Easter will be here before we know it (it’s coming very early this year), so without further ado here is the Holy Week schedule for 2013.

Wednesday of Holy Week, March 27 :

Morning Prayer, 11:45 am.
Mass, 12 noon.
Evening Prayer, 6:30 pm.
Tenebrae, sung by the St Ann Choir under the direction of Prof. Bill Mahrt. Precise time TBA, but this will be in the evening.

Maundy Thursday, March 28 :

Choral Mass, 7 pm. This service celebrates the institution of the Eucharist and the priesthood, and begins the Sacred Triduum of Holy Week.

Good Friday, March 29 :

The Way of the Cross, 3 pm.
Solemn Liturgy of Good Friday, 7 pm (including the Altar Service, the Solemn Collects, the Veneration of the Cross and the Mass of the Presanctified). This liturgy is the solemn celebration of our Lord’s Passion and Crucifixion.

Holy Saturday, March 30 :

The Paschal Vigil, 8 pm. A service celebrating the Resurrection, including the blessing of the new fire, the Easter Proclamation, readings, litanies, and a Solemn Mass.

Easter Sunday, March 31 :

Choral Mass, 11 am.

Mark your calendars now, and plan to attend each service if possible. The experience is unforgettable!

The following sermon was preached on Sunday, December 30, 2012.

God sent forth his Son, made of a woman, made under the law, to redeem them that were under the law, that we might receive the adoption of sons.

In the name of the Father, and of the Son, and of the Holy Ghost. Amen.

It’s a commonplace of melodrama : the eldest son goes into the reading of the will and finds out, through the medium of a lawyer’s droning voice, that he is ADOPTED. His whole world changes–he doesn’t know who he is anymore. His confidence crumbles, his grip on all he has mastered slips. He is undergoing a crisis of identity, to be solved only by whatever plot device the author has planted in the scenery.

Let me make a slight change to the venue. This particular scene takes place in a church, and the voice bearing the news is that of a priest. For I must inform you all that you, also, are adopted.

I hope the news doesn’t precipitate any kind of identity crisis in you. For we all–at least, those of us who have received the sacrament of baptism–have been adopted by God. We have been baptized into the death and resurrection of Jesus, and now have the right to call God “Father”.

Perhaps you’re wondering how we differ from those who aren’t baptized Christians. For surely we’re all God’s children, aren’t we? Aren’t all human beings part of God’s great big family?

Well, in a sense that’s true. God has created all human beings, so in that sense he can be said to be their Father, in the way that anyone who creates something can be said to be its father : thus Thomas Edison is the father of cinema, Enrico Marconi the father of radio, and Teller & Oppenheimer the joint fathers of the atomic bomb. But I really feel that this designation is misleading. After all, God already has a natural Son–the second Person of the Trinity, who is also God. And referring to mere creations as “sons” and “daughters” can only confuse the issue–the relationship that God the Father and God the Son have to each other is special and exclusive, requiring that both parties be God–consubstantial and undivided. It’s simply not possible for us.

Don’t lose hope, though. We can have the next best thing : adoption.

In the ancient world, adoption was much more common than it is today. And I’m not speaking just about adopting small children from orphanages, which is the most common form in our world. I’m speaking mostly of the practice of adopting an adult as part of one’s family, in a legally binding way, which imposes responsibilities and bestows benefits on both parties. Elaborate laws and ceremonies for adoption were part of both Greek and Roman society, so when St Paul uses this as a metaphor for God’s relationship with his Church, you can be sure they got it. Going back further, we can see this same idea used to describe God’s relationship with the Hebrews, a people which he chose as his own–not chosen to be the best or most favored people on Earth, but chosen to become the nation from which God would bring about the world’s salvation.

For this is what we celebrate in this season of Christmas. On that day so long ago in Bethlehem, God, the Infinite, God Who is outside of Time, became finite and entered human history. He was incarnate–the word means enfleshed–as a human being, an infant boy, in a little town of Judea. And his becoming like us means that we can become like him.

There is a branch of theology which is called soteriology. This rather forbidding-sounding word comes from the Greek term soter, which is translated into English as “savior”. What soteriology is concerned with, therefore, is salvation : what it is, and how it works. You may be surprised to know that there are several different theories of salvation, all of which are orthodox. Possibly only one is true; perhaps they are all true. God has a way of resolving contradictions, after all!

The particular theory I’m thinking of concerns the Incarnation itself as a vehicle of salvation. Picture in your mind a pond, cool and still in the summer sun. Now pick up a pebble and cast it into the center of that still pond; watch the ripples from the pebble spread to every part of the water. Now imagine that the pond is the world. That pebble splashing into its center is the Incarnation of Our Lord Jesus Christ. The ripples are still spreading, still being felt. In this theory, the Incarnation itself spreads through all creation and begins to redeem it. Because the world has been touched directly by the Son of God, it begins to flower and bloom with new life, which will eventually spread through all things and make them once again whole.

It’s a beautiful idea, certainly. I’m not suggesting that you abandon your own soteriology and take this theory up, but it seems to me certainly compatible with the idea of Christ’s vicarious atonement on the Cross–I can see how the two ideas might work in a kind of synergy. Nevertheless, the Incarnation, however you conceive of our salvation as working, is a special, unprecedented point in history, and because of it, we are now able to have the close relationship with our Maker that he has always desired for us to have, which our sin has prevented us from having.

Through the sacrament of Baptism, our sins are blotted out. The slate is clean. Baptism is a ratification of our adoption by God, the welcoming ceremony into God’s family. Because we have been baptized, we know that God is now our Father, and that the heavenly Jerusalem is indeed our happy home. Our lives are meant to be journeys toward God. Baptism, by making us heirs of the Kingdom, gives us a home to journey to, and the hope that finally, at the end of this journey, we will find ourselves reunited with the loving Father who cares for us as his own–to begin yet another journey which will take us deeper and deeper into that love and into that home, where all our earthly joys will be revealed as shadows and premonitions of the joys we will discover there.

In the name of the Father, and of the Son, and of the Holy Ghost. Amen.

Here is the sermon preached at St Ann’s on Epiphany I, the 13th of January 2013.

For as we have many members in one body, and all members have not the same office : so we, being many, are one body in Christ, and every one members one of another.

In the name of the Father, and of the Son, and of the Holy Ghost. Amen.

Hear the voice of the Nineteenth Century, crying not into the wilderness, but into the very midst of the storm :

Out of the night that covers me,

I am the captain of my soul.

Very Captain Ahab, isn’t it? Thus spake William Ernest Henly, who lived from 1849 to 1903. The title of the poem is “Invictus.” The title is Latin, and translates as “Unconquered,” or “Unbowed”. Henly was a true product of the nineteenth century, and the poem encapsulates vividly the individualist mindset which permeates–one might even say, infects–Western culture in our era. Timothy McVeigh, the misguided young conspiracy theorist and would-be revolutionary who was executed for the 1995 Oklahoma City bombing, recited this very poem when he was asked for a final statement before his execution.

The sentiment of this poem should be familiar to all of us. For it articulates principles which resonate deeply with the American experience : the push westward of the pioneers against a hostile landscape, inimical elements, and economic hardship. They became self-reliant because, in many cases, there was no-one else to rely upon. And the habits of self-reliance, once learned, are difficult to break. This is one reason, I think, why the nuclear family rather than the extended family has become the normal social unit in our culture. Often the nuclear family was all that there was on the frontier. And even religion was affected : the stability of a diocesan structure, with episcopal oversight and the sense of belonging to a wider Christian community, was unknown to most early Americans. The result is that Catholic Christianity is something of a late-comer on the American scene, and that creeping Congregationalism has influenced even the more hierarchically constructed churches–look at the vestry system in the Episcopal Church for one example.

Think again, though, on what St Paul says in today’s Epistle. He is, tradition holds, speaking to the church in Rome. In today’s extract he counsels them to turn their back on “the world”–not meaning necessarily that they should all become hermits and misanthropes, of course. In Paul’s writing, he often uses “the world” to mean those who are not practicing the Christian faith–in other worlds, the secular culture which surrounds us and in which we must move, live, and conduct our affairs. Like our modern culture, the aims and norms of Roman culture were quite divergent from those of the Christian faith : divorce and sexual immorality were rampant, greed and graft had corrupted the government, and the poor were brutally oppressed by the rich. Sound familiar? Well, it should; it’s the same old situation the human race is always in. We Christians have an explanation for it, of course–it’s a product of the fallen world. The world is not in itself evil, but has degenerated to this evil state as a result of the sin of humanity. We Christians also know that there is a remedy for this : that our Lord became a human being, endured our sufferings, and submitted to an ignoble death in order to redeem us. We have to take individual action in order for this redemption to benefit us; in this sense salvation is an individual concern. Other people cannot save us; only God saves, and we each have to make our personal response to God in order for that salvation to work.

So Paul continues to tell us to be careful that we not think of ourselves too highly, or to overestimate our own worth. Here he’s not warning against pride, per se (although that’s certainly always something to watch out for) : this is preparatory to his main point, which is that we are all members–organs, limbs–of one body. We, the church, are one body in Christ. In fact, elsewhere he refers to the church explicitly as the Body of Christ. In either case, the point is the same. We are all interdependent and none of us can exist effectively on our own. For example : I am a priest. Some might say that makes me a very important person indeed. And certainly, there are some things that just cannot happen without a priest–the Eucharist or absolution, to name two. In that sense, a priest is special, but the “specialness” extends only to his office, his function. Being a priest doesn’t make me better than anyone else; it means that I have a different job to do than most of you. Similarly, the eye isn’t “better” than the elbow; it has a different function. Although at first thought it might seem that the eye is more important (after all, if you can’t see, your overall functioning is impaired), if you think about it for a while you’ll realize that without the ability to bend your arm your ability to reach for things, grasp things, and manipulate things is greatly impaired. So although the elbow might seem more humble than the eye, in reality our body needs both of them to function as it’s supposed to.

Neither eyes nor elbows exist in a vacuum; they need each other, and the rest of the body, to do what they’re supposed to do. And as people, we don’t exist in a vacuum either. There are lots of reasons why any of us might have wound up here at St Ann’s : some are cradle Episcopalians, or cradle Catholics who feel their church has gone further away from God rather than closer to Him. Some respond to the traditional hymnody and music, or to the liturgy, or the sonorous language of the King James Version and the 1928 Prayer Book. But above and beyond these things, it’s our fellow Christians who keep us steadfast in the faith, no matter what church we may belong to. It’s our brothers and sisters in Christ who are here to encourage and to rebuke, to rejoice or commiserate in our happiness or sorrow, and to act as mentors and companions in our journey. We cannot do it alone. We were never intended to do it alone. We are all members of one body.

I’m sure we’ve all heard, at a cocktail party, wedding, or some other social occasion, someone loudly proclaiming his respect for Jesus and his “teachings” while saying that he has no time for religion–after all, the churches are just full of hypocrites, and he can worship God just fine on his own while fishing on a peaceful mountain lake. This is, of course, absolute nonsense. You can, it’s true, get a sense of God’s greatness by contemplating the grandeur of his creation. If you’ve reached an appropriate stage of spiritual development, God can speak to you in the stillness of an early morning in the mountains. But there is simply no substitute for worshiping God together with other worshipers in spirit and truth, with our hearts and minds, our bodies and voices; much less is there a substitute for receiving the very substance of God in the Eucharist. I suspect that part of that disgust for hypocrisy involves what Carl Jung, the famous psychological theorist, would have called a “shadow projection”–the desire to avoid, by projecting upon others, the less savory aspects of one’s own personality. And so the charge of hypocrites in the churches can only be answered in the words of another Karl, the late Bishop Karl Bloch of California : “There’s always room for one more.”

Soon, we will begin our preparation for Lent. The Blessed Apostle will then speak to us of the race we are set to run. But this race, unlike others, is not one in which the winner takes all. Everyone who finishes is a winner; the only ones who lose are those who give up. And since it’s not a zero-sum game, we can’t benefit from the misfortunes or mistakes of others–in fact, we are bound, in order to finish the race, to help one another through those misfortunes and to gently correct one another on the way to the finish line; the eye doesn’t suffer as a consequence of guiding the hand, nor do the legs suffer as a consequence of propelling the body in the direction of the food which benefits the whole. We are members of Christ’s body, and not isolated individuals; the whole body, and not just one or two isolated parts, must finish the race. May we keep these excellent words of St Paul in our minds today and always, until in triumph we finally realize our destiny : to glorify God and enjoy Him forever.

In the name of the Father, and of the Son, and of the Holy Ghost. Amen.

The sermon preached on Christmas Day 2012. Slowly but surely catching up with the backlog!

And the Word was made flesh, and dwelt among us…

In the name of the Father, and of the Son, and of the Holy Ghost. Amen.

Congratulations–we’ve made it!

We’re here at last, the Feast of the Nativity, having finished our four-week journey through Advent. The church is greened and decorated, and the vestments are no longer violet, but white–the color of rejoicing. We can now bask in the glow and wonder of the coming of our Savior as a human being, the birth of the Christ.

And yet I’m sure that many of us have already burnt out on Christmas; we’ve been seeing jolly elves and Santas since before Thanksgiving, been battered with renditions of “Have Yourself a Merry Little Christmas,” “Chestnuts Roasting on an Open Fire,” and “Rudolph the Red-Nosed Reindeer” until we begged for mercy, and had to bite our tongues as well-meaning retail employees wished us a happy “holiday”. And every year it seems as though the retail Christmas season begins earlier and earlier, as corporations look for ways to rack the profits higher than they were last year. The subversion of this high Christian holiday is surely the best evidence that our nation worships not the Almighty, but the Almighty Dollar.

In such a situation, we Christians have to work doubly hard at reclaiming our tradition and our holy days. Christmas is so closely associated with Santa Claus (himself a secularized version of St. Nicholas of Myra), decorated trees, elves, and gift-giving that it has almost become a secular holiday with no religious content. Only the inclusion of the requisite sentimentalized carols on Christmas albums and television shows prevents it from sliding completely into secularism. And Christian churches are tempted to follow suit; some churches place so many trees inside their sanctuary that it begins to resemble a forest. Some churches mount elaborate entertainments like the “singing Christmas tree”, in a bid to outdo in their vulgarity the worst excesses of Las Vegas. And some churches have discarded the concept of Advent altogether, shrugging their shoulders–”If you can’t lick ‘em, join ‘em.”

None of these, of course, are the way to reclaim our feast. Read the Nativity story; there is no glitzy, gaudy display there. A poor couple, the woman far advanced in her pregnancy, are journeying to their home town to be counted in the census so their tax can be calculated. The inns are all booked up, so the only place they can find lodging for the night is a stable. The woman has the child and lays him in the manger. There are angelic apparitions, of course, but they seem to be fairly low-key; only the shepherds see them, and the town is not disturbed.

That’s it. No fanfares, no explosions of glitter and confetti, and only a mild brouhaha. This is the example we should follow–and not for reasons of good taste, but because to do otherwise misses the point. Because the point of Christmas is not presents, or Santa, or even family; it’s not the angelic choirs singing “Glory to God in the highest,” or the little baby who’s so good that he never even cries; it is simply that God himself has condescended to become a human being like us, to redeem our fallen race. It is that the sovereign creator and ruler of the universe became a helpless infant, born to humble parents. It is that the pre-existing Word of God, who himself is God, by whom and for whom all things were made, was made flesh and dwelt among us.

It is this wonderfully singular and singularly wonderful birth (to quote Pope Leo the Great) that we celebrate tonight. Yet we cannot forget–our liturgy will not allow us to forget–that at the end of this road, this life of God made man, lies the Cross. The proximity of Christmas to the feasts of St Stephen and the Holy Innocents
reminds us that even in the midst of such a joyful season there is sacrifice. Robert Southwell, the Elizabethan poet and martyr, wrote the following, which for me encapsulates this aspect of the season :

As I in hoary winter’s night stood shivering in the snow,
Surprised I was with sudden heat which made my heart to glow ;
And lifting up a fearful eye to view what fire was near,
A pretty babe all burning bright did in the air appear ;
Who, scorchëd with excessive heat, such floods of tears did shed
As though his floods should quench his flames which with his tears were fed.
Alas, quoth he, but newly born in fiery heats I fry,
Yet none approach to warm their hearts or feel my fire but I !
My faultless breast the furnace is, the fuel wounding thorns,
Love is the fire, and sighs the smoke, the ashes shame and scorns ;
The fuel justice layeth on, and mercy blows the coals,
The metal in this furnace wrought are men’s defilëd souls,
For which, as now on fire I am to work them to their good,
So will I melt into a bath to wash them in my blood.
With this he vanished out of sight and swiftly shrunk away,
And straight I callëd unto mind that it was Christmas day.

A blessed and peaceful Christmastide to you and yours.

In the name of the Father, and of the Son, and of the Holy Ghost. Amen.

Easter is coming early this year, which means that Lent also is coming early. Which means, of course, that our Shrove Tuesday Pancake Supper will also be early!

February 12, 2012, from 6 pm to whenever we decide we’ve had enough. Nancy Dunaway will be coordinating; please contact her or Fr Weber for more information. The supper will be held in All Saints Hall behind the chapel. Everyone is welcome! Please make plans to come, and bid farewell to indulgence (”Carne, vale!”) for the 6 weeks of Lent.

Catching up on past sermons! Here is the sermon preached at St Ann’s on 12/23/12, the Fourth Sunday in Advent.

That in the last day, when he shall come again in his glorious majesty to judge both the quick and the dead, we may rise to the life immortal.

In the name of the Father, and of the Son, and of the Holy Ghost. Amen.

What an odd world it is that we live in. It’s full of every imaginable sort of wickedness (and some unimaginable ones), from simple greed and lust to complex combinations of all the Seven Deadly Sins in concert. Daily, we are confronted with challenges to our faith and temptations to abandon it. Yet should we, as Christians, voice any objection to any of the wickedness we see–not necessarily calling for it to be punished, or even for it to stop, just saying that we think what’s happening is wrong–there’s certain to be somebody who admonishes us not to judge.

And many times, the words of Our Lord Himself are thrown in our face : Judge not, lest ye be judged. Often these words are delivered with a smirk of self-satisfaction, of finally having hoisted the religious do-gooder with his own petard, beaten him at his own game. And sadly, many Christians allow themselves to be fooled by this tactic, because although they know their Bartlett’s Familiar Quotations, they don’t know their Scripture. Because what is important is not what the Scriptures say, so much as what they mean.

In the example I’ve given, the quotation is incomplete and taken out of context. The verse continues : “For with what judgment ye judge, ye shall be judged: and with what measure ye mete, it shall be measured to you again.” And this continuation colors the whole matter somewhat differently : in other words, if we judge with ulterior motives or evil intent, we can be sure that when it comes to our turn, the judgment will reflect that. Furthermore, if we set unreasonably high expectations for the behavior of others, we can be sure that will be taken into account when we are judged. This verse is therefore an admonition for moderation and fairness in judging rather than a prohibition of judging.

For judgment is something which is part and parcel not only of being Christian, but of being human. When we’re at the supermarket, we judge which produce is fit to consume and which to leave on the display. When we pick up a book and start to read it, we make judgments about whether it’s worth our time to continue reading it or not. When we drive an automobile, we judge whether or not we have sufficient space before the next car comes to make our turn. When it comes to morality and ethics, we make judgments all the time concerning which behavior is appropriate. And as Christians, we are expected to make judgments of this nature, and when necessary to make them publicly.

Does this mean that we ought to support criminalizing any behavior which is forbidden us by our religion? We’re not really given a definitive answer. On the one hand, we are certainly called to be witnesses for Christ, and to model Christian morality to the rest of the world. On the other hand, we are also counseled to render unto Caesar that which is Caesar’s. I personally doubt whether passing a law has ever stopped anyone from committing a crime–it appears to me that the chief function of a law is to provide a predicate to punish wrongdoing–but it’s difficult to come up with any simple answer that covers how everyone should approach this question. Nevertheless, whether you embrace the political process as a means to change or choose to simply lead by the example of how you live your life, I think it’s very clear that to abandon judgment is disastrous.

For we will, indeed, be judged. It is made clear to us, in no uncertain terms, that when Jesus returns (not, this time, as a defenseless child in a manger, but as the Lord of Creation appearing in the clouds with glory and a host of angels), he will return to judge the living and the dead. And on this great day of judgment, all our secrets will be laid bare; there will be no hiding behind closed doors or drawn blinds. This judgment won’t be, as popular mythology often has it, a sifting or weighing of good deeds against bad. God doesn’t conduct audits. Our salvation is not dependent upon having done more good things than bad things, in the final analysis. It’s dependent upon how willing we have been to have a relationship with our Creator, through his Son Jesus Christ.

In order to make such a relationship possible, God Himself was made incarnate as a human being. He suffered, died, was entombed and rose again, demonstrating to his human followers the path they must tread to be saved. For as human beings we all know that we must be born, that we must live a life which includes a certain amount of suffering, and that at the end of this life we must also die. Yet we also know that if we believe in Jesus, and make the effort to walk in his path, then we, like Him, will also rise again and live eternally.

At the beginning of this sermon I quoted the Collect for the First Sunday in Advent, which is appointed to be said at every service within the season. This Collect really is an excellent summary of what Advent is all about. This is the time of year when we look forward with increasing excitement to the Feast of the Nativity–the appearance of God in human flesh–and when we also remind ourselves that he is not gone for good, that he will return in glorious majesty. Not only to judge the quick and the dead, but to restore a broken world, to heal the griefs of a sundered universe, and in the excellent words of C. S. Lewis, to “restore all names to their rightful owners.” And so, with the Prophets Isaiah, Malachi, and Micah, with Blessed John the Baptist and the whole host of God’s prophets, known and unknown, we look East for the rising of the Sun; the light which lighteth every man that cometh into the world. We watch and pray, and await, with joyful hope, his return in glory to make all things new.

In the name of the Father, and of the Son, and of the Holy Ghost. Amen.

The latest issue of the Province’s newsletter, Christus Rex, is available for perusal and download here :
http://www.anglicanpck.org/news/newsletters/ChristusRex-V5-N1.pdf

A reminder : our Christmas celebration will take place on the 24th at 8 pm. This will be a full choral Mass with sermon, and it’s a wonderful way to observe our Lord’s Nativity. I hope to see many of you there, and wish you all a happy and peaceful Christmastide!

Art thou he that should come, or do we look for another?

In the name of the Father, and of the Son, and of the Holy Ghost. Amen.

Happy Gaudete Sunday! Traditionally, the third Sunday in Advent is a slight relaxation of the discipline of this season; instead of the violet of penitence and preparation, we are bidden to put on the rose of rejoicing. This Sunday takes its sobriquet from the Introit, which admonishes us to “rejoice in the Lord alway,” insistently repeating “and again, I say, rejoice!” The command “rejoice” in Latin is “Gaudete”, and so this Sunday is often referred to as Gaudete Sunday. The lightening of the Advent mood is mirrored by the lightening of the color from violet to rose.

Advent is, as I say every year, a time with a dual significance. In Advent, the circle that is the Christian year is most strongly pronounced, because not only are we leading up to the Nativity of Jesus–his first coming–but also to his second coming, in glory. This week’s Gospel concerns John the Baptist speaking of Jesus, and also Jesus speaking of John; the great Forerunner and the Messiah, commenting on each other. We see John in prison, having heard of the marvelous things Jesus is doing, and wistfully asking : are you the One? Have you finally arrived, or do we have to wait longer? This is echoed in the Revelation of St John, where the martyrs cry out to God “How long, O Lord, faithful and true?”–yet another illustration of Advent’s dual significance, and indeed, this portion of Revelation pops up as a lesson for Evening Prayer in this season.

I have always found John’s question very poignant and moving. To paraphrase St Paul, the entire creation was groaning and travailing in pain together up to that point. But what does Jesus answer? “Tell John all the things you’ve seen : the blind receive their sight, the lame walk, lepers are cleansed, the deaf hear, the dead are raised up, and the poor have the good news preached to them.” Jesus is still being a little coy at this point; he says neither Yes nor No, but points out a few salient facts and lets John take care of the addition.

He then goes on to talk to the crowd about John. Now bear in mind that, although John was acting in a manner consistent with the way prophets had acted in Jewish culture up to that point, there was probably a good number of people that thought John the Baptist was a lunatic. How would you react if you saw a man on Alma Street wearing animal skins, with matted hair and beard, stuffing locusts into his mouth and shouting blood-and-thunder about impending apocalypses and messiahs? Well, hardened by living in the Bay Area, you’d probably give him a wide berth and mutter something facetious about Berkeley escapees under your breath; and most likely this is something like what his contemporaries must have thought. Remember that Greek culture, through the conquest of the area by Alexander the Great some 300 years before, had infiltrated the Hebrew people, and made them more cosmopolitan and worldly than before. A man who would have been considered holy in the time of the kings had become, in the minds of many, merely a public nuisance; another nutcase babbling on about nothing anyone needed to know about–such a modern, improved attitude!

And so John opened his mouth when he shouldn’t have, criticizing Herod’s marriage to his brother’s widow, and Herod–a man obviously unused to being criticized–promptly slapped him in jail, leading up to the situation with which today’s Gospel begins. And having delivered his message to John’s disciples, Jesus turns and talks to the crowd about John himself. He asks them : what did you come out here to see? A reed shaken by the wind (this refers to a person who is motivated by the desire for approval, and who modifies his message to gain that approval from people)? A man clothed in soft raiment? a prophet? Yes, John the Baptist is a prophet, and more–and here Jesus comes to the point–For he is the one the scripture is talking about when it says “Behold, I send my messenger before thy face, which shall prepare thy way before thee.” (If you’re keeping track, that’s a quote from the prophet Malachi.)

Let’s just stop and think about that statement for a moment. What is he saying? Essentially, he’s telling them that yes, he (Jesus) is the One who is coming. Implied in Jesus’ statement about John being God’s messenger–his Forerunner–is that Jesus is the one whom John is Forerunning! Throughout the Gospels, we see Jesus speaking this way, couching in oblique ways his statement of just Who he is, letting those who hear him put the pieces together for themselves. It’s only very late in the game that he comes out and says that he is the Son of God, and only after others have come to the conclusion for themselves. In this Jesus shows himself to be a cunning psychologist; it would probably have been a mistake to let that cat out of the bag too early, since it would have sounded like empty bragging or self-aggrandizement.

And what happens to John? Of course, we all know that Herod is tricked by his wife Herodias into executing him. Herodias has it in for John because she doesn’t want anyone criticizing her and Herod’s marriage. When her daughter by her previous husband, Salome, dances for Herod, he is so smitten that he promises her anything–up to half his kingdom–that she desires in return. Coached by Herodias, Salome demands the head of John the Baptist on a platter. Bear in mind that up to this point Herod has avoided doing anything final about John; he has a following, after all, and Herod seems to have, in his heart of hearts, some sense that John is a prophet and not to be crossed. But he’s sworn an oath, and there’s nothing for it but to do as he’s promised; so John is executed, his head brought on a platter, and Herodias is satisfied.

Nevertheless, John, that crazy man in the desert, has served his purpose as the great Forerunner of our Savior. That gives him a special place in the Christian faith, and I would hope, in our hearts as well; and it should remind us that God often speaks and acts in ways that we might not wish to credit. To be sure, God speaks through the clergy–on occasion!–, through our loved ones, out of the mouths of babes and sucklings, and sometimes even through an apparent lunatic in the wilderness. May today’s Gospel serve as a reminder that we cannot simply turn people off because their appearance isn’t what we expect, much less credit someone based solely upon their appearance and credentials; what matters is not the messenger, but the message.

In the name of the Father, and of the Son, and of the Holy Ghost. Amen.

Heaven and earth shall pass away : but my words shall not pass away.

In the name of the Father, and of the Son, and of the Holy Ghost. Amen.

“They just don’t make ‘em like they used to”. We’ve all heard that expression before; most of us, as we grow older, use it more and more the older we get. Sometimes we talk about movies, or books, or records in this way; lamenting that the quality stuff which was so plentiful in our youth now seems much harder to find. Often we fail to realize, of course, that when we’re young everything seems great; we’re liable to look back nostalgically on the Tom Swift novels, or the Star Trek series, or the pop music of the ’80s, as the products of a golden age now long past. The truth is that all those things were just as disposable as today’s reality TV, American Idol popstars, or young-adult fantasy novels; it’s just that when you’re a kid, it all seems new and fantastic–it takes an older, more jaded person to see the tailor’s mark of the emperor’s new clothes, and we often find that when we revisit a childhood treasure, the pleasure pales.

“They just don’t make ‘em like they used to”. We also use this expression to refer to a past when things were built to last; when furniture and household items could be handed down through generations. So much modern stuff seems to have been made to be disposable : you can go to IKEA to pick up cheap furniture that looks attractive enough, but will it stay in your family as long as Great-Aunt Tilly’s sideboard, that was 50 years old when she inherited it? Unless you’re a person who takes enormously great care with your things (which is to say, a person who never uses them), I doubt it. And it’s not just furniture; anything you can name is disposable. Automobiles, electronics, appliances, clothing–even relationships seem disposable, or at least recyclable. And when something breaks that we depend on, it can be a real blow to us : when your microwave oven or car stops working for no apparent reason, there’s almost a sense of betrayal quite apart from the inconvenience of not being able to use it.

Now for some perspective. Of course this is not a new problem, or a new feeling. Things break all the time, and even when great care is taken in their construction and use, sometimes they just give out. We all realize, sooner or later, that nothing in this world is permanent. Many things last a long time; the United States is older than any of us, and it shows every sign of lasting long after all of us are gone, but it had a beginning, and it will eventually have an end. The same is true of everything in physical creation. There’s a French saying : “Tout passe, tout casse, tout lasse.” Translated into English it means, “Everything passes, everything breaks, everything wears out”. An uncomfortable truth, but no less a truth for all that!

The Bible has a bit to say on the topic of impermanence. The book of Job is the story of a man who had everything, and how he behaved when that everything was taken from him. When Job is told of the massacre of his sons and daughters by the Sabaeans, his response is to rend his garments and shave his head (both gestures of mourning), and fall prostrate and say : “Naked came I out of my mother’s womb, and naked shall I return thither: the LORD gave, and the LORD hath taken away; blessed be the name of the LORD.” A more philosophical reaction than I’d be capable of under that circumstance! As his misfortunes increase, he becomes less reserved in his grief, but the words he speaks are true. Nothing lasts.

The Preacher, as the author of Ecclesiastes calls himself, utters similar sentiments. “One generation passeth away, and another generation cometh”, he says, and although his emphasis is on the sameness of all human effort, yet he also recognizes that none of our works will outlast us for very long. He looks at all the things his fabulous wealth has bought him, and all his accomplishments, and dismisses them as vanity–emptiness. His enjoyment of all that his money could buy, and his satisfaction in his achievements, is temporary. Again, nothing lasts.

And in today’s Gospel, Jesus comes right out and tells us that heaven and earth will pass away. That’s everything! This physical creation is temporary. Of course, it was here before we got here, and in all likelihood it will be here long after we’re all dead, but still : it won’t last forever. Think about the world as it was during Jesus’ lifetime : his homeland was part of a vast empire centered in a far-off city in Italy. The Roman Empire probably seemed, at that time, as though it would last forever. It certainly outlasted everybody who ever met Jesus face-to-face. Yet now, two thousand years later, the Roman Empire has shrunk to the Italian peninsula, and Italy is a second-rate world power (if that). The might of Rome is only a memory.

But the words of Jesus Christ remain, and the faith built on him remains. When the Romans noticed Jesus and his followers, they were hostile to them. Some Roman magistrates, and even an emperor or two, did their best to extirpate the Christians; yet not only did the Christians flourish in spite of their efforts, in an ironic twist the new religion wound up taking over the infrastructure and hierarchical administration of the Empire. And although that religion has suffered setbacks, and now and again goes through periods of dryness or struggle, it enters the twenty-first century as the same faith that once was delivered to the saints. Uncounted millions, even billions, of people have passed away since he uttered those words. Empires have crumbled, fashions come and gone, ideas have been born and died. Yet the words of Jesus Christ remain.

In a world where things are in a constant state of change, where everything and everyone passes away, breaks, or wears out, the words of Jesus are our beacon. They are our lifeline. They comfort us when we are distressed, lift us up when we sorrow, and humble us in our pride. For “the words of the Lord are pure words: as silver tried in a furnace of earth, purified seven times.” This Advent, and always, hold on to those words. Everything else may fail you : your possessions may break or be stolen, your family and friends may die or forget about you, your body itself will finally give out–but the words of Jesus will stand like a rock in the river of Time, until that great day when time itself shall be no more.

In the name of the Father, and of the Son, and of the Holy Ghost. Amen.

[This sermon was preached last Sunday, December 2]

…And now it is high time to awake out of sleep: for now is our salvation nearer than when we believed.

In the name of the Father, and of the Son, and of the Holy Ghost. Amen.

The beginning of the Advent season often calls to my mind the “little apocalypse,” in the 24th chapter of St Matthew’s Gospel. If you’ll recall, in it Jesus warns us against those who will promote false Christs, who will appear in manners inconsistent with that which Scripture foretells. There are those, even today, who claim that Jesus has reappeared under secret conditions, or that he walks among us in secret, awaiting the hour of his revelation.

In that little apocalypse—that” lifting of the veil,” so that you can see what it covers—Jesus tells us, in vivid detail, what the circumstances of his return will be. “And then shall all the tribes of the earth mourn, and they shall see the Son of man coming in the clouds of heaven with power and great glory,” he says; and so we know, that until we see him coming in this manner, that he is not yet come, and whoever claims to be (or is claimed to be) Christ, is not.

The Advent season, which begins today, looks simultaneously to the future and to the past. In this season of the church year, we remind ourselves that the return of Jesus is imminent : our faith looks to his second coming in triumph and glory, to sweep away the Enemy and all his angels, and to inaugurate the new Heaven and Earth where we shall be with him forever. But at the same time, Advent is a season of preparing to call to mind his Nativity in Bethlehem; our great feast of Christmas, when he came among us as a helpless human infant. Today’s Gospel, which shows the triumphant entry of Jesus into Jerusalem—mere days before he is to be put to death in a painful and ignominious fashion—is really about the Second Coming, not the first. The entire lesson is, in fact, a type, a foreshadowing in parvo, of the Second Coming.

For if his first Advent was, as the Collect has it, in great humility, his second shall be in great glory. It suited the Father’s purpose that he would be born in relative obscurity, but there will be nothing obscure about the descent from the heavens, with a host of angels. “Every eye shall then behold him, robed in dreadful majesty,” says the hymn; there won’t be any mistaking what’s happening at that moment. Just as he enters into Jerusalem with a crowd singing Hosanna, in imitation of a king returning to his capital, the people of the world will alternately welcome their Lord or wail in despair as they witness his return. And just as he cleansed the Temple–His Temple–of the wicked, who defiled it with commerce, even so shall he cleanse His world of the sin and wickedness with which we have defiled it.

For this reason St Paul counsels us in the Epistle to awake out of sleep, to cast off the works of darkness and put on the armor of light. Advent is, like Lent, a penitential season; all of our great feasts involve some kind of ascetic preparation for the celebrations. We have seven weeks before Easter, and four weeks of penitence for Advent; even some lesser feasts, like those of the Apostles or of Pentecost, involve one vigil day of preparation. The point of these penitential observances is not to punish ourselves for not having been better. This is a terrible misconception, for even an entire life of do-gooding and penitence can’t atone for the least of our sins. These practices are referred to as ascetic, from the Greek word askesis, which means something like an athletic contest. This brings us back, by the way, to St Paul’s athletic figures of speech : “I have fought the good fight, I have run the race,” and so on. Fasting and abstinence, and the other penitential practices available to us, are very much like athletic training; they make us fit for the struggle in which we are daily engaged. Their point is twofold : first, to emphasize for us the contrast between the sometimes mortifying nature of our life on earth with the joy of Heaven and of the Presence of God. And secondly, we undergo these ascetic practices in order to be able to pay more attention to God. You see, the feasts of Christmas and Easter are encrusted with cultural observations that push God out of the picture. Not that there’s anything wrong with Christmas trees or Easter eggs—but if that’s all Christmas or Easter mean to you, then you’re missing the point. Giving something up for Lent, or observing a fast or abstinence during Advent, is an opportunity for us to center our attention on God, and to put ourselves in the proper state of mind to really understand the significance of these great festivals of our faith.

And so today we begin to look forward to the great feast of our Lord’s Incarnation. The church and clergy wear violet, the color of repentance, as a token of our desire to turn again to the Lord our God. We omit the Gloria in excelsis from the liturgy at this time so that it might ring out all the more triumphantly at the first Mass of Christmas, echoing the proclamation of the angels at the birth of their King. And following that King’s admonishment to us, we watch and pray, for none of us—not Emmanuel Swedenborg, not William Miller, not Herbert W. Armstrong, not you, not me—know the hour in which the Son of Man shall come. Yet come he surely will; and he will fulfill our hopes, and justify our faith. As St John, in words at once hopeful and comforting, writes : “He which testifieth these things saith, Surely I come quickly. Amen. Even so, come, Lord Jesus.”

In the name of the Father, and of the Son, and of the Holy Ghost. Amen.