Christopher L. Webber's Blog, page 12

The Grapevine and Us

A sermon preached at Christ Church SeiKoKai, the historic Japanese congregation in San Francisco by Christopher L. Webber on May 3, 2015. One week ago, their Rector retired so this was the first week in their interim time.

Twenty years ago I retired for the first time from a parish I had served for well over twenty years and the Vestry was offered a choice of three possible interim priests as they began the search for a new rector. There are people who specialize in that ministry and do nothing except come into parishes short term to help with the transition to a new Rector or Vicar or priest-in-charge. One of these candidates asked to meet with me and I remember vividly a phrase he used: he said, “I’m here to help people with their grief work.” I remember also my response: I said, “Some people aren’t grieving.”

No priest can please everyone. Years ago there was a football coach at Yale – an Ivy League school without big athletic scholarships where it’s a challenge to get “student athletes” – who said he thought his job was to keep the alumni “sullen but not mutinous.” I was struck by that and I thought it might apply to the work of a parish priest: to keep the members “sullen but not mutinous.” Or to put it another way: challenged and not satisfied. My point is that none of us should ever be satisfied. The priest who sets out to please everyone will probably please no one and will certainly not help the congregation move forward and face challenges and make the changes needed to be an effective church carrying on a ministry to its own members and others.

Now I’m saying all this not just because this congregation has arrived as of last Sunday at such a transition point. Some of you have grief work to do and some not so much because I’m sure you’ve been challenged in many ways and that’s always valuable. But I’m saying these things also because the gospel this morning is from a section of St John’s gospel that is sometimes called “Jesus’ Farewell Address.” In the other three gospels we hear very little about what Jesus said at the Last Supper because the focus is on what he did. He took bread and gave thanks and broke it and gave it to his disciples. And Christians have done that same thing ever since. But St John spends four chapters, 20% of the whole gospel, telling us what Jesus said and nothing of what he did.

I doubt Stina Pope spent that long last Sunday giving you farewell instructions and there was no need. Jesus gave us those long ago and we’re still working on it. But times of change might give us an incentive to think about what’s essential, what matters, what our priorities are and I think we could start almost anywhere in the New Testament and find good advice: the Summary of the Law, the Sermon on the Mount . . . It’s not as if we need to wonder. But today’s gospel narrows the focus and I think it focuses in in a very helpful way on what matters most to us here and now.

Jesus gives us an analogy: a vine and its branches. Most of us have probably been to Napa Valley one time or another – though as a New Yorker I want to put in a word for the Finger Lakes wineries of upstate New York. We have wineries too! So whether we come from New York or California we can easily picture the hillsides covered with grape trellises. But our picture this morning has a narrower focus: just picture one vine and its many branches. That’s us. That’s God’s church. One vine with its branches. “I am the vine,” Jesus tells us, “And you are the branches. . . Those who abide in me and I in them bear much fruit.” Let’s start from that.

Again and again in the New Testament we find that stress on unity and a variety of images for it. Think of it, as we did last week, in terms of a shepherd and a flock of sheep. “I am the Good Shepherd,” Jesus said. That phrase makes us think of the 23rd psalm and the shepherd who leads the flock beside still water and makes them lie down in green pasture. Sheep, I was saying last week in a different church, are not smart. They wander, they get lost, but the good shepherd brings them back and keeps them together. This week the image is different but the point is the same. Unless you abide in me, Jesus says, you have no life. The image is different but the point is the same.

Each image is helpful. The branches can’t wander away from the vine the way we tend to do; We may be more like sheep than branches in that respect. But the branches depend for life on the vine even more completely than the sheep depend on the shepherd. There’s a deeper unity: life flows through the vine and into the branches.

“Abide I me,” Jesus said. I’m not sure “abide” is a very useful word here. It’s a bit out of date; not a word we’re likely to use. One modern translation that I think is helpful says, “Live in me and I will live in you.” That’s almost too graphic; it might conjure up pictures of pregnancy and the fetus in the womb. That’s the clearest example I can think of of living in someone else. But just that truly and fully, Jesus is suggesting we should live in him and he in us. Life comes from him. Without him life is incomplete and barren and dead.

Jesus said, “Live in me.” So let’s start with that and ask what kind of farewell discourse this is in which there’s finally nothing about separation at all but much about growing into a new and deeper and total unity. That first. Unity. Sharing life in Christ. Then a warning. One thing we can’t help noticing about those grape vines on the Napa hillsides, the Finger Lakes hillsides, is that they are radically pruned and trained. But I moved here directly from Connecticut and they do make wine also in Connecticut but grapes also grow wild in Connecticut.

For twenty years I lived on a Connecticut hillside with only woods around us – no neighbors nearer than half a mile. Late in the summer I would wander around the edge of my orchard and check the stone walls along the road looking for grapevines and wild grapes to harvest. I would find them sometimes sprawled along the top of a stone wall but sometimes also high above my head in the branches of an evergreen. There would be clusters of grapes far beyond my reach and I would pull them down and harvest them. Every few years I would pull down the vines and cut them off before they killed the tree or pulled down the stone wall. Grape vines, wild or cultivated, need to be pruned or they become destructive. In fact, if those vines aren’t pulled down and cut back they not only kill what they’re growing on they kill themselves. They grow beyond any usefulness. Vines need to be pruned.

You know there are various images of that also in the New Testament: pruning back, cutting back, dividing sometimes instead of uniting. Separating sheep from goats is one such image of separation. Then there’s the wedding feast and the guest without a wedding garment and there’s the story of the ten foolish virgins who let their lamps go out and got shut out from the wedding feast. Jesus never suggested that heaven is open to all, “Y’all come.” No, there’s a judgment and not all will be ready.

In today’s gospel we hear about branches that bear no fruit and so are cut off and thrown in the fire, and I wonder whether we should look at that in terms of the church today. Is that what’s happening? It’s not a matter of individual churches or even denominations, there’s a winnowing process going on, a pruning. Church memberships are declining. It’s uncomfortable, of course, but I wonder whether, in God’s providence, there’s a purpose, whether God is saying, “You aren’t producing the fruit I’m looking for. It’s time for some pruning, some cutting back.” “I see big churches and comfortable pews, God might say, but I don’t see a transformed society; I see a society in which the rich are getting richer and the poor are being shut out of the wealth all around you and violence is all too common. I see a nation that tries to get its way by armed force, that calls itself Christian but comes across as a rich bully. I’m not seeing the fruit I looked for.” God sometimes will prune and cut back to get better results, better fruit.

You know that’s an image that you find in the Old Testament as well. The prophet Isaiah pictures God as planting a vineyard on a fertile hill. He plants it and prunes it and cultivates it but gets only wild grapes. Now I happen to like wild grapes and I used to make some very nice jelly from the wild grapes on my land. But I didn’t plant them or cultivate them; I had no stake in them; and I had no expectation of a fine Merlot or Beaujolais. But I know the feeling. Ask me about apple trees that I planted and trimmed and cared for that never produced. That’s a different story. But the prophet was talking about Israel and he asks why when he looked for justice he saw oppression and why, when he looked for righteousness, he heard only a cry.

So is God pruning the vine? Is God cutting back a church that has grown too comfortable, that’s not making a difference in a world where there is still oppression and too much pain. All I can do is ask, and if we’re too far removed from the vineyards and sheepfolds to relate to this imagery you may have read as I did in the papers last week about Starbucks closing outlets and MacDonalds reducing their menus. Anyone in business understands: if it doesn’t work, don’t do it; cut it back.

Is God pruning the church? God surely has a right to expect a better return on the investment. There are comfortable churches and contented Christians but we live in a nation that hasn’t found a way to value all lives equally and proclaim a gospel that changes lives. Yes, individually we may find here the strength and comfort and guidance and meaning that we need for our lives but have we shared the treasure? Have we produced the fruit?

But let’s just take one more close look at the parable. “Live in me as I in you,” Jesus said; “apart from me you can do nothing.” Right. Nothing. But with Jesus, and in Jesus, ah! that’s another matter. With Christ and in Christ, there’s a blank check, an unlimited promise. “If you abide in me,” Jesus said, “and my words abide in you, ask for whatever you wish, and it will be done for you. My Father is glorified by this, that you bear much fruit and become my disciples.” My Father is glorified in this: That you bear much fruit and become my disciples. This is what God wants and this is what God is capable of doing: that we bear fruit, that lives are changed and that we become disciples.

I’m struck by that word “become.” I wonder what those at the Last Supper thought of that: “that they become Jesus’ disciples.” I imagine them thinking, “Well, who does he think we are right now? Who has been closer? Who has been following him down the dusty roads these last three years? Who has been here to open the door and arrange for the services and pay the bills.” We might say the same thing. And of course that’s important and makes a difference. But are we there yet? Wasn’t it Jesse Jackson who used to say, “God isn’t finished with me yet.” Well, I hope I can say that myself. I’ve sometimes recalled a scene in the great Ingar Bergman movie The Seventh Seal where a juggler says, “I want to do the one impossible trick. I want to make the ball stand still in mid-air.” And then there was the English poet. Robert Browning, who said, “a man’s reach should exceed his grasp.” Don’t we still have hopes for this church: goals unmet, dreams unrealized? I’m sure the diocese will ask that kind of question in the next few weeks and I don’t think the goals need to be unrealistic. I’m not sure our prayers can reform the Baltimore police department or disarm the Taliban, at least not any time soon, but there are certainly ways this congregation can make a difference through our prayers and witness, some we will never know of, but valuable fruit for the Lord of the Vine.

I don’t think we need to be actually either sullen or mutinous but – what shall I say – maybe constructively unsatisfied? and hoping, praying that God will give us a clear enough vision of what this church can be and faith enough in the Lord of the Harvest to hold onto the vine, to draw closer to Jesus, and produce the fruit God seeks from us.

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Published on May 03, 2015 19:29

All We Like (Dumb) Sheep

A sermon preached by Christopher L. Webber at the Church of the Incarnation, San Francisco, on April 16, 20015.

Up until two years ago I lived in the northwest corner of Connecticut, an area of small towns and small farms and I served a parish in the town of Canaan which liked to claim that it had more cows than people. Somehow I got into a conversation one day with a retired farmer about the relative intelligence of sheep and cows. He told me cows are smarter. They know when to come home and they even know their own stall. The farmer told me about a visit he had from a city friend who was surprised by the way the cows would come into the barn and go straight to their own stalls. And the farmer told him, “That’s why we have those plaques on each stall with each cow’s name on it, so they can find their own stall more easily.”

Well, cows may be smart, but not that smart. Sheep are not smart at all. But Jesus used them as an example because sheep are a lot like human beings, they’re a lot like us. There’s a form of confession in the Prayer Book in Morning Prayer Rite One that says it in so many words: “we have erred and strayed from thy ways like lost sheep.” We, like sheep, have a tendency to err and stray from the ways. The cowherd claps his hands and calls Bossy and Bossy comes. The sheep just keep on munching. The shepherd needs a crook to pull the sheep back from danger and the crook has a pointed end to prod the sheep in the right direction and he needs a good sheep dog if possible to run around and bark at the sheep and nip at their heels to get them moving the right way because without all that help the sheep would get lost. Sheep just focus on the next blade of grass and keep on munching as long as they see that next blade of grass until they’re hopelessly lost. Sheep are not smart.

So Jesus chose a relatively stupid animal to illustrate God’s love for us. When he compares us to sheep it’s not a compliment! Jesus is saying we are like sheep: wandering, without much inner guidance, with a tendency to get lost, with a tendency to get into trouble. It’s not, as I said, a compliment, but it is probably a fair assessment. Yeah, human beings are like that. I’ve met a few of them. I read about them in the paper. I see them on television. It makes you wonder. And, to be honest, I know myself well enough to recognize that Jesus was right.

But the other side of the coin is that for all of that, nevertheless, God values us. The sheep may be dumb but they have commercial value so the shepherd exerts himself to save them. The shepherd would not exert himself for the sheep if there weren’t some value there: wool, mutton, lamb chops. Very few people raise raccoons. The sheep have a value to the shepherd. And the implication is that we have a value to God. Is that obvious? Probably not. When you stop to think of the billions of people crowding the planet, living very often in conditions that no self-respecting sheep would put up with, and put that in the perspective of a span of creation in which the human lifespan is insignificant and a span of space in which this earth is a grain of sand, who could imagine that a Creator would care? And yet, the Bible makes that claim. It not only makes that claim, it goes way beyond that: it says that we are made in the image of God; that we are in some essential way like God.

You and I and the people of Kathmandu are like God. Sheep are not much like the shepherd; they’re a different order of being. No number of sheep can change a light bulb; they can’t even find their way home. But the Bible claims that we are like God in some essential way. And therefore God values us as we would value our own children. The Bible speaks of God as loving us, yearning for us, grieving over us and finally entering into our lives and living here among us and dying for us.

Now, what that also means is that God in some essential way is like us. It always surprises me when I have the chance to speak with a couple planning to be married and find out that they haven’t the foggiest idea what God is like. They have some vague idea of a distant, impersonal power – what the movies call “The Force” – which is not something I much relate to. What is “The Force.” Can you fall in love with a Force or imagine a Force that sees you as anything more than another force, an insignificant force, to be absorbed or manipulated or annihilated?

Of course, we use force ourselves – sometimes well, sometimes badly – but force is a tool and our relationship with force is to control or be controlled. The Force is a tornado destroying homes, an earthquake wiping out a city, a military invasion, a cancer. A force is many things but none of them loveable. God is not like that. Nor did Jesus ever use language like that. God in Jesus’ teaching is sometimes a powerful king but more often a forgiving father, a careful housewife, a hen with chickens, a shepherd with sheep, one who cares for the birds of the air and the lilies of the field and knows our needs and loves us. It’s not a particular compliment Jesus pays us in comparing us with sheep but it is a wonderful gift: God cares; God values us; God loves us.

Now that’s good to know but it’s not enough. It comes with a job to do. The Gospel speaks of other sheep who must also be brought so that finally there is one flock and one shepherd. I’ve had many a disagreement over the years with well-meaning Christians who wonder why we should spend our time worrying about foreign mission and trying to convert people to our faith when they have a perfectly good faith of their own. Well-meaning but totally confused. Does it make a difference to you to know God loves you? Wouldn’t it matter to someone else as well? Someone once described the church’s mission as being like that of hungry beggars who know where bread is to be found and tell others.

Is there really no difference between, for example, Christianity and Islam, between a religion of submission and a religion of freedom, between a religion of a distant God and the knowledge of a close and loving God? Yes, we have things in common: one God, a God of mercy. But we also have vast differences. Muslims are for the most part, a peaceful people and we shoiuldn;t judge them by the worst examples. I don’t want Christianity to be judged by the fundamentalists who think the world is flat and was created 4000 years ago and we shouldn’t judge Islam by ISIS. But there is a difference between Islam at its best and Christianity at its best. And we have a mandate to share what we know.

There are people who think it’s fine to get all the marbles and keep them. There are others who seem to know instinctively that gifts are given to be shared. The Gospel surely, is a gift to be shared. In the early years of the Christian Church there were people called Gnostics who believed that there was secret knowledge available only to insiders and initiates. You couldn’t be given the secret knowledge unless you proved yourself worthy over a long time of training. Gnosticism won a good many followers for awhile; it’s nice to think you’re in on a secret and that you’ve earned the right to special status. But Gnosticism was condemned as a heresy. Christianity is not like that. Christianity is not a secret wisdom for the chosen few; it’s about a love that needs to be shared, shared with everyone, no holds barred.

Christianity is open and available and there for the taking and if that means that the church is filled with people who don’t seem quite nice or quite as deserving as we are – well, that’s the way Jesus and his disciples seemed to a lot of people in that time also. “Why does your master eat with publicans and sinners?” “If this man is a prophet, how come he’s doesn’t know what kind of woman this is that he’s talking to?” That was the criticism. And Jesus accepted that criticism. He said, “The well have no need of a doctor but only those who are sick.” Jesus told his disciples to go into all the world, not stay home where it’s safe, not keep it a secret, but go find those other sheep who are no more or less sheepish than you are; find them and bring them home to the God who loves them and wants them to know that love.

We are members of a church that in all too many congregations these days works hard to balance the budget and has all too little left for others. It may be that we have our priorities wrong, that we need to get mission into our budget first and then see whether we have anything left over for ourselves because the job isn’t done just because the doors are open on Sunday. Jesus did not say, “I’m waiting here with the door open.” The Good Shepherd doesn’t stand there waiting for the lost sheep to come back but goes looking. There’s work to be done and we have barely begun to do it. So there’s good news in today’s gospel but there’s a challenge as well: God loves us – but not just us. Our God is the Good Shepherd who loves us all and seeks to bring us all home and calls us not just to be sheep but to help as well with the shepherding and help make God’s love known.

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Published on April 25, 2015 16:30

What Can I Believe?

A sermon preached at the Church of the Incarnation on the Second Sunday of Easter, April 12, 2015, by Christopher L. Webber.

What can I believe? What can you believe?

Suppose a friend tells you, “There’s a sale at the Safeway today: sirloin steak at 5 cents a pound!” Now, you trust your friend, but you have to ask: “Are you sure? Did you see it yourself?” Is there some trick to it, some qualification: the first five customers, until noon yesterday, if you buy five six packs of beer first? We just instinctively, and out of long experience, weigh what we hear by a number of factors: past experience, importance to us, probabilities of various sorts – and then we believe or not, depending.

If someone tells you later today that Hillary Clinton is running for president, I expect you’ll believe it with no questions asked. Some things are not a surprise. So: what can I believe and how firmly can I believe it? I think these are fundamental questions we deal with daily. But Thomas in today’s gospel reading was asked to believe something on which life depends and on three grounds: first what he heard from others, secondly what he could see for himself, and thirdly what he could actually touch. Three senses: hearing, seeing, feeling.[image error]

The first sense, hearing, he was sure was not enough. I don’t think it ever is when something’s important. Hearsay evidence doesn’t carry much weight and it shouldn’t. If you ever played a game of telephone as a child - you know: you whisper something to someone who whispers it to the next who whispers it to the next and what started out as potatoes winds up as baloney. Who knows what will come out at the other end of the chain?

I remember a news report, probably five or six years ago, when Barack Obama was running for the first time and reports were being spread that he was a Muslim. A television reporter was shown asking some men in a midwestern diner who they would vote for and why and one of them said he couldn’t vote for Obama because Obama was a Muslim. And the reporter said, “Well, but he isn’t a Muslim.” And the man in the diner said, “But what’s what I’ve heard.”

So hearing isn’t very reliable and Thomas knew that and wasn’t about to rely on it, nor was he even ready to be satisfied by seeing. “Seeing’s believing” is the old saying but any magician knows that the hand is quicker than the eye and we can think we see something that’s not really there at all. In an age when virtual reality is a familiar idea, when we can project holographic images and show someone as present who’s actually in Bangla desh, when we can go to the movies and be shown special effects that are totally unreal and untrue, seeing is not believing.

The result is that touch and feel become more important than ever and especially because of what we are as human beings. I am a flesh and blood, material human being. I may see things, hear things, imagine things, but it’s touch that brings me into relationship with what I am: flesh and blood, material, capable of banging into things, being hurt by the collision; that’s reality as we experience it. That’s what we can believe. When I pound on this pulpit (which I don’t often do!) I know this is real, it’s here, I can feel it.

Now, this story about Thomas tells us several things but one that’s important is the place of the sacraments in our lives. Our worship is not just sight and sound as some worship is. We don’t come here just to listen and speak as some worshipers do but to taste and touch and feel. To make new members of the church we don’t just announce it, we pour water over them. We don’t just pronounce two people husband and wife, we join their hands at the altar and wrap a stole around them. Today we use bread and wine to know Christ’s presence here. Jesus says to us as he said to Thomas, “Reach out your hand and feel this bread, touch my body, and know that I am with you still.” Christianity is about God’s relationship with the material world.

At the center of our faith is the fact that God came into this material world that God created and lived in it in real flesh and blood. It’s an incarnational faith. God is real for us in a way that no other faith can claim: God took human flesh, became real for us in the ultimate way, and the celebration of Easter is about the resurrection of that flesh, that human body. I keep meeting people who think that Christians believe in the immortality of the soul and I guess some do, but that’s not what the Creed says. It’s about the body, the resurrection of the body. It’s not about a soul that we can’t even see or hear let alone feel; it’s about a reality that we can understand, that’s tangible, that we can touch and taste and feel. Easter is not about spiritualism; it’s about materialism.

Spirituality is very popular these days but fewer people are going to church. They’re two different things. Spirituality is what it is, but Christian faith is something much more. I like to quote the former Archbishop of Canterbury William Temple, who said, “Christianity is the most materialistic of the world’s religions.” And it is. It’s a religion that has to do with God here, known to us in flesh and blood and therefore concerned with flesh and blood, concerned with problems of poverty and hunger. It’s not a religion of escapism.

So I could simply preach about the sacraments today and how central they are to Christian faith. But what I want to do is to look more deeply at the whole question of matter and spirit and ask what we mean by that classic division between spiritual and material anyway. And what I want to suggest is that this standard division between material and spiritual is really out of date, in a post-Einstein world. I don’t believe we know anymore where the border is between the physical and the spiritual. When scientists talk about quarks and mesons and subatomic particles and fields of force and dark matter that may be the commonest substance in the universe and yet is undetectable so far by human intelligence, where would you draw the line between what’s physical and what’s not?

The Prayer Book defines a sacrament as an outward and visible sign of an inward and spiritual grace as if there were two kinds of reality, the material one you can taste and touch and the spiritual one you can’t. In the middle ages, there was a clear line between material and spiritual and everything had to be one or the other. Christianity with it’s talk about incarnation and sacraments tried to cross that line but it still left us in a divided world in which the things that we knew about from every day experience were the material things while the things that mattered were the things we couldn’t know directly. But we live after Einstein and we know that the material world isn’t all that solid. The solid walls of this church, this seemingly solid pulpit. we know now, are made up of atoms that are made up of electrons and even smaller particles some of which we know only as theory and have never really been seen and certainly not touched.

Worse than that, not only is there no way to taste or touch or see the ultimate elements but they can be turned into immaterial energy, because E=MC2 as I’m sure you know and MC2=E. The wood of the pew you sit on can burn and become heat energy and the energy of the sun can be transformed into the green plants that push up out of the soil. Worse still than that, the material universe includes what science calls “forces.” We all know about gravity but then there’s the electromagnetic force and there are two types of nuclear force. And at the cutting edge of science you actually find them using terms like “weird” and “spooky” as technical terms as the scientists try to reduce the material world to something they can understand. But the physical world keeps escaping from their experiments and leading them out into a world that sometimes seems more spiritual than material.

What kind of world is it in which scientists use terms like “weird” and “spooky?” I saw a book review in the New York Times some while back that talked about “wildly imaginative” new ideas about the basic structure of matter. It said that the fundamental problem with these ideas is that there’s no way to test them. But science is about testing and if you can’t test it, how can it be science? The boundary between the material and the spiritual seems to have disappeared. Which takes us back to Thomas, because that was Thomas’ problem too and the problem of the Christian church when it tried to understand and explain the eucharist and the sacraments.

But isn’t that what we should have expected to learn as we explored God’s world? Shouldn’t we have expected to learn that it was all one and that the hard cold rock in our garden which God made is ultimately simply one more expression of the ultimate reality which is God? Isn’t love one form of reality and aren’t rocks another? And aren’t both of them evidence of the creativity of the same God? When we take the bread of the eucharist in our hands, that too can be analyzed as matter: It’s composed of flour and water; but those ingredients are composed of atoms of carbon and hydrogen and so on, and that’s potential energy. If you burn it, heat is created. If you eat it, the body absorbs the energy. This bread is material, it’s physical, but that means it’s also potential energy and it’s transformed into energy when we eat it. But if you come here with faith, there’s another kind of energy at work as well, as Christians have always known even though they have often disagreed as to just what that energy is. But whatever language you want to use, it has to do with the way Christ comes to us here renewing our lives by his life. You, a child of God, are joined with God and your life is renewed.

Thomas didn’t know all that when he tried to understand what the other disciples were telling him. He thought he had it all figured out: He thought there was matter and there was spirit. He thought that when matter died that was an end of it. Thomas didn’t know about Einstein. And Thomas didn’t really understand that the world is one, that God is one, that all life and matter and creation exist only because of God and there are no boundaries except the ones we make in our heads. Thomas, you might say, was the original scientist, doubting and questioning and looking for the proof. And that’s what he was made to do. It’s what we were made to do. God made us to do that: God made us to explore and to test and eventually to understand; it’s part of our job as human beings; we are here to explore and to learn and to grow in our understanding of the mystery of life. And if we are doing that at all well, we ought to be better prepared than Thomas was to understand that bodies can be raised and life can be transformed and that the piece of bread we are given at the altar is not simply a mystery beyond understanding but just one more of those places where the simple divisions break down and the things that separate us from God are overcome and the material – if we still want to use that language – reveals the spiritual, reveals deeper levels, other dimensions of God’s creation.

If you read about saints and poets, it’s surprising, I think, how often they see evidence of God not in some great burst of light and glory but in simple, material things: a rock, a stream, a daffodil, a leper. A sacramental faith should do that for us: it should send us out into a world “alive with the grandeur of God.” I stop often on the way home to take out m y iPad and take a picture of someone’s small front yard garden: the glory of God on Moraga. I don’t take a picture but I see God also in an occasional homeless person huddled against a wall on Noriega Street or 19th Avenue: God present in the material pain of this world as well as the glory.

We need to go out from here ready to have our eyes opened like Thomas’ to see God here and to see God there, to see God again and again in this world God made, in this life God entered, and to say again and again the same words Thomas said: “My Lord and my God.”

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Published on April 12, 2015 20:31

Open to Glory

A sermon preached by Christopher L. Webber on the Last Sunday after Epiphany, February 15, 2015, at the Church of the Incarnation, San Francisco.

A number of years ago my brother and I and some of our children set out to climb Mt. Marcy which is in the Adirondacks, and the highest mountain in the state of New York. just over a mile high. The peak of Marcy is over 5,000 ft above sea level. The surface of Lake Tahoe is over 6,000 fet above sea level, but you can get to Lake Tahoe by car and you have to walk to get to the top of Marcy.

We planned a three day trip: one day to get near the peak, a second day to climb it, and a third day to get back out. The first day was gray and overcast and as we got near our planned campsite it began to rain. A discouraging start, but the next day was bright and clear. We reached the peak in time for lunch and it was one of those days when it really seemed you could see for ever. Vermont to the east, Canada to the north; except for the curve of the earth we could probably have seen Tahoe to the west. The third day it rained again and we hiked out through a drenching downpour, but we had that one perfect day on top of the mountain and the memory of it still shines, still has a kind of glow.

Mountain tops are made for seeing. Hillary said he wanted to climb Mt Everest “because it was there,” but I think the real attraction of mountain climbing is that feeling of unlimited vision, that sense of having a totally new perspective on the world and its problems. You can see in all directions, and there’s a new, far clearer sense of the relationship between places – Canada, California, Connecticut – and the relationship between ourselves and our world, and between ourselves, humankind, and God. All of that is, as we say, “enlightening.” It’s not just that mountain tops are places of light, of sunshine and clear air, but I think we could say that they throw light on our world and on our own lives, showing us, revealing to us, a new, clearer understanding of life, of our lives, of meaning and purpose.

Now some such thing happened to three of Jesus’ disciples. They went with him to a mountain top – and something happened. They saw in a new way, in a clearer light, who Jesus was and what his life signified, and where it was going, and what they were being called to do. And then, for them, looking back, remembering, there was a kind of glow around that day, around that moment. The figure of Jesus began to stand out more clearly, and especially in relationship to Moses and Elijah, to the law and the prophets, to the working out of God’s purpose.

Now don’t misunderstand what I’m trying to say. There is a way of reading the Bible that sets out to remove the mysteries, to explain away anything out of the ordinary. “Well, the Bible says this, but what really happened was that.” That’s not my point. Light is, of course, a symbol. If you see a cartoon character with a light bulb above his head, you know that means, “I’ve had an idea.” We’re not supposed to take the light bulb literally. But we use that symbol because we do need light to see. You might get an idea in the dark, in the middle of the night, but you will need light to work it out, put it in practice. Without the light of the sun to see our world, life itself would be impossible. There would be no vision, no understanding, no life at all as we know it.

So light isn’t “just a symbol.” Light is the source of life; it’s the source of ideas and understanding. When we are told that Jesus on the mountain seemed to glow with a shining light, a transfiguring glory, you can picture that however you please, but the point remains the same: suddenly, for the first time, the disciples saw Jesus with a clarity that they would never forget, they understood better than ever before. The Gospel of John is the only one that doesn’t describe this event, but much more emphatically than the others, John says: “We have seen his glory, the glory of the one and only Son who came from the Father, full of grace and truth.” Light is the source of understanding, and the gospel is clear: Jesus is the light of the world; in him and through him we come to understand who we are and the meaning and purpose of life.

And that is still true, whether we are there on the mountain top with the disciples or not. They saw a dazzling light and they began to understand. We need no dazzling light; but Jesus still enlightens us today however we come to know him. So we are here at the beginning of Lent, and Lent is a time of growing light. The word itself comes from the word “lengthen” – it’s the time of lengthening days, growing light. This coming Lent can be a time of growing light for all of us – inwardly as well as outside in the returning sunshine if we take time for prayer, for Bible study, for worship, for service. However we use our time to come closer to Jesus’ life, we’ll have more light, more understanding, a clearer view of the meaning and purpose of our own life as a result.

You’ve seen, of course, pictures of Jesus, pictures of the disciples, pictures of the saints in which there’s a halo of light around their heads. Why do artists do that? At one level it’s only confusing, misleading. We look around and there aren’t any circles over people’s heads and we think, “Well, the day of saints is over.” If we take the time in the returning sunshine of Lent, of spring-time, if we take time for prayer, for Bible study, for worship, for service – however we use our time to come closer to Jesus’ life – we’ll have more light, more understanding, in and around our own heads whether people see the haloes or not. What often happens, of course, is that we hear the word “saint” and we think about those halos and we look around and we don’t see any and so we conclude that there just aren’t any saints in the world anymore. But of course First Century people couldn’t spot saints by their halos anymore easily than we can today. But the pictures leave that sub-conscious impression that saints should glow, literally glow. And they do glow, but not with a circle of fluorescent light. The saints are the ones we learn from, the ones who teach us, the ones who show us what life can be like. And the world is full of them. And an artist can show that with a light bulb or a halo if she wants, but the glory of the saints is something far more valuable than mere kilowatts: it’s a depth of understanding, a faithfulness in service, that shines out in many people, and many ways in a dark world.

So where does literal language end and symbolic language begin? I’m not sure it matters. Think how we use words in talking about nuclear weapons, one of the most divisive issues of our day. Isn’t it interesting that that one weapon, unlike any other in its destructive power and which, if our prayers are answered, will never be used again throws so much light on the human race and on each one of us. The explosion of an atomic bomb has been described as “brighter than a thousand suns.” And in a strange way it does illuminate so much about us, about our national priorities, our fears, our deepest concerns. And that’s not entirely bad. It’s good to be forced to look very clearly at what the real issues are and how we should deal with them and what we value It’s good to be forced to look at basic issues of human relationships: at the fears and insecurities and hostilities that divide us. Certainly that could be true in our relationship with Iran and North Korea. Wherever there’s nuclear power, there’s the potential for disastrous miscalculations and catastrophe. But also, I think, the greatest potential evil the world has ever faced could be a means of salvation by forcing us to confront the evil and the potential for good: the potential evil if we continue to be ruled by fear and sacrifice all the good things of this planet, the lives and hopes of millions, to destruction instead of creation. But at the same time there’s the potential for a whole new world if we finally recognize our need for each other and find ways to work together for the common good. Then light will truly have dawned for us all.

And carry the picture one step further. It isn’t that blinding light that we fear in nuclear weapons; the destructive force is not the light but the heat and the shock waves. And so, too, in much of the debate over defense and nuclear arms, it’s light we need in order to understand; but it’s heat and power politics that we often get instead. It seems to me that if we could learn in our local communities to seek only for light and avoid any use of anger and bitterness, of heat and force, then we would be on the right path for understanding and growth and life.

But that’s only one example, and maybe not the best simply because it does generate so much heat and power that it’s hard to see clearly, hard to analyze our own motives, hard to be patient and understanding and charitable. There might be simpler examples but this is one we do have to face, like it or not. Just as other generations have had to deal with civil war and slavery or world war and depression, so this generation still has to face the issue of nuclear weapons in Iran and N.Korea – to say nothing of Russia and the United States and Israel. And if we are faithful, if we can discipline ourselves to look only for light, it might be that we really could stand at a turning point in the history of the world and the final opening out of the full potential for which God made us.

Do you know the old story of the man who came to his bishop and said, “I want God to reveal himself to me; how can I find the revelation I need?” And the bishop said, “Go out at night and turn your face to the heavens and ask God for revelation and it will come.” So the man did it and came back to tell the bishop, “I went out at night as you told me and I turned my face to the sky and the rain ran down my face and my neck and I felt like a fool.” And the bishop said, “That’s not bad for a first revelation.”

The story of the Transfiguration tells us that as the glory of Jesus began to fade, Peter said something just as dumb. He said. “Let us put up three shelters.” Maybe he thought they could stay there for ever just basking in the light. Luke’s gospel adds, “He did not know what he was saying.” He knew he’d seen glory, but it would take time for the meaning to work its way down into the reality of his life. So too for us. Week by week we come here and Jesus is here and the glory breaks through in the prayers and liturgy and music and sacrament and we’re tempted to try to contain it within these walls. We may even be reluctant to go back outside and try to walk by the light of that glory. We may well be afraid to look at our world and our lives with the clarity Jesus could give; afraid to let that light shine and to live by that light wherever we are. So maybe we need that “first revelation” of our own foolishness, our own weakness, our own dependence on a light that seldom breaks in on us in all its dazzling power, seldom sits above our heads like a halo, seldom completely overpowers us. Maybe it would help if we were content – as St. Paul put it once – to be “fools for Christ’s sake,” if we were content to follow an inner light that might set a different priority for us than for many others even of our friends and family and neighbors.

And maybe what we need most to know is this, that the Transfiguration of Jesus didn’t stop when they came down the mountain nor did the light go out. The artists who show Peter and James and John and the other followers of Jesus with halos, with a glow of light shining out of them are right. The light they had seen, the understanding they had gained, began to change their lives, and the glory of Jesus began to be seen in them. You see, the light of the Transfiguration, isn’t a one-time display but a center from which light spreads. And it continues to spread. And you and I, however slowly and dimly, are called to be part of that spreading circle of light. If we respond with patience and faithfulness and offer ourselves, our lives, to spread that light, that gospel, that good news, then the Transfiguration will not be just a past event on a distant mountain but a future for all the human race. And that would indeed be glory.

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Published on February 15, 2015 20:25

In the Midst of Wolves

A sermon preached at the Church of the Incarnation, San Francisco, on St. Paul’s Day January 25, 2015, by Christopher L. Webber.

“I am sending you out like sheep in the midst of wolves.” St. Matthew 10:18

You come to church week by week to hear good news. The word “gospel” means “good news.” So what was the good news this morning? “Jesus said, I am sending you out like sheep in the midst of wolves.” Good news? Doesn’t sound like it to me!

The Gospel goes on to tell us that Christians will be flogged in the synagogues and dragged before governors and kings, that brother will betray brother to death and a father his child, and children will rise against parents and have them put to death and you will be hated by all because of Jesus’ name. Isn’t that a great thought to start the week!

Now, we hear this message because this is St. Paul’s Day, the Feast of the Conversion of St. Paul, which we celebrate because without St. Paul we can’t be sure the Christian Church would have made much impact on the world. And the Gospel applies to St. Paul because he was sent out into the midst of wolves and faced and endured all the hardships the Gospel talks about. He lists them at one point: NRS

“Three times I was beaten with rods. Once I received a stoning. Three times I was shipwrecked; for a night and a day I was adrift at sea; 26 on frequent journeys, in danger from rivers, danger from bandits, danger from my own people, danger from Gentiles, danger in the city, danger in the wilderness, danger at sea, danger from false brothers and sisters; 27 in toil and hardship, through many a sleepless night, hungry and thirsty, often without food, cold and naked.”

I did an update of that in my new version of Paul’s letters that was published last fall. It went this way:

“I have been tortured by Roman soldiers and by the Inquisition, denounced, arrested, and threatened by supporters and opponents of the Reformation, sent into exile by New England Puritans and Russian Communists, driven out by slave holders and by those who hunt down illegal aliens, forced underground by agents of the Japanese emperor and the Chinese People’s Republic, mocked and ignored by the comfortable Christians of your American churches. I have been cold and thirsty, hungry and sleepless, attacked by professed friends who proved false, betrayed by those to whom I turned in confidence. “

By which I was trying to say, “Things don’t change that much.” I think we get told about our future as sheep among wolves because the wolves are always out there. If we don’t see them it might be because they don’t see us as Jesus’ sheep. But presumably, as I said, the thought behind the choice of these words is that things haven’t changed that much, that being a Christian might not always be easy; that it might be really, really hard.

Is that good news? How do we handle it when we hear stuff like this in church? I wonder whether there is an automatic adjustment machine in our brain that kicks in and translates it, if I could put it that way, and tells us, “This is interesting history; but this doesn’t apply to us; this was about the first century when the church was persecuted and, yes, that’s how it was for them but that’s not how it is for us. Don’t worry about it.” Do I at some level of the brain go through that sort of exercise to discount what I am hearing? It’s not unnatural if we do because who wants to be wolf-meat?

And it’s easy to do – even to make it into good news – because we don’t have that kind of trouble at the moment but I have to wonder, when I think about it, whether the difference between them and us isn’t so much that the neighbors are friendlier but just that Satan is smarter. The fact is that the church grew in the first 300 years in spite of the persecution. Christians were crucified and thrown to the lions and beheaded and burned at the stake and starved and drowned and those in power did everything they could think of to persuade people that Christianity was bad for your health but the church grew just the same.

A couple of years ago I was serving a congregation in Connecticut and we were cleaning up files in the church office and came across copies of some old diocesan yearbooks. It was fascinating to look at the numbers from just 25 years ago. Things weren’t going all that well 25 years ago and haven’t been for at least forty years. But even 25 years ago not just the parish I was serving but every church in the state still had large congregations and large church schools. There were still four Episcopal churches in the town I was serving and now there are three. There were 186 churches in the diocese and now there are 170 – and I haven’t heard about any persecution. Nobody these days is crucifying Christians in this country.

And, of course, it’s not just the Episcopal Church; all the churches have the same problem. Back during the Depression the churches grew. Back during World War II the churches grew. Back during the early days of the Cold War the churches grew. But not anymore. No, we haven’t solved all our problems but comparatively our problems are small and surely there is nothing to keep people from going to church on Sunday except the fact that it’s too easy and life is too comfortable.

I really think that what’s happened is that after almost 2000 years of trying to wipe out the church Satan has gotten smart and relaxed the pressure. I think the new strategy is “Kill them with kindness.”

I remember years ago meeting people from Sri Lanka where there was a new government that was Buddhist and was doing everything possible to make it hard for Christians. They instituted a ten-day week so you never knew when it was Sunday and Sunday was almost never a day off. That meant that Christians had to go to church before going to work – and church attendance grew because it required a commitment. During the worst days of communism in China the church grew faster than anywhere else in the world. During the worst days of communism in Russia the church still grew. And maybe Satan finally figured it out: just leave them alone and they’ll get bored and give it up.

And it’s working. This is St. Paul’s day: the Feast of the Conversion of St. Paul, and Paul learned something by persecuting Christians. He learned that it doesn’t work; and when he couldn’t beat them he finally joined them. He talks about it in the first reading this morning. “I’ve locked up many of the saints in prison. I cast my vote against them when they were being condemned to death; I pursued them in foreign cities.” Paul tried, and it didn’t work. So Paul gave up and joined them.

We’re just into a new year and have an annual meeting coming up and maybe we ought to be asking ourselves if we can find some way to get ourselves persecuted. What can we do to build up this church? Christians everywhere are asking that question and I don’t know that anyone has good answers. There are indeed growing churches but it seems to me that many of them follow one of two different strategies. Some of them do what a friend of mine calls “entertainment evangelism.” They bring on rock groups and popular music and sit you down in comfortable chairs and make it easy for you and that works pretty well in the short term but I wonder how well that would last in a time of persecution. What is there in that to die for? Others find a way to pretend they are persecuted: they rave against the government and claim our liberties are being taken away and that also works pretty well with some people but I don’t think St. Paul would have been impressed. Lots of Christians in lots of places would be happy to be persecuted the way we are.

No, I think we need to begin to imagine a new kind of evangelism that does two things. First, it would analyze what Christianity really means in a world like ours. It would ask for a really clear definition of what it means to be a Christian. It would ask each of us to be able to answer the question, “What difference does it really make? Could I live without it?” And second, it looks for the challenge, it looks for the places where Satan is at work and it confronts him – or her, and it faces up to conflict if necessary recognizing that change isn’t easy.

But where is the challenge? Let me be controversial. I see any number of places in our society where the gospel is ignored and we don’t face it. What about gun control? Why are the laws not enforced? There are laws to prevent the wrong people from getting guns but it’s easy for them to get them and the gun lobby scares our legislators out of doing anything about it. Two policemen were shot in New York City recently and the whole focus was on the conflict between the mayor and the police force, but where did the killer get the gun? He was known to be dangerous but he had no problem getting a gun. Why not? If gun control laws were enforced maybe fewer policemen would get shot and maybe fewer policemen would be so quick to kill others. Polls show that the vast majority of the population wants stricter gun control but it’s too controversial for our politicians to act. This diocese holds vigils in protest but hardly anyone notices because I think most of us consider it hopeless. And, in fact, the Episcopal Church alone, even if we all took part in vigils, can’t change anything. Only when Christians together demand the government act will something happen. We vastly out number the NRA but they care and so they make a difference and we don’t.

What about the economy? The richest people are richer than ever but too many people are unemployed or underemployed, underpaid. People who work for Walmart are paid so poorly they have to go on welfare which the rest of us pay for. So we taxpayers subsidize Walmart and the Walmart family is among the wealthiest in the world. It makes no sense but nobody dares raise taxes on the rich because they subsidize the politicians. What would Jesus do? We know what Jesus would do because there are stories in the Bible about it. A rich man came to him and asked what he should do and Jesus told him: Give your money to the poor and follow me. You cannot run Walmart or any such corporation and claim to be a Christian.

What about the amount of money the government spends on weapons and bases we don’t need? Aren’t Christians called to be peacemakers? Who challenges our priorities? We could take a stand on some of these issues and insist that if we are faithful to Jesus, we should do something about violence and poverty and we could get ourselves persecuted and it might be good for us and maybe the neighbors would notice that there are people here trying to make a difference. Some of them might make it hard for us but some of them might join us.

Okay, I’m trying to be controversial because I think we need to be thinking about the reason we are here and you are welcome to disagree with me and we can find out whether our commitment to Jesus is greater than the differences we may have. I think we need to be willing to challenge each other and disagree with each other and work through our disagreements to come to a faith that matters, that makes a difference, that changes the world the way St. Paul and the early church changed the world.

Let me make a few other suggestions that ought to be less controversial but maybe even harder to act on. What about prayer? How many of us pray daily, maybe use the daily offices in the Prayer Book? St Paul said, “Pray without ceasing.” How about just “pray often”? How many of us meet with others during the week to share our faith, to strengthen each other to make a difference? This church offers a wonderful number of opportunities for worship and prayer and mutual support every week but not enough of us are here.

What about stewardship? A bishop I knew many years ago who had a very simple standard: “Give till it hurts” Do we? Does our giving make a difference – to us? Does it deprive us of anything important? Does it keep us from doing anything we want to do? In most parishes if people were all at the poverty level and tithed church income would go way up. In the last parish I served in Connecticut we had about 30 pledges and a pledged income of about $35,000. Which was just where it ought to be if every one of those pledges represented an individual living at the Federal poverty level and tithing. But I have to assume that most of them were living somewhat above the poverty line and were living in larger family units – 2, 3, or 4 – and were nowhere near tithing. I don’t know the numbers here, but I suspect that there are many who are not tithing, or at least could give more – Give until it hurts. But how else will we make a difference?

Now the purpose of the sermon is to proclaim the Gospel, proclaim good news, and there is good news. God in Jesus Christ has acted to give us life – – eternal life – – and following him is not always easy but it brings a depth of peace and joy not to be found elsewhere. But that life and peace and joy are not for the casual Christian, the Christmas and Easter Christian, the drop-in-on-occasion Christian who acts as if it doesn’t make a difference because it hasn’t made a difference. Many of them have not become real Christians because they have never met a real Christian. They have never met anyone who made them ask, “How can I have what you have?” Paul had met people like that and eventually it got to him and he was changed.

This church needs to be the kind of place that not only gives thanks once a year for St. Paul but works to make the same difference he did in the world around us today.

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Published on January 25, 2015 20:16

In gthe Midst of Wolves