not belong to the world, just as I do not belong to the world. ¹⁵I am not asking you to take them out of the world, but I ask you to protect them from the evil one. ¹⁶They do not belong to the world, just as I do not belong to the world. ¹⁷Sanctify them in the truth; your word is truth. ¹⁸As you have sent me into the world, so I have sent them into the world. ¹⁹And for their sakes I sanctify myself, so that they also may be sanctified in truth.

John 17:11b-19

Some of you may remember our Lenten Bible study in 2015, where I taught you about how the Gospel of John was written in code, and how in seminary we learned to spot the lines of code with the use of a bell, which we rang every time one of those code words came up.

Well, that’s not what I’m using this bell for today, mostly because this passage is so loaded that ringing it would leave us all with migraines. But I did want to talk about bells in general, and why I thought of them when I read this passage.

This is a small bell but still has many of the parts of a larger church bell. It has a crown, a shoulder, a waist or skirt, a sound bow, and, of course, a mouth and a clapper. Church bells, of course, can be mounted to beams to swing back and forth, although the largest ones must be struck, because they are so big that swinging can damage the towers.

Bells are complicated to make. Two molds are made using a stone model – one for the outer bell (called the cope) and one for the inner bell, or core – and, once they are fitted together, are laid in a casting pit, and finally liquid bell metal is poured in and left to cool. This requires much care, since too much moisture can leave the bell susceptible to cracks. Some large bells can take up to a week to fully cool! Once it has cooled it can be lifted out and put to use. Since we have not always had trucks, the largest bells once had to be made on site, with casting done inside the church itself or outside in a pit in the earth. Sometimes the bell tower was built on top of the pit!

Learning all this, I think the Fourth Evangelist might welcome the bell as a metaphor for the Jesus the Word’s journey into and out of the world. I think the Evangelist would love that image of those huge Medieval bells lowered into a hole in the earth. Talk about descending to live among us. Talk about incarnation. Talk about an empty tomb and a rising again once the work is completed.

The incarnate Word as church bell: a heavenly thing calling us to worship, telling us what time it is – remember that Johannine refrain, “The hour has come!”

And a bell is the perfect metaphor to illustrate the paradox of Jesus’ life, proclamation, and death.

In today’s reading, we hear Jesus’ words as he prays for his disciples. These verses are at the heart of his long farewell to the ones he loved. And he asks God to do three things.

First, in the verses just before our reading, Jesus asks God to glorify him, in order that he might glorify God. Second, Jesus asks God to protect the disciples, “so that they may be one.” Third, Jesus asks God to sanctify the disciples in the truth.

If we believe that God will give Jesus whatever he asks, then these three commandments can interact with each other in a highly intimate way.

Remember there are two molds required to craft a bell, because a bell has the outer cope, and the inner core. What if the cope was our glory, the glory with which God glorified us, Jesus’ beloved disciples? And what if the core was our sanctity, a space held open for God deep within us, like how the hollow emptiness of a bell is, paradoxically, the necessary ingredient for sound?

For the Evangelist, glory and sanctity are intimately tied up with sacrifice, with a pouring out. They are the things that clothe sacred emptiness. In Pentecost we are clothed with fire and wind. The metal must be molten, and must rest in the earth before it will be ready.

Once it is lifted up, even mere wind howling through a big bell is enough to make a song. But it needs more than just wind or breath to do its true work.

So, finally, what if the clapper was the tongue of every Christian, who, having received protection through Christ, has now been made one, and is commissioned to call out to the world, in order that the whole world can be made one?

What if all Christians, fashioned by the unending love of God, cast with molten sacrifice, laid in the earth and risen again in baptism, have become bells?

If that is so, friends, with apologies to British rock band The Kinks, I say to you:

“Shout out, ring the bells. Shout out, tell the world you’re in love.”

Apr 25 | “The Light shines,” (Sermon, April 24th, 2016)

Note: Today was a Celtic Sunday with a Godly Play-style sermon. Here was the regular sermon I preached at the 8am.

When he had gone out, Jesus said, ‘Now the Son of Man has been glorified, and God has been glorified in him. ³²If God has been glorified in him, God will also glorify him in himself and will glorify him at once. ³³Little children, I am with you only a little longer. You will look for me; and as I said to the Jews so now I say to you, “Where I am going, you cannot come.” ³⁴I give you a new commandment, that you love one another. Just as I have loved you, you also should love one another. ³⁵By this everyone will know that you are my disciples, if you have love for one another.’

John 13:31-35

“ Ἐν  ἀρχῇ  ἦν  ὁ  Λόγος,  καὶ  ὁ  Λόγος  ἦν  πρὸς  τὸν  Θεόν,  καὶ  Θεὸς  ἦν  ὁ  Λόγος.  Οὗτος  ἦν  ἐν  ἀρχῇ  πρὸς  τὸν  Θεόν.  πάντα  δι’  αὐτοῦ  ἐγένετο,  καὶ  χωρὶς  αὐτοῦ  ἐγένετο  οὐδὲ  ἕν  ὃ  γέγονεν.  ἐν  αὐτῷ  ζωὴ  ἦν,  καὶ  ἡ  ζωὴ  ἦν  τὸ  φῶς  τῶν  ἀνθρώπων.  καὶ  τὸ  φῶς  ἐν  τῇ  σκοτίᾳ  φαίνει,  καὶ  ἡ  σκοτία  αὐτὸ  οὐ  κατέλαβεν.”

It’s not often that we get the chance to hear the Scripture in its original language. There’s good reason for that; at the risk of underestimating you, dear friends, I imagine that was gibberish to many of you. What I just recited were the first five verses of the Gospel of John.

“In the beginning was the Word, and the Word was with God, and the Word was God. He was in the beginning with God. All things came into being through him, and without him not one thing came into being. What has come into being in him was life, and the life was the light of all people. The light shines in the darkness, and the darkness did not overcome it.”

I recited it in Greek to remind us of our roots. Koinē, the Greek of the New Testament, may be inaccessible to many Western Christians now, but once it was a language of the common people. Like Elizabethan English it now ironically enjoys an academic, privileged status that it never possessed in life.

Hearing the Gospel in this language reminds us who we are. Not superheroes. Not spiritual Titans of virtue. Ordinary people, using ordinary language. Children using sticks and dust to sketch crude pictures of a promised kingdom beyond anything we could ask or imagine. Children who are afraid, vulnerable, messy, and wobbling on scraped knees. Children who need love and affirmation.

I also recited this passage because many scholars believe it is a microcosm of John’s entire Gospel. If you like, it’s John’s thesis statement – particularly the last couple of lines: “And the light shines in the darkness, and the darkness did not overcome it.” This thesis statement keeps popping up throughout the whole of the book, not only through explicit linking of images and phrases but through implicit construction of sentences and phrases. This was part of John’s genius. He used simple words that any child – or beginning student of Koinē – would recognize, and yet loaded them with layers of meaning so that they are at once maddeningly cryptic and utterly enticing.

Actually, that’s a pretty good description of Jesus – talk about the Living Word.

But John was an even more brilliant wordsmith than that. John’s Gospel is exquisitely crafted, probably one of the most perfectly constructed documents in history. I tell you this because today’s passage, Chapter 13 verses 31-25, is a restatement of that thesis, and it’s done not in an explicit way but in a beautiful implicit way, like a love note passed in secret. I want to share a piece of that with you, because we’re Anglicans and we appreciate beautiful things, and because I really believe that this beauty can be a sign for the world – say, a piece of scaffolding for the coming kingdom of God, which should give us hope during this time of transition and change.

Let’s explore.

Chapter 13, verses 31-35. We also hear it on Maundy Thursday, when Jesus washes his disciples’ feet. That’s the scene right before this passage in verses 1 to 31. Jesus performs this beautiful sacramental act to teach his disciples, whom he calls “little children,” about the new commandment of love which will be a mark of identity for them. It is a “teachable moment.”

But Jesus doesn’t do this for no reason, and the text makes that clear. He does it knowing full well that two of those who are washed will later betray him. Peter, who at his washing in verse 8 enthusiastically blurts, “Not only my feet! My hands and my head too!” will deny him three times. This is a dreadfully ironic moment. Peter believes this is a statement of faith, but really he has just betrayed himself. He doesn’t really understand what the footwashing is about. It’s not just about love and servitude, you see. It’s about death, and how the Christian person is to respond to death and loss in all its forms.

How do we know this? Well, thematically the washing of feet hearkens back to the anointing of Jesus’ feet by Mary of Bethany, which she does to, in his words, “prepare him for burial.” And then the text gets even more explicit than that.

The footwashing begins in verse 5. In verse 2 we hear that the devil had already put it into the heart of Judas to betray Jesus. Then we hear in verse 4 that Jesus took off his robe – except the Greek says, “lays down” his robe. Jesus lays down his robe, like he will later lay down his life.

These verses provide us with a filter to view the washing. And just in case we didn’t get it the first time, we receive another couple of clues. Jesus makes veiled comments about his betrayer in verses 11 and 18. Then in verse 21 Jesus totally does away with subtlety and says outright that he will be betrayed. Judas, who the text implies is present both for the washing and the supper, stays silent, and, after being commanded by the living Word who is in complete control of the whole narrative, goes out into the darkness of night. Remember that time is important in John. “It was night” is a cipher for the machinations of the world (which God is said to love) that seeks to extinguish the light. But the light shines in the darkness.

The teachable moment, overshadowed by the specter of death, is followed by the overt and literal nighttime of Jesus’ betrayal.

And then, just as the darkness is dropping down, Jesus says in verse 31, “Now the Son of Man has been glorified, and God has been glorified in him.”

Now? After that?

Yes. This is the light. The light shines in the darkness, and the darkness does not overcome it.

It really shines in the darkness, because right after the conclusion of the passage, at verse 36, there is more nighttime. After the new commandment, the proclamation of love that never dies, in verses 36 to 38 Jesus predicts the denial of Peter.

Those are the verses which close out the chapter.

Current betrayal, a proclamation of love, and future betrayal. Jesus knows he has been sold out by Judas, and he speaks love. He knows he will be betrayed by Peter, and he speaks love.

The light shines in the darkness.

Jesus, knowing that the disciples’ love for him will not survive the fear of reprisal, commands them to love one another. Knowing that he will once again come to them and they will finally understand, he commands them to love one another, and patiently waits for that later morning of breakfast on the beach, where, over a charcoal fire, he says, “Simon, son of Jonah, do you love me?”; where he asks it three times in order to undo that threefold denial Peter made over the last charcoal fire in this story.

What does this tell us?

That nighttime is no time to be afraid.

Today, we are sitting squarely in the light. We have an advantage over the disciples: we know the whole story. Today, on our last Sunday before our interim priest joins us for our identity-forging journey through the wilderness, through the nighttime of uncertainty, we are given the gift of this new commandment, this new rule of love for our time together.

We do not carry this commandment into a barren place. We carry it into a world made fully new by Love rising from the grave. We carry it into a world where the holy springs up from barren ground, where if our voices fail or are taken away, the rocks and stones themselves will sing for us, where τὸ  φῶς  ἐν  τῇ  σκοτίᾳ  φαίνει, the light shines in the darkness.

The light shines in the darkness…and the darkness has not, does not, will not overcome it.

Apr 24 | “God is all in,” (Sermon, April 17th 2016)

Note: This was the sermon I preached on the first Sunday after my mentor, a beloved priest who had served his parish for nearly fifteen years, left to pursue ministry at another parish.

At that time the festival of the Dedication took place in Jerusalem. It was winter, ²³and Jesus was walking in the temple, in the portico of Solomon. ²⁴So the Jews gathered around him and said to him, ‘How long will you keep us in suspense? If you are the Messiah, tell us plainly.’ ²⁵Jesus answered, ‘I have told you, and you do not believe. The works that I do in my Father’s name testify to me; ²⁶but you do not believe, because you do not belong to my sheep. ²⁷My sheep hear my voice. I know them, and they follow me. ²⁸I give them eternal life, and they will never perish. No one will snatch them out of my hand. ²⁹What my Father has given me is greater than all else, and no one can snatch it out of the Father’s hand. ³⁰The Father and I are one.’

John 10:22-30

In the Godly Play curriculum, when the seasons of the church year change, we begin our stories with, “Everything has changed.” We’ll say, “Now is the time of the colour blue,” or the colour purple. It is a way to encourage our children to notice the changes in church, and to give them a vocabulary to center them in the Christian faith.

Today, dear friends, to encourage and support you in naming the changes in our family, and to give us a vocabulary to center us in the Christian faith, I say:

“Everything has changed. Now is the time of the interim minister.”

As much as we will surely come to love John Bailey, who will be an excellent and stable presence for us, it will not be the same. Everything has changed for us, Jesus’ disciples, today in Dunbar and yesterday in Jerusalem. The one who was friend and shepherd is no longer with us. We are scattered – literally once, metaphorically now, in our heads and hearts.

But this is as it should be.

Easter is not a simple time. Sometimes we shout Alleluia to add to the echo of that momentous shift in the fabric of the universe. And sometimes we shout it because we feel like the echo is all that’s left. Easter is messy that way. We weep at the physical absence of the one whom we loved, but rejoice in the ministry of the one who goes bearing a piece of us, having been with us for a time.

In today’s Gospel reading, we’ve rewound a bit and Jesus is walking in the portico of Solomon. If the Gospel of John tells you where something happened, that’s never just a throwaway line. Same if it tells you what time it is. Everything is essential for our interpretation.

We believe that the portico of Solomon was the only part of Solomon’s temple that was not destroyed by the Babylonians in their siege of Jerusalem in 586 BCE. It held tremendous spiritual significance for the Jewish people living there – a link to a glorious time when they felt as if God was very close and active in their history; a time when they were under no foreign rule but only under the rule of the great I AM who had liberated them and made of them a great and holy nation.

That’s the place.

Now the time. It was close to the Feast of Dedication. This is one of the names for the festival of Hanukkah. We might know the story of a one-day supply of oil miraculously burning for eight in the temple. But Hanukkah, like that portico, was another piece of culture that had ties to a radical time in Jewish history. Hanukkah commemorates the day that the Hasmoneans, led by Judas Maccabeus, liberated the temple from the pagan Seleucid monarchy and rededicated it after it had been closed and polluted under their rule. This was a landmark victory, and it occurred barely two hundred years before Jesus was born. The fire of that victory still rested in the hearts of many Jewish people, who, now under Roman rule, proclaimed the coming of the Messiah, who would liberate the people and their ancestral home. This was the belief of the Zealots, who played a key part in the First Jewish-Roman war about fifty years after the death of Jesus. Their targeting of Romans and Greeks made the chief priests of Jesus’ time angry and fearful. They had good reason, based on past experience, to believe that open revolt would gain little to nothing at the cost of much blood. This might give us a context for why they were so wary of Jesus. This, I think, is what Caiaphas meant when he said, “It is better for one man to die than the whole people.”

So, Jesus walks, through the cloisters that stubbornly proclaimed the glory of God’s people, during the festival where God’s people stubbornly remembered the glory of God’s temple. He walks and is accosted by some folks; folks who heard that he had done great things, but perhaps had not seen them firsthand, or were unable to believe it could be possible; folks nursing old wounds of destruction, nurturing the fire of past victory, yearning and burning for the promised salvation; folks who then say, “Be straight with us. Are you the one? Are you the healer who will bind up these old wounds? Are you the gasoline for that victory fire? Are you the one who will save us from Rome?”

These are all real, heartbreaking questions, and I bet they sound familiar.

We come to Jesus, remembering old wounds, nurturing past victories, uncertain about the future. We come and we catch him here, in this place which has seen joy and victory and pain and loss. And we say, “Be straight with us. Are you going to step up? Are you going to be with us while we walk the pilgrim path? Are you really going to bring the right person to us, someone who will love us and care for us in the way that we have come to know and count on?”

And he answers, and it’s a pretty scary answer. “I have told you, and you do not believe.”

That hurts.

But you know what? For me, sometimes, it’s 100% true. I don’t always know for sure if God’s going to step up – and sometimes I don’t like the way God steps up! And even if I know in my heart that Jesus walks with me through every part of life, sometimes he’s really hard to see. And we may believe that God is working wholeheartedly in our canonical committee, but this is a huge position that we are trying to fill.

Sometimes the truth hurts. Sometimes the truth, like Easter, like joy, like resurrection, is messy.

But there is hope.

Jesus goes on to say, “My sheep hear my voice. I know them and they follow me.”

We are known.

“I give my sheep eternal life.”

We are loved.

“No one will snatch my sheep out of my hand.”

We are cared for, and there is nothing we can do to escape that.

Now a sheep isn’t exactly a glamorous animal with which to be identified, is it? In fact, “sheep” among our individualist Western society these days is basically a slur. But do you know what Wikipedia calls sheep? “A prey animal with a strong gregarious instinct.”

Have you ever heard a better description of a Christian? We may not be literal prey today, the way we once were in the arena, but we are prey to all of the things everyday people are prey to – fear, uncertainty, selfishness, apathy. We are also by nature of our baptism prey to other forces. We are prey to those who can’t comprehend why it would better to serve than to be served; prey to a culture of self-aggrandizement and promotion that can’t possibly imagine why we would try so hard to regard others as better than ourselves; prey to an increasingly loud culture which claims the world goes down the toilet every time someone chooses vulnerability or empowerment of the weak rather than judgement and bootstrap thinking.

Prey animals with a strong gregarious instinct.

Oh do we Christians have a strong gregarious instinct. We broadcast our story of death transformed into new life to each other and the world, even when no one is listening.

Isn’t that strange? Why would we do that?

Because we think it’s important.

Because we think it might be the most important truth the world has ever heard.

It’s so important, that Jesus told us we would not be left to do the work alone. We have an Advocate – the Holy Spirit, who moves in us and in the world.

It’s so important, that God entered human flesh and said to us, “Okay, children. These are the promises. I’m all in. What about you?”

Promises were made – at the beginning of time in the middle of swirling chaos; two thousand years ago in an occupied backwater nation; ninety years ago in a little neighbourhood on the west coast of Canada.

These are the promises. God is all in.

What about us?

Mar 27 | “A woman in a garden,” (Easter Vigil Sermon, March 26th 2016)

Note: The community in which I serve uses a much abbreviated version of the Easter Vigil which leans more heavily on the vigil/Holy Saturday tone than the full-on Easter celebration, which it reserves until the morning. The Gospel reading for this evening service as the current rector has chosen it is the following incredibly truncated passage:

Early on the first day of the week, while it was still dark, Mary Magdalene came to the tomb[.]

John 20: 1a

It all comes back to this: a woman in a garden. The cool of twilight. The in-between time, the balance between light and dark.

Beneath the story of salvation that we just heard runs a shadowy thread: the thread of our Fall in that lost garden of Eden. Beneath the image of Jesus’ beloved lost sheep, weeping outside his tomb, another image lies in secret: innocently naked Eve, reaching out to a forbidden tree.

It all comes back to this: a woman in a garden, standing on the precipice of something inescapable and irrevocable. Things are about to change.

Two women, leaning toward a promised wisdom, walking a shared path into history, and the path suddenly splitting in two. One walks into a thick tangle of angry thorns, blamed and shamed and painted forever as the millstone weighing down the human family. One walks into an earth made completely new, an earth still humming with the echo of shattered manacles, Love’s great exodus from the world beneath our feet.

Two women sharing twin experiences. A brand new heart, learning a new existence – outside of him, without him. An invisible thread, pulling each one in to remind her of the new limits she faces. A lack of knowledge. A turning around. New eyes, new focus, new vision, fresh tears.

A woman in a garden. The cool of twilight. The in-between time.

The cool of twilight; fragrant grass bending under holy feet that somehow walk on the earth, pressing impossible footprints into soft soil – once, the soil of Eden; now, the soil of this latter garden, and indeed the soil of humankind’s grieving flesh. A veil of mist parts along a brow that has no business being there. Silent stones share secret surprise, sputtering stars go out, one by one, mute to us, but singing beyond the expanse of space and time, underneath the range of the ear, hovering in the range of the heart. Written into our cells, our bones, our sinews, held hidden, waiting for the inevitable turning of the earth into dawn.

A woman in a garden. The cool of twilight. The in-between time.

A liminal time, held in tension, the eternal space between the hand and the object of desire, the sacred dance between seeker and wisdom, the thin surface of energy blanketing each living thing blending, seeping in, becoming one…but never further, always in process.

This is the truth of our kingdom, our new reign of love. The already and the not yet. The joy of the unfulfilled lover, dreaming of the beloved. The yearning of the heart that yet sings shy on the threshold. The searing bliss of peering through the lattice and leaning into the voice, “Rise up. Rise up and come away – the winter is past.”

A woman in a garden. The cool of twilight. The in-between time.

The slow pulse of a bleeding heart, raw with the ecstasy of grief, leaving the breast warm and crimson with spent ardor, kept there as memorial to what once was and can never be again, and yet destined to be burned away in the tender new sunshine of once-familiar nut brown eyes that should not be open, should not be, because how could God have eyes like a man’s eyes, how could God have feet to walk in the cool of the evening, how could the one who swooned with love onto the hard, splintered wood of the Tree and died there be the one who now waits for the moment when his lost sheep is ready to hear his voice speak her name into the fading dark?

How could this be?

It cannot.

And yet.

A woman in a garden. The cool of twilight. The in-between time.

A woman in a garden, Church Triumphant, a bride waiting under a veil of early morning shadow, bedecked with the glory of spring and carefully silenced bells, holding her breath.

A woman in a garden, holding out her hand.

Mar 22 | “The Hidden Light,” (Sermon, March 22nd 2016)

Now among those who went up to worship at the festival were some Greeks. ²¹They came to Philip, who was from Bethsaida in Galilee, and said to him, ‘Sir, we wish to see Jesus.’ ²²Philip went and told Andrew; then Andrew and Philip went and told Jesus. ²³Jesus answered them, ‘The hour has come for the Son of Man to be glorified. ²⁴Very truly, I tell you, unless a grain of wheat falls into the earth and dies, it remains just a single grain; but if it dies, it bears much fruit. ²⁵Those who love their life lose it, and those who hate their life in this world will keep it for eternal life. ²⁶Whoever serves me must follow me, and where I am, there will my servant be also. Whoever serves me, the Father will honour.

27 ‘Now my soul is troubled. And what should I say—“Father, save me from this hour”? No, it is for this reason that I have come to this hour. ²⁸Father, glorify your name.’ Then a voice came from heaven, ‘I have glorified it, and I will glorify it again.’ ²⁹The crowd standing there heard it and said that it was thunder. Others said, ‘An angel has spoken to him.’ ³⁰Jesus answered, ‘This voice has come for your sake, not for mine. ³¹Now is the judgement of this world; now the ruler of this world will be driven out. ³²And I, when I am lifted up from the earth, will draw all people to myself.’ ³³He said this to indicate the kind of death he was to die. ³⁴The crowd answered him, ‘We have heard from the law that the Messiah remains for ever. How can you say that the Son of Man must be lifted up? Who is this Son of Man?’ ³⁵Jesus said to them, ‘The light is with you for a little longer. Walk while you have the light, so that the darkness may not overtake you. If you walk in the darkness, you do not know where you are going. ³⁶While you have the light, believe in the light, so that you may become children of light.’

After Jesus had said this, he departed and hid from them.

John 12:20-36

I have this friend. He’s what John O’Donohue would call an “anam cara,” a “soul friend.”

We met at a Goth club I used to go to every Sunday evening. (If you’re curious about that part of my life it’s actually a lot less exciting than it sounds; just spectacular outfits, very loud music, and a lot of pierced and tattooed people more likely to spend their hard-earned cash on corsets than any of the illicit substances my mother thought they consumed in the bathroom.)

My friend is older than me, he’s gay, and identifies as Pagan but was raised Plymouth Brethren. When I met him he also attended a Presbyterian Church, and is a faithful member of the late-night Compline service congregation at Christ Church Cathedral. He’s got a rich spiritual heritage and temperament.

We began our relationship with a conversation about religion, and have continued in that vein for several years. We exchange books. We share in each other’s struggles.

His Plymouth Brethren background, his spiritual practices, and his sexual orientation mean that he currently has a familiar but uneasy relationship with Christianity, freely admitting that leaving it was the hardest but most necessary thing he has ever done. The Plymouth Brethren are a nonconformist offshoot of the Anglican Church which can be traced back to mid-seventeenth century Dublin. They reject the concept of clergy leadership, are theologically conservative, and are liturgically very Protestant, without much music or embellishments.

Although most of the time my friend was open and humourously self-deprecating about his birth faith, it occasionally shone through in interesting ways, most notably one year when I encouraged him to come to Cathedral services during Holy Week.

“Oh, don’t give me that,” he said, in a dry, scoffing tone I can hear ever so clearly in my head right now, “It’s no more holy than any other week.”

Is Holy Week more holy than any other week?

I suppose technically it isn’t. We’re looking forward to some really important things, but for most people I imagine it doesn’t feel that different.

Especially on the Monday, Tuesday, and Wednesday, before we get to the good stuff on Thursday, Friday, and Saturday. Why would we mark this entire week? Why do these first three days get their own pages in the BAS? Why do we get to change colour to red? There’s nothing about these days that stands out the way the palms or the foot-washing or the Cross does. Aside from these cosmetic changes a lot of it probably feels pretty mundane.

I can understand that. It’s not like the world stops when we mark this time.

But maybe that’s where the wisdom lies.

Chapter 12 of the Gospel of John is the beginning of what scholars call the ‘Book of Glory,’ because ‘glory’ is mentioned so many times. Our narrative moves into a constant song of Jesus being ‘lifted up.’ That phrase is a hint that our evangelist probably spoke Hebrew, because the Hebrew word nasah means both ‘glorify’ and ‘lift up.’ If the earlier Book of Signs (which begins with the wedding at Cana and ends with the raising of Lazarus) is about the descent of the Word into the world, this book is about the Word’s ascent out of the world. In the Book of Signs, Jesus gave everyone a chance to see and believe who he really was. In the Book of Glory, all of the things he tried to explain are about to come to fruition. If you don’t get it now, it’s too late. You will be left in the dark, like Nicodemus. Like the Pharisees who didn’t believe the blind man in Chapter 9. Like Judas.

In the passage we just read, our patron saint Philip is approached by some Greeks. It’s unclear as to why they approached him, although it could be because they knew him – Philip is, after all, a Greek name, and Philip was from the cosmopolitan city of Bethesda. Philip gets Andrew, and they both go to Jesus to let him know he’s got fans to talk to.

And then what? Some weird noises, something that almost sounds like it could be another long-winded discourse but is surprisingly short and curt, and then Jesus hides.

Because, verse 37: “Although he had performed so many signs in their presence, they did not believe in him.”

And so the Light of the World becomes hidden.

How could this be? It’s like the worst timing! Jesus just made a huge deal coming into Jerusalem. The Pharisees say to each other, “Look, the world has gone after him!” And it’s true, because here are some Greeks, some Gentiles. You don’t get much further from the family than that. And then Jesus says, “The hour has come for the Son of Man to be glorified. Soooo bye!”

What kind of glory is this that must be hidden from those who seek it out? How can the Light of the World be a hidden light, when we are told by our brother Matthew to let our light shine before others?

Well, the problem, for John, lies here: If the Light of the World were easy to see, there would have been no need for a Messiah figure in the first place. John’s whole story is about Jesus calling people to remember a truth they have forgotten.

I have more sympathy for the forgetful than John does. I forget little things all the time. I can imagine it would be just as easy to forget something huge like your own self-worth and agency when you’re being trampled by so many foreign Empires. I can imagine that, having forgotten, one might misremember, and believe that salvation comes through a sword. That was, after all, what the Roman Empire taught.

The hidden light of self-sacrificing love of your enemies would be really hard to see at that point. In fact, it would probably look like complete nonsense.

But it wasn’t. It isn’t.

I’m going to show you the way we show our children here at St. Philip’s, when we tell the Godly Play Baptism story. After explaining what baptism looks like, we light the light of Christ, and then each child receives a candle to remind them of their baptism. We reflect on how amazing it is that so much light can grow from just one light, and the one light not be any smaller for it.

And then, we say this:

“There comes a time when the light is changed so it is not in just one place anymore. It can be in many places all at once. Watch.”

You snuff the candle. It’s important to snuff rather than blow it out, because when you snuff, the smoke is held and can be released in this way.

We say, “The Light that was just in one place at one time is in all places in all times. So the Light can be everywhere in this room, and even in other places. Everywhere you go in this room, you will bump into the Light.”

There is a hidden truth here. It’s hidden because…well, think of trying to explain to someone how this works. “You make the light bigger by extinguishing it.” It’s nonsense.

And yet.

In these few red days, know that the light is hidden in these simple acts of meeting, telling stories, forgiving and proclaiming, eating, and sending each other out.

Know that the light is changed, passed from one body to yours, and is now hidden by your flesh…and waiting to be lifted up.

Mar 21 | “To conquer Death,” (Palm Sunday Sermon, March 20th 2016)

Palm Sunday and the beginning of Holy Week, the most sacred time of the Christian year, are incredibly awe-inspiring to me. And yet what always comes to mind, year after year, is Jesus Christ Superstar. Love it or hate it, this musical, and particularly its 1973 film adaption, was hugely influential to my Christology and life of faith.

Luke is the only Gospel that mentions the interaction between Jesus and Herod. I love Superstar’s take on it. I think I’ve started loving it more recently because for some reason it seems terribly relevant. See, Herod kind of reminds me of Donald Trump.

If you’re remembering the same slightly tubby white-Afro-sporting yellow-shaded cavorting beach boy in sparkly white shorts that I am, understand I’m still being serious. He’s florid, crass, complacent, ostentatiously wealthy, and above all, deeply cynical. The fact that Herod is surrounded by hangers-on mirrors the popularity of the Donald, and cements my belief that there is nothing new under the sun. People of all stripes have always been attracted to swaggering loudmouths; it seems to be deeply written into the human psyche.

Hey, maybe the serpent was the first one. “Listen, baby, who are you going to believe: the joker who invented the platypus or me? This fruit? Best fruit. I know this stuff, I’ve eaten like every fruit in this garden. And since when does God have the right to tell you which trees you can eat from? Wait, don’t answer that. Naw, I didn’t say that. Don’t recall.”

I feel like now every time I think of the serpent I’m going to hear the voice of Donald Trump – a swaggering loudmouth shilling snake oil statecraft, and booking it out of there when it gets real.

The biggest difference, of course, is that the serpent never told Eve to punch Adam in the face if he tried to stop her from taking that fruit. Trump, however, had a planned rally in Chicago canceled because of escalating violence outside the venue. This isn’t surprising, considering the footage that has surfaced from two other earlier rallies that clearly shows elderly white men physically assaulting young African-American protestors. Trump’s stupefying response to this was a lament for the “good old days,” when, I quote: “There used to be consequences for protesting.”

When he said that, I remember thinking, “Which good old days is he talking about? Is he talking about the ones where, yeah, there were consequences for protesting? Like…fire hoses and attack dogs? Like ‘This summer I hear the drumming, four dead in Ohio?’”

First of all, that’s awful. Which I feel like I really shouldn’t have to say. Second of all, come on, man – there are still consequences for protesting. It just depends on who and where you are.

If you’re a young white kid in Victoria, BC in 2003 at a huge march condemning the US war in Iraq, as I once was, there aren’t any. If you’re a young black kid protesting at a Donald Trump rally in 2016, though, video evidence shows you can expect to be sucker-punched by a known white supremacist and immediately arrested on the spot – while the guy who punched you in full view of stadium security will be ignored for a couple of days and then finally brought in once video of the incident goes viral online.

If you’re a young Jewish man in first century Palestine, riding on a donkey…well, we know that story.

Just imagine things from the perspective of the people in power: Here comes this hayseed Galilean, surrounded by a bunch of other hayseeds and a pack of local troublemakers, not just walking into the city but riding into it on a donkey surrounded by adulation and palm branches. The religious leaders would have known the passage from Zechariah:

“Rejoice greatly, O daughter Zion!
Shout aloud, O daughter Jerusalem!
Lo, your king comes to you;
triumphant and victorious is he,
humble and riding on a donkey,
on a colt, the foal of a donkey.
He will cut off the chariot from Ephraim
and the warhorse from Jerusalem;
and the battle-bow shall be cut off,
and he shall command peace to the nations;
his dominion shall be from sea to sea,
and from the River to the ends of the earth.”

This is not a neutral act, friends. In fact, biblical scholars Marcus Borg and Dominic Crossan even wonder if there were two processions into Jerusalem occurring simultaneously: one, Jesus and his disciples, and the other, Pilate and his guard. It was barely a week before the Passover, you see, and it was common for governors to arrive in style at places like Jerusalem during great religious festivals to make sure everyone knew their place.

I actually feel great sympathy for the religious leaders in Jerusalem. Although the Gospel writers mostly exonerate Pilate by making him out to be an indecisive dupe, according to the history we have, Pilate was actually a petty tyrant. First-century Jewish historian Josephus writes that Pilate once spent Temple money to build an aqueduct, and when informing the people of this, hid disguised soldiers among the crowd, who killed protestors. The scholar Philo describes Pilate as having “vindictiveness and a furious temper.” Pilate’s term as governor ended shortly after an incident in which he had a group of Samaritans visiting Mount Gerizim massacred in a conniving sneak attack.

You can imagine why the religious leaders would be suspicious and hostile toward Jesus, arriving in the Holy City accompanied by zealots, the latter of which regularly stirred up trouble against the Roman state and eventually helped instigate the First Jewish-Roman war, which destroyed the Temple.

But Romans, Pharisees, and zealots alike misunderstood Jesus’ message.

As Jesus Christ Superstar hauntingly puts it, “To conquer death you only have to die.”

It might seem weird that we just celebrated with such pomp, only to move straight into the stark Passion account. Who and what exactly are we celebrating here? Certainly not the one we would expect. This is why I think it’s so important to combine Palm Sunday with Passion Sunday. Our celebrations should not be for the ones who insist they are entitled to them, or the ones who respond to the violence of Empire with calls to crush and maim, or even the good-hearted powerful ones who stay silent while the weak fall around them.

Our celebrations should be for the ones who walk into hostile territory exposing the folly of Empire with their own poverty.

Our celebrations should be for the ones who embrace weakness in order to shame the toxic misuse of strength.

Because the world, right now, today, needs to know this story. The world needs to know that our God is a god of action as well as a god of the Word. The world needs to know that our God wouldn’t preach resistance to life-denying forces if God hadn’t done it first. The world needs to know that God wouldn’t tell us to die to ourselves if God hadn’t done it first. The world needs to know that when we say “Death is not the end,” we really believe it.

Most of all, the world needs to know that our God remembers.

Our God remembers covenants and abandoned slaves. Our God remembers wayward nations and fallen sparrows. Our God remembers us, and calls us to remember.

There is a Greek word, anamnesis, which refers to a part of the Eucharistic prayer. It ostensibly means ‘to remember’, but it doesn’t refer to quiet reminiscence. It is always linked to action. It bears witness to the past and incarnate it into the present, because God’s work occurs outside as well as inside the walls of time. In the Bible, when God remembers, God delivers. God saves the world from bondage and isolation. God literally re-members.

On this day, and throughout Holy Week, we will re-member, in story, song, and sacrament. What we do together matters here. We are the broken, triumphant, incarnate Body of Christ, forever nourishing ourselves and each other through the unifying mystery of the sacraments.

Blessed are we, who come in the name of the Lord.

Amen.