(Sermon preached by Bishop Terry Brown at the Ordination of Janice Maloney-Brooks to the Vocational Diaconate at Christ’s Church Cathedral, Hamilton, on the Fourth Sunday after Epiphany, January 29, 2017. Texts: Isaiah 6: 1-8; Psalm 139: 13-17, 22; Philippians 4: 4-9; John 12: 20-26.)
The Irish are famous for their blessings and I shudder, just a bit, to think how many kitchens around the world have an Irish blessing refrigerator magnet. But today is a day of blessing: Janice is blessed, we are blessed, the church is blessed.
There has been a theological shift in recent years in the church’s understanding of blessings. The dualistic view of the middle ages, in which something profane is taken and through special holy words uttered by a bishop or priest (or a deacon in the case of inanimate objects) and perhaps sprinkled with holy water, becomes sacred, has been challenged by a more holistic view. In this new view, creation, human beings, the work of human hands, our world, have all already been blessed by God; thus, liturgical blessing is more a recognition of that already-existing divine blessing with a thanksgiving to God for it.
There is the shadow here of the controversial baptismal theology of the great 19th century English theologian, F.D. Maurice. As Evangelicals and Anglo-Catholics argued when and if, during or after Baptism, the grace of baptismal regeneration began to operate, Maurice put forward a very different view: that at birth every child is a child of God, already graced, and Baptism is but the recognition of that grace already existing, and thanking God for it, confident that it is bound to increase.
I believe this new understanding of blessing and Maurice’s baptismal theology give some insight to what we are doing here today. Janice is already a well-practiced servant; she has lived half a lifetime of Christian service; God’s grace has already been abundant in her life. She has already been blessed with God’s grace of servanthood. She has already strengthened the service of others through her ministry to them. What I say of Janice, might, I hope be said of all of us here simply as Christians. But in Janice and other Deacons we, the church, recognize exceptional ministries of service and want to see them continue and flourish. So, we recognize and bless that servanthood in ordination, with the prayers that it will go from strength to strength and never cease.
But first we listen to Scripture and what it says about this ministry of diakonia, servanthood. The story of God’s call to Isaiah reminds us that it is a call, not a selfish act of the ego. Jesus called his apostles to servanthood. Jesus himself was among us as one who served. Service and servanthood, like mission, are part of the esse, the very being of the church. We discern that call both individually and corporately. We are also called to be sent; but we are also called to return home. Servanthood is God’s business, God’s work, part of God’s Mission, and we are called into it.
The psalm reminds us that God has created and knows our most inward selves, our broken bodies, our most intimate desires, our deepest needs. But God knows us with love, not judgement, and helps us make the best of how we have been created and how we have grown (or even been damaged) over the years. God will continue to know and love us to the end.
The passage from Philippians speaks of confidence and joy in the Christian life, including the Christian life of service. Janice, already your friends and the church have seen your tremendous capacity to bring joy out of suffering and grief. Here you have followed Jesus who says, “I no longer call you servants, . . . instead, I call you friends”. You have knit us together in friendship. Part of the ministry of service, diakonia, is making this move from Christian service to Christian friendship. May you (and all of us) take Paul’s words to heart: “Keep on doing the things that you have learned and received and heard and seen in me [and I would add, in Christ], and the God of peace will be with you.”
But there is also the Cross. In the Gospel we heard today, a group of Greeks ask Philip, “Sir, we would see Jesus”. (Like many 19th century Evangelical Anglican churches, those words are written on a brass plaque in the pulpit lectern at Ascension to challenge every preacher there.) Jesus, about to go to his glorification on the Cross, speaks of his death and resurrection: “Very 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”.
Ordination is also a commitment to stay closer to the Cross, to be willing to take on even more burdens. “Whoever serves me must follow me, and where I am, there will my servant be also.” But with the Cross comes Resurrection and Glorification. “Whoever serves me, the Father will honour”.
God’s ongoing call to new ministries of service and friendship, divine intimacy, confidence and joy, the Cross and glorification: what better signposts are there for the life of a Deacon, the servant of all God’s people? Janice, you will be examined and make promises, the community will invoke the Holy Spirit, the bishops will lay hands on you and we, as a community, will celebrate that the church has a new deacon. Anglican theological magpies that we are, we can even dip into the middle ages and say that your sacramental character as a deacon will now become permanent. It is all an enormous blessing, both to Janice and to the church. But it is a blessing that must continue to be nourished by prayer, the sacraments, fellowship, rest, leisure and, indeed, solitude.
To bring together the blessing that is today with the continued call to solitude and sustaining intimacy with God, I shall end with a poem of blessing by the Irish Catholic priest and theologian, John O’Donohue, from his book of blessings, “To Bless the Space between us”. While I shall read it especially for Janice, may it also be a blessing for all of us and a reminder that blessed for service, we are also called deeper into a boundless God who is both perfect activity and perfect solitude.
Blessed be the mind that dreamed the day
the blueprint of your life
would begin to glow on earth,
illuminating all the faces and voices
that would arrive to invite
your soul to growth.
Praised be your father and mother,
who loved you before you were,
and trusted to call you here
with no idea who you would be.
Blessed be those who have loved you
into becoming who you were meant to be,
blessed be those who have crossed your life
with dark gifts of hurt and loss
that have helped to school your mind
in the art of disappointment.
When desolation surrounded you,
blessed be those who looked for you
and found you, their kind hands
urgent to open a blue window
in the gray wall formed around you.
Blessed be the gifts you never notice,
your health, eyes to behold the world,
thoughts to countenance the unknown,
memory to harvest vanished days,
your heart to feel the world’s waves,
your breath to breathe the nourishment
of distance made intimate by earth.
On this echoing-day of your birth,
may you open the gift of solitude
in order to receive your soul;
enter the generosity of silence
to hear your hidden heart;
know the serenity of stillness
to be enfolded anew
by the miracle of your being.
[Silence]
And let there be a coda, the same tune, the same melody, out of the prophetic fire, incense and deep silence of God, whether amongst your diaconal service to seafarers, the parish or beyond, especially as entropy and disorder begin to take hold globally, the words of Micah from this morning’s lesson: “O mortal, what is good; and what does the Lord require of you but to do justice, and to love kindness, and to walk humbly with your God?” Amen.
(Sermon preached by Bishop Terry Brown at Church of the Ascension, Hamilton, Ontario, on the Fourth Sunday after Epiphany, January 29, 2017. Texts: Micah 6: 1-8; 1 Corinthians 1: 18-31; Matthew 5: 1-12.)
Some weeks as I look at the Scripture readings to prepare a sermon for Sunday, I shake my head and wonder what can I say out of all this. In those cases, I sometimes resort to preaching on the Collect, the prayer for the day. But that is not the case this Sunday.
From Micah, “O mortal, what is good; and what does the Lord require of you but to do justice, and to live kindness, and to walk humbly with your God?” From Paul, in today’s Epistle: “the Cross is foolishness to those who are perishing, but to us who are being saved it is the power of God.” And the Gospel presents Jesus’ Beatitudes: Blessed are the poor in spirit, those who mourn, the meek, those who hunger and thirst for righteousness, the merciful, the pure in heart, the peacemakers, those persecuted for righteousness’ sake.
The combined effect of these readings makes it clear that what God seeks of us is justice-making, humility, kindness, mercy, simplicity, purity, a spirit of reconciliation and a willingness to bear the Cross. They are perhaps summed up in Paul’s description of Love, agape, attempting to live in our own lives, God’s self-giving love in Jesus Christ.
This description of the Christian life is in stark contrast to many of the words and actions of many world leaders today, most famously now, the new President of the United States. There the talk is of economic and political grandeur, increasing military might, building walls of exclusion, advocating torture, no mercy for the oppressed, cultural and racial supremacy, institutionalizing greed – in short, hatred and demonization of the Other, put forward as a path to love and peace. In the Christian vocabulary, there is only one word for that approach: sin.
As Canadian Christians, we can well demand of all our leaders, from the national to the provincial to the local level: “do justice and live kindness and walk humbly” even if you do not believe in God. These are universal values of goodness shared by all religions and ideologies that value human life and community.
Power, including political power, can be addictive. As power-crazed leaders gain power, they want more power, and take away power from others – often from those who don’t have much power to start with: the poor, the refugee, the homeless, the First Nations person, the person on a fixed income, the unemployed, women and other threatening minorities. Or they promise power to some and take it away from others. This power-mongering can hypnotize and lead to mass violence, often against the other, the stranger. The other, the stranger, becomes the scapegoat.
The message of the Cross is different. God becomes a broken human being on the Cross, powerless; God takes on humility and weakness, so that the powerless, the broken, the humble, the Other, may be empowered. It is foolishness to those who think power and wealth are the highest good. The Latin American Liberation theologians a couple decades ago had a name for this divine action: God’s “preferential option for the poor” – and we might extend it to all who are weak and vulnerable.
Last week, I mentioned the request from the Church of the Transfiguration, St. Catharines, to take on responsibility for a Karen refugee family from Burma-Myanmar that they have been looking after and who will be moving on March 1st to Hamilton. I am pleased to report that enough people in the parish have expressed an interest in offering this support that I have sent back a “Yes” to St. Catharines. The family, a married couple and four children, will sometimes be worshipping with us. Let us welcome them, as a part of our doing justice, being kind, and looking out for the foreigner and stranger. This afternoon I’ll be at All Saints and will also invite them to become involved.
Working together, using all our different experiences and backgrounds, even our experiences of weakness and vulnerability, it should not be that difficult to take on such a task.
The South Pacific is full of many religious movements, some of them very strange. One I came across, some years ago, was called the Personal Viability movement. It advocated dividing people into the two categories of “viable” and “unviable”. When you joined the movement, you took a test that told you your level of “personal viability”. If your score was too low, you were declared “personally unviable” and encouraged to join the movement to make yourself “viable”.
While some churches encouraged the movement, I found the ideology deeply flawed. In the Cross of Christ, all are viable, even the weak and vulnerable, and we do not rank. People are not development projects, ranked for their viability. We all have areas of vulnerability, we all have areas of strength. Through mutual support and living the virtues of today’s lessons, we can all grow from weakness to strength, strength in the Christian life, holistically understood.
The powerful, addicted to power and seeking more power, turn the despised Other into objects, no longer human beings. The great Jewish philosopher and theologian, Martin Buber, contrasted the I-it and the I-thou relationships. The I-it relationship is the human relationship with an object, a shoe perhaps, or a stone. Mutuality is impossible because the Other is not a human being, rather an object. But in the I-thou relationship, one speaks to the heart of the Other, another person, and the other responds with a mutual “thou”. The I-thou relationship is a reflection of our relationship with God, a “thou” who responds to our “thou” with the divine “thou” of love. Sin is treating another person as an “it”, only a object. Often the key is when we cannot name the other and can only say “they” and “them”: “’they’ are taking all our jobs away”, ‘they’ are causing all the crime”, “’they’ shouldn’t come here”, “I don’t trust them”.
Seeking justice and kindness and living with humility, requires us to approach the Other as a “thou”, as another human being like ourselves, open to and wanting friendship and mutuality. Where cultural or language barriers are great, it may be something as simple as making sure in an apartment that the elevator door does not shut before a large family arrives, or simply smiling to show acceptance. And to watch our talk – when it is a hostile “they”, “they”, “them”, “them”, we need to stop ourselves and re-assess our attitudes.
Likewise, when we meet strangers or even talk with one another, we are to give each other our full attention, eyes not drifting off to some more attractive person or old friend we might want to meet. Real engagement and presence are the foundations of seeking justice, loving kindness and living with humility.
So, let us take these lessons to heart. Though we may have fears, let us also have confidence. In the end, righteousness, kindness, humility, the weakness of the Cross, the Beatitudes will triumph because Love is eternal. Let us pray more and more to be agents of that Love, speaking and acting against the powerful injustices of this world. May God bless and strengthen us in this task. Amen.
(Sermon preached by Bishop Terry Brown at Church of the Ascension, Hamilton, Ontario, on the Second Sunday after Epiphany, January 15, 2017. Texts: Psalm 40: 1-12, 1 Corinthians 1: 1-9, and John 1: 29-42.)
If there is a theme that keeps emerging in today’s two lessons and the psalm it is celebration. The psalmist is celebrating that his prayers and faithfulness have been answered by God’s mercy and goodness. Much later, Paul begins his first letter to the Corinthians by celebrating the new life in Christ that the Christian community in Corinth now shares. And in the Gospel, Andrew and Peter celebrate because they have found the long-awaited Messiah.
Here we find three kinds of celebration: individual celebration, celebration of community and the celebration (of the beginning) of a very hopeful movement.
Often when we think of individual personal celebration we think of particular special events: a epic birthday, a marriage, a birth, an ordination, and we put much effort into that celebration. In the psalm, the writer reflects on a lifetime of celebration: “I waited patiently upon the Lord … and he heard my cry.” “He put a new song in my mouth, a song of praise to our God”. “Great things are they that you have done, O Lord my God.” The psalmist also wishes to share his joy and celebration with the whole community: “I have not concealed your love and faithfulness from the great congregation”. The celebration is rooted in deep personal faith that internalizes the law, not in the rote celebration of sacrifices: “I love to do your will, O my God, your law is deep in my heart”. The psalm is the summing up of a life of celebration of God’s love and faithfulness. It also extends to the future: “You are the Lord; do not withhold your compassion from me; let your love and your faithfulness keep me safe for ever.” We are encouraged to see our whole lives (past, present and future) as celebration, rather than concentrating on special celebrations and being, perhaps, a bit dull and depressed the rest of the time.
Likewise, Paul begins his first letter to the Corinthians by celebrating their life together as a community in Christ. In a way, every preacher or speaker to a Christian community should do the same. I celebrate our life together in Christ in this community. Paul extends the celebration of Christ beyond the Corinthian community to the global church of his world, “those who in every place call on the name of our Lord Jesus Christ”. Paul celebrates God’s present ongoing grace in the Corinthian community, “so that you are not lacking in any spiritual gift”. And that celebratory grace will continue to be poured out to the end.
The suggestion is that we are called to be not just individuals of celebration but communities of celebration. We celebrate that we are here this morning. We celebrate all that has been done, is being done, and will be done for Christ’s sake in this community. It is so easy to be a bit dyspeptic about church life and begin with complaints. Paul’s celebration is especially marked by confidence: even where there are problems, Paul is essentially a confident person. He was a confident Pharisaic rabbi; that confidence didn’t change, he became a confident apostle to the Gentiles. And he expected that confidence from the Christian communities he visited, oversaw and taught. We, too, do well to have confidence and a deep sense of celebration, rather than bemoaning difficulties, past, present and future, and being messengers of doom.
The Gospel for today tells of the moment of celebration when Andrew and his companion, and then Peter, recognize Jesus as the Messiah, turn away from their fishing nets, and follow him. It is the celebratory beginning of a movement, what the Presiding Bishop of the Episcopal Church calls “the Jesus Movement”. Church history is plagued with exciting movements turning into bureaucratic and institutional nightmares. We are reminded to be open to forms of renewal of Christianity that are not so institutional, that emerge, for example, simply from a group of people wishing to follow Jesus more closely. Such movements might be study groups (Bible study or another approach) or prayer and meditation groups. They might be new commitments to mission, such as work with refugees or neighbourhood groups. They might be movements of radical hospitality. Our willingness to host a large All Saints funeral this Saturday with patience and friendliness will be, I hope, an example of such radical hospitality.
One of the burdens of our big old building is the amount of human energy the building sometimes takes; energy that could better be put into Christian mission and ministry that celebrate and exemplify our faith in Christ. Yet we celebrate too that we have parishioners with the skills and resources to look after this building. And there is no reason why it cannot be the home of many celebratory movements too. And I believe it is.
In all three passages of Scripture, the celebration is ongoing, a mark of the daily Christian life, not just the occasional blast which wears us out and may make us depressed afterwards.
Yet what about the low points? Can we still celebrate when we have human suffering and death, anxieties, poverty, uncertainty and other difficulties to face? Are we somehow just to laugh and joke in the face of these. The answer is, of course, No.
If we go back to the three passages, they all also include within themselves the honest struggle with low points. The psalmist declares, “He lifted me out of the desolate pit, out of the mire and clay, he set my feet upon the high cliff and made my footing sure”. There must have been a lot of suffering behind that reflection. The psalms are full of this dialogue between despair and celebration. The psalmist does not give up. With patience, faithfulness and perseverance, celebration emerges out of the deepest despair.
Likewise, Paul, after these very positive words of celebration, goes on to critique the weaknesses of the Corinthian church. But he does so with love, always urging the community to move from individual backbiting and point-scoring, to a common celebratory faith in Christ. And of course, Andrew and Peter are called to a movement of love and justice that leads to the Cross and martyrdom, in short, to a great deal of suffering before the Resurrection restores all to new life and celebration.
So, ours is not a cheap and superficial celebration – getting drunk in a bar and feeling good about the world, only to come home to a big hangover the next morning – but a celebration, a daily celebration, that is personal, community and missional (being sent out – or even sent in – as a movement of celebration), rooted and grounded in Jesus Christ.
So when we face travails – sickness and death, financial problems, relationship problems, unemployment, distance and loneliness, uncertainty about the future, world events, and so forth – we are given the power to step back and become re-grounded in Christ through prayer, mediation and participation in the sacraments; through mutual support in the community, through retreat from what stresses us (perhaps the social media, or too much work or travel, or taking on too many burdens, or making the wrong things idols). The Christian life is a marathon, not a sprint, and it is not a sin to slow down towards the end or when the road is too steep. Paul uses that “running a race” metaphor elsewhere. But it is a celebratory marathon, “whose yoke is easy and burden light”.
The flaw with the marathon metaphor is that it might suggest competition in which some win and others lose. But in the Christian race, the Christian Way of Life, we all race together, supporting one another, all celebrating together, and, in the end, we all win. The psalmist shares his story to encourage others, including us, so that we may join him in that experience of God’s love and mercy. Paul shares his letter to the Corinthians with the whole church as he wants to encourage the whole people of God. And, of course, Andrew and Peter and the other disciples follow Jesus out into the whole world of all cultures and all peoples, sharing the good and celebratory news of Jesus Christ.
So, let our lives be lives of celebration, day by day, even if there are very low points, points of despair and great sadness, even though the future is uncertain, despite world events, even if we have failed (God offers forgiveness): Let us be like the psalmist: “I waited patiently upon the Lord; he stooped to me and heard my cry. He lifted me out of the desolate pit, out of the mire and clay; he set my feet upon a high cliff and made my footing sure.” Thanks be to God.
(Sermon preached by Bishop Terry Brown on the Feast of the Baptism of the Lord, January 8, 2017, at the Church of the Ascension, Hamilton, Ontario. Text: Matthew 3: 12-17.)
Many years ago, in my first-year theology class, I heard a theological word that was new to me, “Revelation” (written with a capital “R”) or, more precisely, divine Revelation. The term was used as a shorthand for God’s intervention in human history in the person of Jesus Christ and extended backwards to all of salvation history and forward to the development of doctrines such as that of the Holy Spirt and the Holy Trinity.
The point of the word is that it is God who is taking the initiative and revealing the divine nature of perfect love through Jesus. We are not in the driver’s seat on this one. As Christians, we believe that Jesus is God’s divine Revelation, not a clever human invention or myth, and not something hidden by God to be discovered by some secret formula or knowledge. Divine Revelation takes place in human history. It is public. It is shared. It is reflected and acted upon. It is accessible to all people through the eyes of faith.
Our liturgical celebrations the last two weeks contain the heart of the divine Revelation and they have come to us rather like waves emanating from a stone dropped into the sea. After the preparation of Advent, there is Christmas, the coming of the divine Word into human history in the person of the child Jesus, worshipped by rude shepherds. Then last Sunday we marked the naming of that divine and human Word, as Salvation. A few days ago, on the feast of Epiphany, as the magi arrive at the manger, it becomes clear that divine Revelation is for all peoples, not just the Jews. And today we mark the Baptism of Jesus by John the Baptist, with the divine commissioning of Jesus for his earthly ministry as the Anointed One, the Messiah or Christ, to reveal God’s perfect love to the world. Words even come from heaven: “This is my Son, the Beloved, with whom I am well pleased.”
Our age, and ages before ours, have challenged this idea of divine Revelation in various ways. One approach is simply to deny it, whether through atheism, denying the existence of God, or regarding the story all as some sort of human invention or myth. Some would argue that a real God is so powerful and separate from us that he would not want to get involved in the muck of human history. Others might argue that Jesus was just doing his own thing and it had nothing to do with God at all or that Jesus was, at best, just a prophet, revealing God’s will, but not Revelation Himself.
Others like hiddenness and mystery and feel the story is just all to obvious, so there must be some further secret knowledge to be discovered (the shorthand for this approach is the theological category of Gnosticism): for example, perhaps Jesus did not really die on the cross, perhaps Jesus was an angel (maybe St. Michael), perhaps Jesus was married and had descendants (the Di Vinci Code approach); or perhaps some whole new book is required for further Revelation: the Quran or the Book of Mormon, for example.
But as Christians, and particularly as Anglicans, we come back to the simple mystery of public divine Revelation in Jesus Christ of Nazareth, born in a rude manger, revealed to the simple and to the wise, to Jew and Gentile, God’s Son, human and divine, revealed to the world in Palestine in the first century, what some theologians have called the “scandal of particularity”. Nothing secret, nothing hidden, God revealing the divine nature and the Rule of God in human history, through human history.
If we think of the last couple of weeks as waves of divine Revelation, what about the future? Is there still more to be revealed of the story? There is, of course, the simple life of Jesus, all his teaching and all his example; there is his death on the Cross, his Resurrection and resurrected life, his Ascension and Glorification. These too are part of divine Revelation. And beyond that? There is Pentecost, the gift of the Holy Spirit, and the growth of the church around the Mediterranean world and beyond. The gift of the Holy Spirit, of course, is also forward looking, guiding us into the way of truth in the future, across ages, cultures, languages and civilizations. What we carry with us as Christians is divine Revelation, waves from this central event of Jesus’ birth.
One of the theological debates about divine Revelation is whether it is “open” or “closed”. Might God still have some new revelation to offer us beyond Jesus? Or is the Bible a closed book and we are to live according only to it? I think the answer is “yes” and “no” or “it depends”. Salvation is complete in Christ (the Bible contains all that is necessary for salvation) and there is no need for or reason to believe in another Saviour or Prophet or Incarnation to take us beyond Jesus. (Some groups, such as the Unification Church or “Moonies” do believe such a thing and in the Solomons we had a Methodist breakaway group, the Christian Fellowship Church, who added their founder to the Trinity to make to four rather than three.) As Christians, we believe that the essentials have been revealed in the divine Revelation of God in Jesus Christ: what we are celebrating in this season.
Yet, the gift of the Holy Spirit has a real open-endedness to it and Jesus himself indicates to his disciples that he cannot teach them everything and the Spirit of Truth, who will lead them into all truth, will be imparted. This gift of the Holy Spirit is also a part of divine Revelation. Jesus surely foresaw that his teachings, indeed, his divine Reign, would extend across centuries and cultures to come, to situations unthinkable such as space travel, genetic engineering, great varieties of human relationships, medical technology and the like. So it is also wrong to put the Bible in a kind of time capsule of the past and let only the situations of 2000 years ago govern what we do today.
Yesterday, I participated in the consecration of the three new suffragan bishops in the diocese of Toronto at St. Paul’s, Bloor Street. If you have been following the church news, you’ll know this was a very controversial event as one of the new bishops is gay and has a partner and there were formal objections to his consecration. Yet, here is a case where the church for at least the past 40 years has been reflecting on the nature of same-sex relationships and what is to be affirmed and what is to be discouraged. I believe the Holy Spirit has been informing those discussions and decisions, though the Bible says very little directly about loving and committed same-sex relationships, though a lot about violent and exploitative sexual relationships, both heterosexual and homosexual. I believe the event yesterday was a good example of the open-endedness of divine Revelation: it leads us to new truths, new understandings, new traditions.
All that leads to another word I heard for the first time in my first-year theology class 45 years ago, “hermeneutics”, how we understand and live ancient texts of other times and cultures (in our case, the Bible) in our cultural situations today. (The word hermeneutics, by the way, comes from the Greek messenger god, Hermes – what is the message brought forward from the past to today?) That is what good preaching and good Bible study is about: making divine Revelation alive for today.
To return to the metaphor of waves of divine Revelation: In Christ’s birth, it is as though a great stone has been dropped into the sea. In further waves, the divine Revelation is further defined and clarified. We look back to those waves in the Bible and in the work of the Holy Spirit in human history. We move forward on those waves.
Yet there are other waves. In my years as a bishop in the Solomons, I frequently travelled by small outboard canoe around the diocese, as often there simply were no roads. Looking back, I sometimes consider myself lucky to be still alive. The southern-most tip of Malaita, Cape Zelee, had extremely treacherous currents, with waves coming every-which direction, towering over the canoe as the east, west and south currents battled one another, especially at high tide. Some villages had only one breach through the reef that had to be travelled through at low tide on a big wave. In the end, I could only trust my skilled canoe drivers and sometimes I just turned by back to the waves and hoped for the best. We never sunk and I was only once drenched when an inexperienced driver coming out of a river did not know how to deal with the waves produced by the incoming tide.
I tell the story to suggest that not all waves lead us forward and the waves of divine Revelation will encounter waves of human selfishness, lust for political power, greed, hardheartedness, harsh judgement and sheer human stupidity. Yet Christian divine Revelation teaches that in the end (and even now), love will overcome evil, human greed will turn to dust, the powerful will be pulled down, and God’s Reign, God’s divine Revelation will triumph. Therefore, we are not to lose heart. Let us be like my skilled canoe drivers who knew how to navigate treacherous currents and count and ride the right waves.
So, today, at the Baptism of Jesus by John, we celebrate God’s declaration of Jesus as the divine Son and God’s endorsement of Jesus’ divine and earthly ministry (indeed, its beginning), part of divine Revelation. We pray that we may ride and live the waves of that divine Revelation, both today and in the years to come. Thanks be to God.
Good morning, my friends, it is always good to be here.
Let me begin by wishing you all a happy new year. With hope, happiness, strength, and purpose. Feliz Año Nuevo.
Today is, indeed, the first day of the new year, and in the calendar of the church, also the occasion to observe the feast of the Naming of Jesus.
Now, you would have to admit that to celebrate the Naming of Jesus is a somehow less strident alternative to celebrating the circumcision of our Lord. Such is the traditional liturgical feast associated with this day and, after all, this is precisely what the naming of a male child in the Jewish tradition in which Jesus was raised was about: you named a male child, clip, and he was then a son of Abraham.
In the case of Jesus, this was an event to be recalled by the gospel writer, since one of the several requirements for the Jewish Messiah was, precisely, to be a child of the Torah, the Jewish Law. And circumcision is kind of one of those ritual bits, no pun intended, which you just could not ignore -so the writer of this Gospel makes the point of consigning it as a chronological fact.
There is only so much, however, that we could say about the rite of circumcision that would make some impact in who we are here as Christians in this part of the world, today. The Naming of Jesus, on the other hand, is so much more of a fruitful way to look at this occasion in the church lectionary.
Our gospel for today actually begins earlier than the Naming itself. Reflecting the way things were in the days immediately following the birth of Jesus, we are told about some shepherds, folks engaged in one of the humblest and lowest regarded occupations at the time, the same shepherds to whom it was just announced by an angel the birth “in the city of David of a Savior, the Messiah”, the same shepherds who just witnessed the choirs of angels first singing Gloria in excelsis Deo ----we are told that these shepherds come and pay a visit to the Holy Family, during which they report to the proud parents of the apparitions and revelations that they had witnessed, concerning this child.
Why shepherds, precisely?
On the one hand, it is a most ancient, symbolic occupation, profusely featured in the Scriptures -Psalm 23 and so forth. On the other hand, being a shepherd made it very difficult to preserve any sense of ritual purity because of living with sheep -which was deemed impure by the Levitical code. Shepherds were not able to observe important religious festivals, because you could not really take holidays from herding flocks then. And because they spent so much of their time doing just that, shepherds were mostly away from other people and therefore unable to inflict much social change, even for their own sake.
The idea of God using shepherds as vehicles and witness of the coming of the Messiah is surely meant to show who and what this God is about.
God, who chose to come to the world in a (by all earthly accounts, illegitimate) child, born of a woman -two quarters of the value of a man back then- without a roof over his head nor possessions or power to inherit.
The whole proposition of the Gospel appears to be geared to upending assumptions about the place of God in our lives, in human society, in the world, assumptions of power, class, and privilege, which one could say are as common today as they were back in the times of the Nativity.
Then, the name of Jesus. Or Jeshua, in both Hebrew and Aramaic. Or Jesús, in Spanish. Jesus, Jesus. Both in Latin countries and Biblical times, it was very common to find the equivalent of the name Jesus. It is still so in Latin America, and in Cuba, Jesús -the endearing form being ‘Chuchi’.
In the Palestine of two thousand years ago, Jeshua also was a common name. It was quite a common name, to be perfectly clear, and as it has been said elsewhere, we could think of the name Jesus then as the Jack or Peter of our times. Now you can ponder how some of our most beloved prayers and devotions would look like if addressed to Jack -or Terry, for that matter.
But the Gospel had already told us, however, that ‘Jesus’ was the name revealed to his mother Mary, by an angel, even “before He was conceived in the womb”.
Some of us here may have a somehow similar story for the name we were given -not because it was common or easy one to remember, but rather because it otherwise held higher meaning for those giving it to us.
Jesus was named by Mary and Joseph after a divine revelation, and it is so recorded in the Gospels, I believe, because the earthly life of the Christ was to be one of perfect fulfillment of the will of God. From the beginning of his birth and naming, to its earthly, seeming ending on the cross.
But still one can see how the Gospel writer is walking a very fine line between underlying Mary and Joseph’s obedience to the will of God, in naming the child the way they did, and showing some tacit disregard for power-driven concerns for ritual purity, when none but shepherds -rather than priests, scribes, Levites and other “professionals of revelation”- are given a center spot and role in the drama of the birth of the Messiah.
The Feast of the Naming of Jesus is also, to put it this way, a stepping stone kind of day in our liturgical calendar, a bridge between Christmas and Epiphany, between the birth of a promised child Jesus, and his Manifestation as Messiah and Savior to all Peoples, symbolized in the Wise Men and the rest of that small community gathered near some random, humble manger in Bethlehem. The event of the Incarnation, realized in the Virgin Mary by the operation of the Holy Spirit, is continually proclaimed by the Church as we follow the earliest account of the life of Jesus, the earliest manifestations of His teaching and ministry.
Last Sunday, Father William Roberts spoke to us about the central, crucial place of the Incarnation, the coming of God in Jesus to our humanity and to our complete reality, in the Anglican proclamation of the Christian faith.
Of course, this is not a concern limited in any way to our tradition as a church, but it is something to hold dear, that ability and openness of our Anglican ethos to find God in the messy, daily, non-coated experience of our lives as human beings and children of God redeemed by Jesus.
Our spirituality, however diverse, usually shows the marks of the lived experience of the people of God, our lives being earthily, beautiful vessels that show something like that kind of patina one can often see on old church furniture, produced by years of use -the signs of our sanctification.
It is indeed as we recall, and more than recall, as we own in our prayers and spiritual life and reflection and wisdom, the chronicles of the Incarnation, and the implications of these Christmas gospels, that we can more fully appreciate what Saint Paul is talking about in the Epistle lesson for today.
The self-emptying of God in Jesus, so God could fully inhabit the experience, the joy and the angst, of humanity, and more so, of humanity in relationship, of humanity as concerned with others -hence the saving power of both the humility, the obedience, and the sacrifice, of Jesus. Hence the homage to be given to that name, hence that every knee shall bow and every tongue confess, that it is this Jesus, God made flesh, in humanity, in the world, to teach justice, reconcile, forgive, and heal.
Thanks be to God.
